Thomas Anders admitted in an interview that his colleague at Modern Talking, Dieter Bohlen, did not follow Plan A, but rather Plan B.
The musician was a guest on the MDR talk show “Riverboat” on December 15th, where presenter Wolfgang Lippert got him to talk in more detail about the creation of the Modern Talking duo. After some pushing around (“If I have to talk about Dieter Bohlen again, it’ll be all over the newspapers again”), Anders admitted that Dieter Bohlen wasn’t actually planned and was ultimately used as an “emergency solution”.
Dieter Bohlen came to Modern Talking later
The conversation on MDR focused on the initial Modern Talking hit “You’re My Heart, You’re My Soul” from 1985. After Anders had already revealed that Bohlen was the second choice, Wolfgang Lippert followed up: “I think it’s a really cool story that Dieter Bohlen, who is always celebrated everywhere as the ‘great Zampano’, was actually a half-emergency solution. Please tell me that.” And so Thomas Anders finally unpacked. The record company wanted a duo for “You’re My Heart, You’re My Soul” to market it better.
The track had already been recorded at that point – just not as a duet and without faces on the accompanying artwork. Since there didn’t seem to be anyone suitable for a duo and the record company didn’t believe in the success of the track, this project was initially postponed. “And if at some point this thing – probably not – goes into the charts at all, we can always put a second person next to you,” one is said to have said to Anders. “That happened a quarter of a year later and the second place was Dieter Bohlen,” he says in the talk about the decision in favor of Bohlen.
Was the dissolution of Modern Talking foreseeable?
The 60-year-old also spoke about Bohlen’s announcement of the duo’s dissolution at the start of the Universe tour in June 2003 in front of 25,000 spectators on “Riverboat”. He had already suspected that “the bomb would go off,” he reported in the interview. Modern Talking is said to have struggled with tensions among themselves, said the pop singer, who later began performing with Florian Silbereisen and also as a solo artist, at the end of the band.