Michael Schenker – Temple Of Rock – Uber Rock Interview Exclusive
Written by Eamon O’Neill
Saturday, 11 April 2015 03:00
Michael Schenker has had an extraordinary career. As a teenage prodigy he was beamed onto the UFO mothership from a fledgling Scorpions, where he made his name as one of the finest guitarists of a generation. With his own MSG imprint he tasted solo success in the 1980s, and following a period of unrest towards the end of the millennium where he briefly rejoined UFO, the German has returned with Temple Of Rock, the latest band that are a vehicle for his incredible skills. With a new studio album ‘Spirit On A Mission’ having just been released, we caught the guitarist in a philosophical mood. Vigilante man; Eamon O’Neill.
Hi Michael, how are you today?
I’m good. The sun is shining and I think that spring is in the air. I’m in Brighton so it’s a good time to be by the seaside. It’s very nice.
Tell me about your earliest musical memories.
From I was three years old I was always singing and drumming and pinching instruments that were sitting around. Eventually my brother [Scorpions’ founder member and guitarist Rudolph Schenker] got his guitar for his sixteenth birthday when I was still only nine years old. I discovered it when he went to work, but I was not allowed to touch it. I did anyhow and I discovered putting my finger on one string, and then another finger on another and it went ‘ding-dong’. Right there, I was fascinated with guitar playing, and it never stopped.
I’d like to take you back to the beginning of our career. What was it like playing in the earliest incarnation of the Scorpions?
My brother found out that I had been playing his guitar he asked me to teach him things, and by the way, he was paying me for each song. He already had the Scorpions; the name and the vision, even before he could play guitar, so it was all basically his dream, the Scorpions thing. So when I was fifteen we recorded this album [‘Lonesome Crow’], and I wrote more or less all the songs, and we just shared it between all of us [the album is credited as being written by the Scorpions]. Basically that was the jump start, and I was involved in jump-starting the Scorpions to start getting somewhere.
You have worked with the Scorpions on a number of occasions over the years.
I finished with UFO [in 1978] and my brother found out. Matthias [Jabbs] had just joined the Scorpions but he wasn’t ready to do the job that he needed to do, so my brother asked me to help out [recording 1979’s ‘Lovedrive’ album]. So I was there again to jump start and open up the door for them [to be successful] in America. Off they went, and I went solo and did my own thing. Every so often I was being asked to help out, to play with them when they needed some kind of an energy refill or something that was important to attract attention. When they needed that I showed up and did something. I was just there when needed, because my own vision is very little to do with ‘what money can buy’ kind of stuff, it’s more based on the spiritual experience. My brother is more ‘macrocosm’ and I’m more ‘microcosm’, but the main thing is fulfil your dreams whatever it is that is in your blood. That’s basically the bottom line.
Your new album ‘Spirit On A Mission’ reunites you with the same rhythm section; drummer Herman Rarebell and bassist Francis Buchholz, that you made the Scorpions ‘Love Drive’ album with. What is it like being with those guys again?
[Laughing] Yes, you know that’s so funny, and I couldn’t have planned it myself. It just happened step by step how we got there. You know another thing I discovered was when I left the Scorpions, I don’t know, coincidently or was it just that the script is already written and we are just here now living it?, is that the guitarist I picked for the Scorpions before I left to join UFO was Uli Roth, and he is exactly the same horoscope as me and he comes from around the corner [from where I do], out of a billion [people]! You know, out of a billion, something like that happens, so there are a certain amount of little indications where I wonder, ‘wow, what is this?!’ So Herman and Francis being there, we did one album together ‘Lovedrive’ and that was it. And now after all these years, here we sit together doing this. They disappeared from the rock world for different reasons all these years themselves, and if you look at Francis it looks like he has been preserved in a box and he just came out! [Laughing] So who knows? Maybe we have been preserved for this and there is something that we are assigned to do. I really believe that different people have assignments, or particular areas in life where they make a contribution where they can do a better job than others, and it’s for them, a particular space and time and a particular momentum; it’s just like clockwork where everyone is a cog and different people are being used for different things because it benefits the situation and they are just the right person to be there at that time. Things come and go; sometimes this person is shining, the next moment someone else is shining and the other person that was shining is going away because they have done what they needed to do. It’s like Jimmy Page; Jimmy Page only needed to do Zeppelin – that was it. That is enough for the next five hundred years. Every person is useful for a particular something in a particular time. So it’s pretty interesting.
