I bought this in 2002 for £3 from Fopp.
The following year, a few weeks after I moved to London, I had nothing to do on a Saturday evening so I went to a basement club in Mayfair where Anke Landau was billed as providing an evening of Marlene Dietrich songs plus some Brecht and Eisler. It was long, bizarre and sparsely attended evening (thankfully I took a book with me). Ms Landau sang a kind of karaoke. Which is to say that all the music was on tape, which she operated, and she sang over it. So did her support act, a web programmer called Lucy by day, whom I quite fancied, though her voice was neither as revealing or as suggestive as her clothing.
At the end of the evening, Ms Landau hawked her CD of Marlene Dietrich cover versions in vain for £10 or 12. It's a tricky proposition: 11 derivative songs for a tenner or more than twice as many original versions for less than a third of the price. If she'd handed out the very positive review comments on this page, however, I would have been impressed.
I thought of going again in the months that followed, but it didn't happen.
It's slightly disconcerting to hear Marlene singing Blowing in the Wind and a French translation of Where Have All the Flowers Gone? It's not the kind of thing that Josef von Sternberg would have sanctioned in one of his films, surely.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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