Her taste is far, far, far more mainstream and charts-oriented than mine, but to this day she will list widely unknown Australian groups such as the Trilobites and the Mad Turks among her Top 5 or Top 10 bands of all time. But my wife loved these rarities just as much as, say, a Radio Birdman or New Christs classic. There were really obscure things on that tape, from the Assassins (a side project of the Dagoes, though that won’t mean a whole lot more to someone reading this) to one-record wonders like the Melting Skyscrapers. It was a 90-minute tape, and it had by and large only one song per band, all stuff taken from singles I had lying around the house. Back then, I made a compilation tape for my girlfriend, who is now my wife, that I dubbed “Wizards of Oz”. UH: There are literally too many bands to mention. What are some of your favourite Oz bands and how did you hear about them? I was astounded by how much you know about Australian bands from the ‘80s and ‘90s – a real golden age for Oz underground rock.

But you’ve also got a deep love and knowledge of underground rock music. SF: Most people know you for the books you’ve written, like Tor! The Story of German Football, and your Bundesliga column for ESPN FC. His new book, Who Invented the Stepover?, was co-written with Paul Simpson. So we here at Shoot Farken thought it would be worthwhile to find out a little more about his many passions. But Uli is one of those people who knows about all sorts of cool shit, from punk rock to baseball – which he wrote his Masters thesis about. This soon cascaded into a long discussion about Australian underground rock, something Uli knows a heck of a lot about. In the course of the interview we touched on St Pauli, the iconic German rebel football club, and I mentioned I was a fan of punk band Turbonegro, who of course are St Pauli fans. Uli also writes a regular Bundesliga column for ESPN and has written a book about his beloved Borussia Dortmund.

I picked up his extraordinary book, Tor! The Story of German Football, to do a little research and got in touch with him for an interview. I was writing a story about the transformation of German football and what Australia could learn from it when I first came across Uli Hesse.

Shoot Farken Q&A: German football writer Uli Hesse.

Uli hesse tor