Ahead of their 50th anniversary world tour and the release of their new album “Return to Forever” AMNPLIFY’s Pauli Dee spoke to “The Scorpions” lead singer Klaus Meine

Paul: Good evening Klaus. How are you?

Klaus: Hello Paul. I’m good. It’s good evening in Australia & good morning here in Germany! The day starts early when I’m doing interviews & promotion for the upcoming album this week, so it’s tiring but very exciting!

Paul: I saw you attended the premiere of the Scorpions movie “Forever and a Day” last week. How was that?

Klaus: Oh that was fantastic. The world premiere was during the Berlin Film Festival in Berlin and it was very exciting for the first time to see The Scorpions on the big screen. The movie will be out in March & we’re hoping to take it all around the world.
It’s a documentary about the band, about the stories and history of The Scorpions as a young German band from Hanover, Germany who started in the early 70’s to go and take their music all over the world… Except for Australia so far! We hope we can change that!
We start the tour in May and for the very first time we go to China, so with this tour we have a chance & hopefully we can work it out with Australian promotors to come Down Under!

Paul: Are you looking forward to getting back on stage with a new set?

Klaus: Yeah well we’ve started working already on a new stage set & a completely new show for 2015. We’ve been touring the “Sting in the tail” show for the last couple of years all over the world, so it’s time for a whole new set & a new set list, you know we can play the classics, the big hits, but now also new material from the “Return to Forever” album, new stuff we haven’t done so far, as well as stuff dating back to the early 70’s… so that’ll be really cool!

Paul: The new album “Return to Forever” it comes out in 2 days. Can you tell us a bit about the album?

Klaus: Yeah well after “Sting the Tail” we were a little bit burnt out & we wanted to break out of this ongoing circle of touring and playing a hundred concerts every year, so it was like, OK, this might be the last album, we knew we had some great material sitting there from the 80’s, some unreleased songs, so we always wanted to go back and record those songs & make it like an 80’s album, something like that, but then when the MTV offer came up after the “Farewell Tour” was over in 2012, we started writing again for this MTV unplugged concert and in a way the creative gates were open again & we felt really motivated!
In the last couple of years, we saw a whole new audience coming to our shows & playing in front of three generations is very inspiring & motivating so we started writing new material for this MTV unplugged which we did in Athens in September 2013 and when we were done, we went back to our 80’s projects & we had started recording songs already in 2011/2012 so this was building up & when we came back into the studio after the MTV unplugged with our Swedish producers last year, we figured it out – Everybody came up with new songs & there was plenty of new material & at the end of last year we had about 20 songs and it turned out to be a good mix between some 80’s material and brand new written songs so it became much more like a new album just going down memory lane!

Paul: Will we see some of your power ballads that you’re famous for on “Return to Forever” or is it more of a rock album?

Klaus: It’s a rock album, but it has the typical Scorpions DNA in a good mix. Of course there are ballads on the album… The Scorpions, I think made a name for ourselves by doing those power rock ballads & there are 2 or 3 of them songs on this album as well. There’s also a deluxe version. The regular album has 12 tracks & the deluxe version has another 4 bonus tracks… and the best part is it’s hard to tell which ones are old and which ones are new!

Paul: Do you have a favourite track off the album?

Klaus: Well right now we have the single out, which is one of my favourite tracks, it’s called “We built this house” That’s the first single and it has some nice Scorpions DNA – It could be a song that has been taken right out of the 80’s but it has a very modern sound at the same time, it sounds really fresh. It has like a ballad verse, then a real rock chorus and it’s a great Scorpions song to kick off the album with. It’s a relationship song, but in a way it’s about the band – We built this house on a rock all those years, all those decades ago & we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary year now in 2015; We’re building up this house brick by brick, chasing some big storms along the way like going through the 90’s when alternative & grunge music dominated the world. That was a time when it wasn’t easy to survive for any band that enjoyed success through the 80’s with hard rock or soft rock so we’re still standing strong and that’s what this song is all about.

Paul: 50 years is a long time. How is the industry or performing to a crowd different now to 50 years ago?

Klaus: It’s totally different! In the early years when I joined the band, you know, 1969/1970, it was all about playing live. It wasn’t so much about becoming a superstar; it was about how we can manage to play not only the weekends, but every day during the week & how we can make a living from being a professional musician. There were plenty of clubs and you had time to grow as a band & to find the right musicians, the right chemistry & to figure out if you’re good enough. Today with the internet, you can take your music around the world with a click, and it’s great but now to see on Facebook we have over 6 million fans, friends or followers and the average age is from 16 to 28 & that’s what we see in front of the stage, playing in front of 3 generations and there’s a whole new audience out there singing along to songs that were written before they were even born and that’s wonderful. I think Scorpions after all these years still deliver the goods! We still deliver a great rock night where the young kids come with their friends to have a rock n roll party.

Paul: Do you think there will ever come a day when The Scorpions will retire and hang up the boots? Or is performing something that you’ll do right up until the end?

Klaus: Well we’ve been through the “farewell experience3” in 2010. We were getting a little burnt out & tired of doing a hundred shows a year & playing 20 to 30 countries around the world, even WITHOUT Australia, so now we feel like it’s a privilege to still be out there & we can still play this global stage & we realise how much it means for our die-hard fans that the band is still around and we realise that there’s still so much energy, passion & so much creativity in the band so at this point we move on without making any predictions or looking too far into the future, knowing it can all be over tomorrow. We just lost 3 close friends, one being our tour manager in the last couple of weeks so it’s been a rollercoaster of emotions between the excitement of releasing a new album & the movie but at the same time losing some very close friends. Rock n Roll’s getting older, we’re getting older, I’m 66 now and I watched The (Rolling) Stones in Berlin in the summer last year with Steve Tyler from Aerosmith & I said to Steven “Look at Jagger man, he’s 70 & it’s unbelievable what this man’s doing!” and Steve said, “Klaus, I’m 66, what can you say?” and me too, you know so Rock n Roll is getting older & for all this generation of bands, we come from, from ACDC, Motorhead, Aerosmith, its great we’re still around and out there! Let’s take a look around the corner and see what life will bring! So far there’s so much feedback from around the world from such a strong fan-base because wherever we play you can see clips on YouTube and the generations figure out I like it or I don’t like it, but if they like it, they come to see us when we come to their country & then we rock the house and have a great time together & of course we bring lots of classics like “Rock you like a hurricane,” to “Wind of change” and “Who’s loving you” and now it turns out that we have music that has become timeless, you know & that seems to be very attractive even for a younger audience.

Paul: When you say you were with Steve Tyler watching Mick Jagger, does that seem surreal to you? Do you sometimes have to pinch yourself to see if it is a dream or in fact true reality?

Klaus: Yes. It really is sometimes like that! Sometimes you go out on stage and you look out to all those young kids at the front of the stage being so emotional about our music and it’s really like ‘is this real?’ or ‘hey guys, you came to see us?’ It’s amazing. It’s sometimes hard to believe. Doing this for so many years indicates the band is still together and still going strong & one of the reasons for the longevity of the Scorpions is not only the music and the talent and the live performance, it’s also the fact that this band was built on friendship and team work & I think that’s also quite an attractive type of message for a young generation. You know, to say if you believe in yourself, you can do it, no matter what anybody says. If you believe strongly in yourself, you can live your dream & this is what The Scorpions did when we started out in Hanover, Germany in the late 60’s, it was not written in our book, as a German band, where English isn’t even our mother language to take on a world career.

The Scorpions album “Return to Forever” is out now & on itunes HERE