Arabesque – Sunrise In Your Eyes

Released only in Germany, by a German trio whose real fans were in Japan, two years before their singer had a hit of her own across Europe

Arabesque were a German group whose biggest audience lived on the other side of the world. In Japan they toured and sold albums in numbers they never came close to at home, where they managed a single Top 10 hit. Sunrise In Your Eyes shows that split clearly. Polydor released it as a single only in West Germany in June 1983, while Japanese buyers found it on albums. The woman singing lead, Sandra Lauer, was a year from leaving the group and two years from a hit of her own across Europe.

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The group was put together in Frankfurt in 1977, and the lineup changed early. By 1979 only Michaela Rose remained from the first version, joined by Jasmin Vetter, a former gymnast who also choreographed the trio, and Sandra Lauer from Saarbrücken, who was 17 and became the lead singer. Their songs came from the composer Jean Frankfurter, whose real name was Erich Ließmann. Japan took to them fast, and Lauer spent her 18th birthday on tour there in May 1980. At home, Marigot Bay reached No.8 in 1981, and it stayed their only German Top 10.

Frankfurter wrote Sunrise In Your Eyes with John Möring, and Wolfgang Mewes produced it. Polydor issued it on June 2, 1983, as single 813 249-7, with You Better Get a Move On on the B-side. In Japan, Victor put the song on two albums that year: Radio Arabesque in September and Arabesque VIII, also called Loser Pays the Piper, in December. The lyric is a simple one, a woman alone at night who dreams that her lover will come back to her by morning.

Switzerland, September 1983

On September 6, 1983, the trio performed the song on Swiss television’s Karussell, and the clip now sits on Sandra’s official channel. Lauer was 21, with Michaela Rose and Jasmin Vetter beside her, the lineup that had carried the group since 1979. The song itself came and went without much notice, but this is one of the last views of all three together before the group came apart.

Arabesque split in 1984. Rose and Vetter carried on as the duo Rouge, and Lauer went solo as Sandra, working with Michael Cretu, the keyboard player she had met during her Arabesque years. In 1985 (I’ll Never Be) Maria Magdalena topped charts across Europe. She married Cretu in January 1988 and later sang on the first records by his project Enigma. Sunrise In Your Eyes was a single most of Europe never heard, and the singer on it was about to become one of the best-known voices on the continent.