Joy

In 1984 three school friends from Austria—Andy Schweitzer, Freddy Jaklitsch and Manfred Temmel—launched the dance-pop outfit Joy. Their commercial breakthrough arrived with the September 1985 single “Touch by Touch,” after which the 1986 debut album Hello also registered strongly on European dance charts. Capitalizing on that momentum, the band tracked its follow-up, Joy and Tears, in summer 1986; the cut “Japanese Girls” from that set extended their audience into Asia.

Keyboardist Schweitzer, who had written the bulk of the group’s material, chose to launch a solo career in 1989. Three years later he obtained consent from his former colleagues to release the album She’s Dancing Alone—also issued as 3rd—under the Joy name, yet the record found no foothold amid the house and techno surge of the early ’90s. In 1995 Jaklitsch and Temmel enlisted a new keyboardist, Johannes Groebl, to complete Full of Joy, a project that likewise vanished from view before the remaining members went their separate ways.