Internationally, there are three sustainably successful musical flagships from Germany: Rammstein and the Scorpions. After a few years of alienation, the hard rock heroes from Hanover are again considered a rock jewel at home. And will be honored for 50 years of band history accordingly. So also from us - with an eclipsed shopping list XXL.
"There are not so many of our kind of bands anymore - Motörhead, Ozzy or AC/DC come to mind spontaneously", Klaus Meine ponders at the end of January on the couch of the noble Regent Hotel in Berlin-Mitte. The question we actually asked the Scorpions shouter was about the reason for their retreat from the band: Despite an offensively announced farewell tour, their members suddenly don't want to know anything more about the end of the glorious band. Rudolf Schenker, who had founded the group The Scorpions with his buddies in 1965, had previously become a little more concrete: "Our farewell round became longer and longer and we asked ourselves why we should stop. With 'Sting In The Tail' we had put down a great album, we got a lot of praise from fans and critics. And the concert audience became younger and younger. Some seemed to have discovered us only now. The acoustic concert in Athens was the deciding factor to say, "We're going on." Mine and his neighbor Matthias Jabs, who made his debut on "Lovedrive" in 1979, nod to each other: "Yes, the end is open."
So the Scorpions do a lot different than other German bands. Instead of planning carefully, they now let the train run and fully enjoy their newly acquired Credibilty. According to their age, however, they take it more calmly. "It's fun again because we record the albums differently than before," explains Jabs. "I remember we got a real killer during the recordings at the Dierks studio. We spent days working on the sound, and something was always wrong. This was also due to the studio, where something was always broken. That was often no fun."
