Ernst Horn had just quit his position as a conductor at the Statestheater of Baden in Karlsruhe, while keeping his freelance work as pianist and composer for dramas at the "Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel" in Munich being engaged in avant-garde music of the 20th century.

Alexander Veljanov, born in Republic of North Macedonia, was enrolled for film and theatre studies in Munich in 1985.

[2] After Alexander Veljanov contacted Ernst Horn responding to the ad, both met in Munich and founded Deine Lakaien within the same year.

Their debut album Deine Lakaien, that was distributed by themselves, was released in 1986 an edition of 500 records, which Ernst Horn financed personally.

With an edition of 50 pieces of the Silver Tape Deine Lakaien tried for years to attract interest of a label.

The debut album got re-released end of 1991 and the band went on their first tour, playing in front of up to 800 people in Bochum.

[4] Since Ernst Horn and Alexander Veljanov wanted to give concerts without playback and bandtracks, two musicians reinforced the live ensemble: Violinist Christian „Komo“ Komorowski and Michael Popp, multi-instrumentalist and specialist for medieval music.

Alexander Veljanov knew Christian Komorowski from the band Love Sister Hope, Michael Popp and Ernst Horn met each other at the Residence Theater in Munich.

Deine Lakaien gave a concert in the Vier-Linden in Hildesheim already on 11 October 1991 that was recorded for the radio show Grenzwellen another followed on 19 February 1992 in the Hunky Dory in Detmold.

Ernst Horn thought it would be a private party and developed a concept to perform pieces of Deine Lakaien with a prepared piano.

Thus, in December 1992 Deine Lakaien went on the Dark Moon-Tour, a first acoustic tour, together with Stephen Brown and Blaine L. Reininger from Tuxedomoon.

Alexander was working together with the English band Sleeping Dogs Wake, who got in touch with Deine Lakaien as their supporting act on the Forest Enter Exit tour.

During March, April, October and November, the Winter Fish Testosterone tour took place, with Qntal as supporting act.

The live-musicians Tobias "B. Deutung" Unterberg from The Inchtabokatables, Rober Wilcocks from Sleeping Dogs Wake and Summit, as well as Yvonne "Ivee Leon" Fechner and "Sharifa" joined the band for the tour in March and November 2002.

After Ernst Horn listened to a bootleg, where somebody added own pieces between the original tracks, Deine Lakaien decided finally to release the album after 16 years with the title 1987.

In the summer 2006 A Fish called prince was released as new piece by Deine Lakaien on the sampler Where's Neil when you need him?.

The concert on February 18 in the König Pilsener Arena in Oberhausen was recorded and released on 8 June in different versions with up to three DVDs and two CDs.

Deine Lakaien gave concerts with the usual line up in October 2007 in Germany, The Netherlands, France, Switzerland and Austria.

The single Gone was released on 3 September 2010 and contained the additional songs Kraken and A Fish called Prince (acoustic version).

[14] After touring acoustic, Deine Lakaien recorded their 8th studio album Crystal Palace that was released in August 2014.

[15] Therefore, Slobodan Kajkut (drums) and Goran Trajkoski (E-guitar, electronics) joined Ernst Horn and Alexander Veljanov on the following tour.

[20] Instead, Deine Lakaien gave a streaming concert on 16 July 2020,[21] where they presented their cover version of "Because the night" (by Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen) as a forerunner of the new album.

The majority of their studio albums are produced electronically, but there are exceptions: In Kasmodiah (1999) the musicians Michael Popp and Christian Komorowski join Deine Lakaien.

White Lies (2002) was recorded with Patrizia Düringer (violin), Jost Hecker (cello), Uli Widenhorn (guitar), Riccardo Delfino (hurdy-gurdy) and Sabine Lutzenberger (vocals).

On the early album Forest enter Exit, are collected such different pieces like Walk to the Moon – a quiet, emotional, mainly piano accompanied ballad, Nightmare – a mixture of slow passages and dissonant avant-garde parts, Resurrection Machine and Brain Fic – two technoid songs.

Through the years, Ernst Horn and Alexander Veljanov developed different ways of presenting their music live.

The first concept presenting the music of Deine Lakaien included Ernst Horn with his synthesizers (later a piano was added), Christian „Komo“ Komorowski with violin, and Michael Popp with electric guitar and various medieval instruments in addition to the vocals by Alexander Veljanov.

Deutung“ Unterberg on the violoncello, Robert Wilcocks with electric guitar, as well as the violinists Yvonne „Ivee Leon“ Fechner and „Sharifa“, who are also vocalists.

It was very important for the band to differ from bands like Metallica, who had their songs just rearranged for the S&M concerts: It's dumb to just play one's songs and to pour some sticky syrup of classical music onto them, this is really sad.Ernst Horn was able to rewrite the pieces for orchestra due to his background in classical music.

[33] Ernst Horn was mainly inspired by 20th-century classical music after the second world war, including unusual use of the instruments like knocking on them or playing col legno.