Our guest on 14.06.2009 Klaus Meine, Singer and Songwriter
Klaus Meine has been in the spotlight for 40 years now as singer and songwriter for the “Scorpions.” The most successful German rock band were this year awarded the German music prize ECHO for their life’s achievement.
Some 75 million sold albums, global gigs to millions of fans – nobody on Germany's rock scene can boast such a long and lasting international career as Klaus Meine and his fellow band musicians. With “Winds of Change,” Klaus Meine penned the band’s biggest hit, and in 1990 the song became an anthem marking the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War – climbing the charts worldwide in nearly 80 countries. At 61, Klaus - a native from Hanover - is not contemplating retirement. On the contrary, he would "still like to write another hit or two.”
Klaus Meine was born in Hanover on May 25th 1948. To please his parents he learned to be an interior decorator, but never actually worked in the profession because as a teenager he had already caught the rock’n’roll virus. Meine cut his musical teeth as a singer with the Hanover based bands Mushrooms and Copernicus. He then joined the Scorpions in 1969, a former school band which guitarist Rudolf Schenker had founded in 1965. The Scorpions’ aim was to become one of the world’s top hard rock bands. In order to gain international acclaim, Meine wrote lyrics in English from the outset.
In 1972 the legendary music producer Conny Plank helped release the first Scorpions album "Lonesome Crow". It sold 25 thousand copies in the US, a huge success for an unknown band from Europe. Shortly afterwards The Scorpions signed a contract with leading label RCA and started their first European tour in 1975. The band’s third album "In Trance" was produced by Dieter Dierks. It launched the Scorpions trademark sound that was to last for the next fourteen years. In 1976 the Scorpions first went gold with their fourth album "Virgin Killer" in Japan. Another gold disc followed, this time in the US for "Lovedrive".
In 1981 a bitter blow followed when Klaus Meine lost his voice, but he returned to the stage after two operations on his vocal chords. The Scorpions went from strength to strength, giving three concerts to a sold out Madison Square gardens in New York and attending huge festivals such as Rock in Rio where they played in front of an audience of 470 thousand fans. However the Scorpions will probably be best remembered for their ballad "Wind of Change". Written by Klaus Meine it followed the 1989 Moscow Peace Festival and won the band an invitation to meet up with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The world hit is closely associated with Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin wall.
The band’s first excursion into the world of classical music came with "Moment of Glory", the anthem for the 2000 EXPO which was held in Meine’s home town of Hanover. It was recorded with the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic. Although Klaus Meine is still on tour with the Scorpions for six months of the year he still has close links with his native Hanover where he lives with his wife of over 30 years, Gabi. In the past he has played tennis with another famous son of the city, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Klaus Meine is also a keen environmentalist, supporting Greenpeace campaigns and is a founding member of a music therapy foundation.