SCORPIONS Frontman Klaus Meine - "I Don’t Need To Sing At All Anymore; The Audience Sings All The Words To All The Songs"
January 21, 2012, 12 years ago
Jeb Wright at Classic Rock Revisited recently caught up with SCORPIONS frontman.Klaus Meine. An excerpt from the interview is available below:
Jeb: As the farewell tour goes on are you starting to get emotional that the end is near?
Klaus: "It is a weird thing to think about after forty years with this band. We are family. On the other side, we are a band that after forty years has survived punk and grunge. Classic rock music seems to be very popular with the new generation. Right now, we can put all of our energy into our concerts. We are going to be doing the biggest heavy metal festival in the world called Wacken. People come from all over the world to see this show. We are really happening right now and we feel the energy. Our fans around the world will keep this energy going until the very end. They will keep it going until our rocking hurricane is downgraded to a tropical storm."
Jeb: On the Blu-Ray, during the song 'Still Loving You' the camera pans the audience and every person in the crowd knows every word to your song. That is amazing.
Klaus: "I don’t need to sing at all anymore as the audience sings all the words to all the songs. It is quite something. We have a whole new audience which makes a nice mix with those fans who have been with the band for thirty or forty years. There are young fans standing right in front of the stage going totally nuts to 'Blackout', 'No One Like You' and 'The Zoo' and other songs that were written way before they were even born.
It is wonderful to have those classics like 'Still Loving You' and no matter where we play the fans react the same way and sing along. Scorpions fans make every show a lot of fun and it feels great. We can play Russia or New York City or somewhere in the jungle and the fans sing all of the words to the songs. It is a wonderful, wonderful feeling.
Jeb: I’ve got a bone to pick with you. I thought Sting In The Tail was supposed to be the last album by the Scorpions. I am holding in my hands the new album Comeblack.
Klaus: "It was. We announced the album Sting in the Tail in conjunction with this tour that will take us all over the world and it became such a huge success that Sony said, 'Okay, we want to support this with some product.' What can you do? We just announced our last album and then things are so huge that they want us to get back in the studio. We decided that if we were going to do that then we would just go in and have some fun. We decided to re-record some of our classics like 'The Zoo' and 'Rock You Like a Hurricane.' The idea was for us to blow off the dust from those vinyl records and to present them to a whole new audience in the sound of the 21st century. It was a lot of fun because you can do so much more today in the studio. At the same time, we thought that this can’t be enough as we didn’t want to put out a new album without some new songs on it. We thought about recording some covers and paying tribute to some of the legendary bands who inspired us in the ‘60’s. We had a lot of fun trying things out and seeing what worked and what didn’t work. We really were enjoying playing music from all of our heroes like THE BEATLES and the ROLLING STONES. We did songs like 'Tainted Love' which is a song that many people might not expect to hear us do but the riff worked well. We gave it a try and it worked. We did 'Children Of The Revolution' by T. REX, which was outside of us in a lot of ways. They are all great bands.
Go to this location for the complete interview. Click here for BW&BK; scribe Martin Popoff's recent interview with Scorpions guitarist Rudolph Schenker.