“I laughed when writing, cried, wound me”: Marco Wanda in conversation about “that we even existed”.
In the eleven years since his band’s groundbreaking debut album appeared, singer and songwriter Marco Wanda did not live through heights and depths. From the largest stages in German-speaking countries to a double number in the Austrian charts and a village destroyed in the rushing to the death of his keyboardist Christian Hummer. He has now put all the madness of more than a decade of rock’n’roll on paper. A conversation with the authors of “that we at all”.
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Why did you seem a good time to write your memoirs now?
I never wanted to write memoirs or an autobiography. I wanted to write a book and I think we would give people in the book pseudonyms if we had a novel …
The leather jacket in which you have become famous has long been musalized (unfortunately lost). On the occasion of the announcement of your book, you are now showing yourself behind thinker glasses, in turtleneck and jacket. Stop like a classic writer. A conscious game with roles or is the unleashed rock star Marco Wanda Passé?
I know that this a photo shoot in the suit will now follow me for a lifetime. It’s like with the leather jacket, I rarely worn them in public, but if you think of Wanda, you think of leather jacket. I am not busy with my clothes at great details and I hope nobody else.
At the beginning of your career, the bands in the roster of your first label problem Bär Records were a thorn in the side because of this painting; In your book you call them “Sensible, spiritual literary lines that also made music”. Has anything changed in your attitude?
Nobody was a thorn in my side, I just noticed that Wanda differed completely from all bands during this time. We had a different urgency, we had to. That was a big difference.
In the book it is always a question that you sometimes only understood your own songs at a few years. In retrospect, did you feel similar with some moments of life?
The book wants readers something about their own learning based on the model of my life. In this book you walk with literary VR glasses through 14 years of my life, you grown up with me, famous, drained, sad, euphoric and sobered.
There are places in the book that are as gripping as your most stirring songs, such as the description of an early gig in front of 120 people in Vienna’s “Werk X” – Congratulations! Did you notice by writing the book that you have completely different channels apart from music to express yourself emotionally?
Writing the book was a intoxicated experience, I went through all sky and hell and I had to report on it. The next came after one side, and after a few weeks I was finished and had to share that, it was all too instructive and exciting so as not to share it. The Wanda career is the framework, but in the end it is a book about life.
You have always been a read pop fan, know the biographies of the Beatles, for example. Is this knowledge an advantage when you become a rock star yourself? Because you can already guess which part of the program is played next?
After 3 years of hype, I noticed that a lot of what I read in biographies suddenly happened in my own life. And that was a scary and exciting feeling.
Which expectations of a life as a rock star have not been met?
I didn’t find the luxury to be able to choose a life as a rock star at all. I was on the sand, a life design as a musician seemed to me without alternative that it worked, my life saved.
One of the most beautiful lines in the book is: “Success is not an ointment, recognition does not heal wounds”. What makes you really happy?
Yes, someone can explain that to me … I am striving for happiness, there is no paradise, nobody will save us, I have freed myself from many beliefs, stories and illusions and are not looking for luck, but, if at all, something like satisfaction, or even less, the rare occurrence of pain.
Your biography reads like the endless search for life-and therefore certainly works for people who are not necessarily Wanda fans. The question of all questions: What is the meaning of life? Is it to be here now?
I don’t know what the meaning of life is, but at least I have the assumption that we will not find it on Instagram.
How did you remember so many details in the face of your fabulous alcohol and drug use? Did you lead a diary during this wild year?
I actually wrote this book in my head for 14 years. I have observed the entire career through the eyes of a writer, maybe that also saved me from being crazy.
Falco should have fallen into a meaning crisis immediately after he has found out that “Rock Me Amadeus” is No. 1 in the USA. He didn’t know how to keep this level or even top. The passage in your book reads similarly as “Columbo” and Nente at the same time cited the single or album charts in Austria: “We had reached historical ones. But we didn’t feel it.” Can you enjoy success again today, about eight years later?
I never want to be the slave of a success again. That never met me, Wanda was our ticket in a life design, and I love what I do and do what I love. But I no longer measure success in numerical categories, I never need a number 1 hit, but if I really felt one thing in one day, really thought one thing and really did one thing, it was a successful day. And then we go from there …
You were in Cairo during the Arab spring, watched from your hotel room how people are killed. In 2015 you were in Paris during the terrorist attacks, if you were there in the “Bataclan” concert hall, you would have known that the Austrian band White Miles also played there in addition to the Eagles of Death Metal. To what extent have these experiences shaped you?
I write in the book about how my time in Cairo especially shaped me, but I don’t want to spoil anyone here. Well, just so much: I saw in Cairo where the division of a society leads, and that changed me, I realized how important it is to build bridges between the camps that tear our society. And yes, I am disappointed by all of us, we have stopped loving, we want to instruct and convince ourselves. But do we love each other?
Your ex-manager Stefan Redelsteiner recently released his memoirs. Did you read them?
I didn’t get to it.
In it he describes you as a “only child from an academic household. The father was a high animal at ORF, the mother was a respected psychologist. But when we met each other, Marco tried to act like a prolo at all costs and almost stage himself like a land string. he gathered for his prosperity. ” Elsewhere it says: “Marco Wanda has no natural, but a developed charisma.” How do you feel like that?
What annoys me about this extract is the representation of my apartment at the time. I was very decent and proud of my order, the 28 square meters on which I used to tidy up … and I didn’t know that my father was a high animal, nor that he was an academic. My father had so little money at my age that he was publicly showering at the Westbahnhof.
We as a music express also appear in the book, at first you enthusiastically quote big passages from your first title story 2015 with us, but already about the next cover story of 2017 it says: “A confusing, schizophrenic photo gallery with an equally confused side interview. A worse crash.” What do you think of us now?
Without the article by Reitsamer 2015, I don’t believe that the band would ever be withdrawn so quickly in Germany.
What is the most important thing that you wanted to achieve with your music?
Bring people together, help people in crises, give people a favorite band.
What would you do differently today if you were at the beginning of your music career again?
I never want to be at the beginning of this career again. I wrote about it and laughed enough while writing, cried, wondered and happy. A certain peace has appeared in me, and things have already happened in unchangeable. Also: Marco at the time, at the beginning of twenty, obsessed, on a sacred mission, to work out a life that would not have listened to me, and that’s a good thing.
What you hear, you already work on your next book – do you want to reveal something about it?
No, my door is closed when writing.