No sooner does the prime minister return from his highly successful charm offensive in Berlin than a minor diplomatic incident breaks out between Germany and the UK. Scooter, the 30m album-selling German happy hardcore act, cancelled their headline gig in Margate on September 6 with only a week’s notice, and an army of British fans are up in arms.
Still, crisis talks might yet be averted as fans are consoling themselves with the eight UK and Ireland arena dates Scooter still have planned for the autumn, part of a massive 30th anniversary tour across Europe.
Most Brits, if they know them at all, might consider Scooter a naff relic of early 2000s Eurodance. Yet they will play to a combined total of 90,000 British fans this October and November – they are nothing less than the biggest-selling act to come out of Germany in the last 50 years.
The trio’s abrasive 170-beats-per-minute techno, featuring the MCing of 60-year-old peroxide blond frontman, HP Baxxter, has been more successful than the Teutonic edginess of Rammstein or the electronic innovations of Kraftwerk. Commercially, they have left even the chart-topping disco pop of Boney M in the dust.
In the past, the British public have gone out to buy Scooter’s records in their droves. Jumping All Over the World, released in 2008, was a No 1 album and their Supertramp-sampling The Logical Song, with their characteristic sped-up Pinky and Perky vocals, had been a No 2 hit six years earlier.
Follow-up single Nessaja indicated Scooter’s thing for nonsensical lyrics – “3AM!/ The painted cow!”, Baxxter shouts, “It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane/ It must be Dave who’s on the train”. “How much is the fish?”. The 1998 single is talismanic among fans, and it is fair to say that only fields full of dedicated hedonists could truly appreciate this kind of absurdity. Indeed, even the tent-destroying Storm Lilian couldn’t dampen Scooter’s reception at Cheshire’s Creamfields festival last month.
Mike Dempsey, a carpenter from the Isle of Man, is moderator of the biggest Scooter fan group on Facebook. He was just 12 when The Logical Song came out. “I loved every second of the track,” he tells me. “I’ve never looked back and I’ve even got my kids obsessed with Scooter!”
Mike has travelled as far as Hamburg to see the band live. “The rumble of the kick drum going through your whole body, the heat of the flames from the pyrotechnics, fireworks, smoke. It’s unbelievable,” he says. He will make the journey across the Irish Sea to their Cardiff date in November and is even planning to make a permanent commitment to them. “I have a tattoo in the works,” he says. “I intend to have half my arm dedicated to Scooter.”
Mike’s devotion knows no bounds and it turns out that the feeling is mutual. The flamboyant Baxxter, Scooter’s only remaining original member, may have gold and platinum records from all around the globe, but he has a particular love of the UK. He has admitted an Anglophilic penchant for PG Tips and Earl Grey, Upstairs, Downstairs and All Creatures Great and Small, and goes antique shopping at Portobello Road Market whenever he is in London.
Crucially, this great German export would just not exist without British music. In his formative years Baxxter listened to British Forces Radio, where the glam rock of the 1970s gave way to the synth pop of the 1980s. His first band, Celebrate the Nun, was so heavily influenced by Depeche Mode that it was virtually a tribute act.
But it was when he first heard The KLF’s What Time Is Love? in the summer of 1990 that his “fate was changed for ever”, as Baxxter later put it. Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty’s acid house project, with its bombastic sound and absurdist self-mythologisation, would give Baxxter a blueprint he would follow for the next three decades. The KLF’s reputation for Situationist-inspired stunts, including famously burning a million pounds, meant that, when Scooter played their first gig, some people thought they were a KLF-backed hoax.
As long as the relationship between Britain and Scooter continues, Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz may find that the Anglo-German alliance is even stronger than they thought.
Sophia Deboick is a freelance writer who specialises in music and cultural icons