One of the tracks that stands out on the new album is the frankly fantastical ‘Something Of The Night’.
The whole album is based on writing from within. You just have to be yourself and you don’t have any boarders. You just do what you love doing and what you think you should express, and if you’re not in a box you’re not restricted, and that’s when you come up with ‘fresh’ or ‘crazy’ – or whatever you want to call it – ideas. But that particular thing also, is played with a ‘howler’, and a howler is a technique and a device, well more of a technique than anything that makes that weird sound, and so combined with melody, you get some crazy, fresh new weird things that nobody has actually discovered. Because it’s a personal expression, only you; a person who decides to write from within, is tapping into his own way of seeing it. When you decide to open your spirit and to write from within and let self-expression come to the foreground other than copying a trend, you will automatically add a new colour to life because only you can express that and because only the individual has access to what’s within themselves. What’s within yourself is infinite basically. It’s like tropical fish in the ocean; there is one after another but there’s a different design – it never stops, it’s like a kaleidoscope. The people that decide to follow a trend, the problem with that is they’re under pressure and they have to fit in and it has to be a certain way. So that, verses just being yourself, having fun playing and doing whatever comes out of yourself – that is the difference.
There has always been the question of whether you and your brother Rudolph will record an album together again. Is that likely?
Again, it is more than meets the eye. The universe is the driver and we are just playing our parts here. We’ve been talking about Schenker Brothers, but if you look back on years gone past when Rudolph and the Scorpions were going to finish, but they keep going, and it keeps going, so it’s impossible to figure out when that could be. By now it looks like we’ve kind of missed the boat, because now I have developed Temple Of Rock and he’s still with the Scorpions and they’re still doing tours and albums and so on, and so the question would be, what would Rudolph and I be doing? If the Schenker brothers were to do something together it would be more of the same thing I’m already doing with Temple Of Rock; you play the classics and you make new material with the band. And the only thing I can see doing is new material with my brother, and maybe that’s what the whole thing is going to be preserved for, is the ultimate reunion with the Scorpions; making a studio CD album and then going on a world tour. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me. The other thing would be, I had some crazy idea the other day, maybe if Rudolph and I wanted to do something together, maybe we can do it with Klaus Meine, the singer with the Scorpions. It’s a bit of a funny one, because do you know what ‘Meine’ means? His second name Meine is a German word and in English translated it means ‘mine’, you know, like ‘my’. Because of his name you could call it ‘Meine Schenker’ or ‘My Schenker’ [Laughing] so anyway, there is lots of crazy ideas one can come up and stuff like that, but I think that there is a particular development that we can’t really see yet but I think things are developing in a direction where it needs to be. And so the best is to live in the now and just do my part and look at things as they show up.
That’s obviously something that would interest you in the future then?
Well you know I have lots of family, I’ve created a lot of rooms in my house of my own design, and it depends on the demand or what shows up, and we can figure out what needs to happen in the future. There are lots of possibilities, you know? But the main thing is to live in the now, and live and be creative, and try to protect piece of mind and have fun with music. Basically, those are the two number one priorities and everything else is secondary.
Going back to Temple Of Rock, and are you looking forward to getting back out on the road?
Absolutely! Live and let live. It’s all getting ready, and Herman and Francis and I are going to be playing in America, so it’s very exciting for us, and very exciting for the audiences; it’s the next level for our touring in the States and we start, in March and we are finished by the beginning of May. Then we are going to do festivals in Europe, and then we go to Japan in June, and then after that we’re going to start our European and UK tour. We’re also hoping to add Australia, South America and Asian dates. There’s going to be a lot of touring; a year it’s going to be, into the summer of 2016, so it’s all developing and the offers are coming in.
Finally, the title of the new album is taken from how you say you’d like to be remembered. What mission are you on?
The mission is simply spreading the joy of music from a place of pure self-expression. That is how I want to be remembered.
Photography courtesy of Steve Johnston, Adam Kennedy and Laurence Harvey
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