Five years ago you said how much you like the Belgian musician Stromae. You can also hear his influence in the way you set up some of your songs electronically.
Yes, exactly. I’m a huge Stromae fan. I think it’s eerily unique, eerily simple in a great way. I saw him in concert and went quite shyly. Then I also said hello, that was quite uptight, from both of us. The designers Bold from Brussels, who do his artworks, also did the graphic design for “Tumult” and now “Das ist los”. Stromae has such a melancholy serenity and he has a great band too. There were very nice videos online showing how he composes his songs, very playful. He also makes his own fashion. There’s something heartwarming about him.
You are one of the few popular artists who are still developing. But can it be said that you – not a nostalgic person – are looking back for the first time?
Of course, that doesn’t stop there. Of course, when you’re of a certain age, the pandemic has taken years off the clock. At first nobody could perform at Corona, and then last year someone infected our drummer and me.
That was the reason why the 20th anniversary tour of “Mensch” did not take place last year?
Yes. We would have liked to catch up on the dates, but there were no crews, there was no equipment, no stages because many concerts from the year before were made up for. When you go through time like this, you naturally think about your age – where you are in life.
The long break: Are you able to add something new in facets?
Every artist is unique in their possibilities and also somewhat limited, but of course I think about whether I can still create something new – or whether I’ll repeat myself and fall back on what I can do. A ballad like “A Tonne of Lead” is of course Grönemeyer standard, I would say – certainly not a bad piece. I really like one song, “Herzhaft”, it’s a beat by Hainbach from Berlin, who builds analogue beats. I wrote around the beat. I’m interested in that.
Next year is the 40th anniversary of “Bochum”. Will there be concerts where the entire album will be played?
Now we are facing the “That’s going on” tour. But we thought about performing in Bochum for the anniversary. Basically there is the idea that we play the whole album. Two years ago we had to cancel a Christmas tour with the Bolshoi Orchestra.
“Bochum” is, of course, a different kind of nonsense than 20 years of “human”. Do the same musicians play then as on the album “Bochum”?
the same. We’re an incredibly good live band, I think, and we’re also a good match on a personal level. We’ve grown old together, but we’re not completely screwed up yet I think – we can still make a stadium tap-dance. In five years we might play unplugged concerts.
The “Rockpalast” concert from 1984 in the Bochum colliery can be seen on YouTube.
Oh! No! It does exist?
Do you remember the performance?
I remember it well. I had just joined EMI after Intercord pretty much fired me. And it was about making “Bochum” known with presentation concerts. The colliery was founded in my Bochum days. So it was a crazy moment when I got to play there. It was before the release of the “Bochum” record. I was proud like Oskar. When I lived in Bochum, we used to meet in the colliery in the evenings. In another Bochum pub I played from nine to twelve in the evening for 500 marks, or 400 or whatever.
Was it your own songs?
No, I hardly ever played my own songs back then. It was Elton John stuff, Randy Newman stuff, Dylan stuff. I was always banging around in the pubs in the Ruhr area since I was fifteen. I had my first band when I was fourteen, we played Cream and Ten Years After. A later band imitated Frank Zappa and Hendrix. I played all of the Doors. Once when I was driving past the Cologne sports hall with Jakob Hansonis, the guitarist, I said: “One day we will play in the sports hall.” He, in Kölsch: “Yes, that’s clear, that’s clear.” a target.
Is “Bochum” the perfect first song of a concert?
“Bochum” was the best opening song for a long time. On the last tour with “Tumult” we started with “Sekundenglück”, that little click, and I was blown away that people sang along quietly right away. I would not have expected this. But these two tracks fight for the best opening song.
You can read Arne Willander’s full, detailed interview with Herbert Grönemeyer in the April issue of ROLLING STONE
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