Loving You Sunday Morning: Scorpions Remastered
Written by Johnny H
Sunday, 08 November 2015 03:00
I can remember my first encounter with Teutonic rockers Scorpions like it was yesterday. It was 1979, I had just turned 12 years of age, and like I would most weekends when I had some pocket money to spend, I found myself browsing the ex-chart box of singles that used to be on the counter of Jeff’s Records & Cards in Somerset St in Abertillery. Flicking through the selection of Driver 67, The Dooleys and Leif Garrett 7” inchers, one record immediately stood out. The Rollerball font logo I kind of recognised from the backs of a few older lads denim jackets, but it was the green tinted black and white sleeve that housed the double A side single ‘Is There Anybody There?’/‘Another Piece Of Meat’ that had my jaw hitting the ground. This was verging on pornography for someone of such tender years, and if I’m totally honest it most probably sealed the deal. Heading home 50p the lighter, I really had no idea it was the music contained on said record that was about to rock my world, not the, ahem, tasteful cover art. Suddenly I was a fan, it really was love at first sting…
Fast forward to the 17th of August 1985 and I can just as easily pinpoint the exact time I realised my time spent in love with Germany’s number one heavy rock band was about to come to an end. You see that day I’d just witnessed Metallica live for the very first time and it was such a shock to the system compared to the snore-fest I’d encountered at Knebworth House just a few months earlier when Scorpions supported Deep Purple at a wash out of a show I just knew I needed to follow my instincts on this one because much more exciting things were happening outside the comfortable world of heavy rock I had grown up in…and I needed more of that same thrill called rock ‘n’ roll – or whatever the mainstream media wanted to brand it. It was this same desire for more that initially saw me firstly purchase ‘Lovedrive’ on LP and then ‘Animal Magnetism’ both seemingly in quick succession (although there was a year between their release dates) in my quest to know more about these guys from Hannover, and now all these years later I find myself listening to them – mainly in sequence – for the first time in what must be twenty years, as part of an eight album reissue campaign that SPV are running in collaboration with BMG to mark the Scorpions’ fiftieth birthday.
The series though (just like the EMI CD remasters from 2001) actually starts with ‘Taken By Force’ originally released in 1977. This newly remastered version expands the original 8 track LP to 14 tracks in total by mixing previously unreleased demos (with titles like ‘Busy Guys’ and ‘Believe In Love’ you can probably sense these are meant for completists) with ‘Suspender Love’ which also featured on the 2001 CD. This album along with 1978’s double live album ‘Tokyo Tapes’ (here adding 7 additional sings to the original 17 track album) are still a very decent introduction to the band (why it starts here and not ‘Lonesome Crow’ must be something to do with licensing), but it is really the four studio albums that followed these two albums – Uli Jon Roth’s last on guitar – that would help shape the Scorpions into the 100 million selling rock sensations we know today.
Nevermind how many times I play ‘Lovedrive’, ‘Animal Magnetism’, ‘Blackout’ and ‘Love At First Sting’ I just can’t separate them. They all have their own little idiosyncrasies that help worm them back into my life, and suddenly I find myself walking around Morrisons humming the chorus from ‘Twentieth Century Man’ or suddenly I’m waking up in the middle of the night wondering if other people think ‘Always Somewhere’ is perhaps the best power ballad of all time too. It is ‘Blackout’ though (originally realised in 1982) and in particular the three track blast from the old side 1 of that LP, that places ‘Can’t Live Without You’, ‘No One Like You’ and ‘You Give Me All I Need’ all in quick succession, that perhaps best captures the band’s metamorphosis from quasi prog metallers with a penchant for the odd musical curveball (I mean German metallers doing reggae? C’mon) into the gleaming stadium rock beast that was to follow with 1984’s almost perfect ‘Love At First Sting’.
I say almost perfect when it comes to ‘Love At First Sting’ largely because when you have songs as instantly magical as ‘Bad Boys Running Wild’ and ‘Rock You Like A Hurricane’ as your opening gambit then I’m not afraid to admit that some of the record does have me reaching for the skip button, but only because I know the sublime ‘Coming Home’ or the anthemic ‘Big City Nights’ are just around the corner waiting. Oh and then there’s the small matter of Herman Rarebell’s snare sound on this album, which as you will soon find out develops into those awful eighties triggered robo-drums come ‘Savage Amusement’.
However before I assassinate that 1988 monstrosity there’s the 1985 double live album ‘World Wide Live’ to deal with first, and I’m not sure if it is down to the reasons outlined in my opening paragraphs or just the fact that the band were moving off off into this all new squeaky clean stadium rock direction but just like back then…it simply leaves me cold, but nowhere near as cold as I feel when I listen to the emotionally bankrupt exercise in bland that is ‘Savage Amusement’. This is the sound of a band fully chasing the America dream by trying to sound err…American, and in the process totally forgetting what they were about. Yes of course it sold well it was 1988, anything with enough marketing dollar behind it sold by the bucket load back then, but if I never hear tracks like ‘Media Overkill’ or ‘Every Minute Every Day’ ever again it will be a day too soon. Of course in saying that worse was indeed yet to come, and Scorpions would go on to become even bigger worldwide, with my falling out of love with them failing to register one cent on their collective bank balances. It’s a ‘Crazy World’ that’s for sure.
Back to the matter at hand and as with the extras already mentioned the five studio records released between 1979 and 1988 all come bolstered with an array of unreleased bonus tracks. However just like with ‘Taken By Force’ these are largely unreleased demos of songs in progress or totally unreleased tracks with titles like ‘Running For The Plane’ and ‘Get Your Love’ and are all quite unremarkable, unless that is, you are the woman I witnessed crying to ‘Send Me An Angel’ during the band’s headline appearance at this year’s Hellfest. A gig I laughed like a drain through most of, much to the consternation of my travelling compadre Jim Rowland (sorry matey). Here, I hope I have readdressed this by sharing my one time love of a band who were first in so many things in the world of heavy rock. Without them my teenage years would most definitely have been a hell of a lot less fun, and playing at least six of these eight reissues now gives me a warm glow I wish I’d had that day stuck up to my ankles in mud in a field somewhere in the middle of Hertfordshire. 2015, as I’ve already mentioned, is the Scorpions 50th anniversary as a band and through these reissues I can think of no better way to raise a glass to Messrs Roth, Meine, Schenker, Rarebell, Jabs and Buchholz, even if like their onstage human pyramids the latter is sadly missing from the accompanying documentary DVDs, well as far as I can see from the PR blurb anyway as I only got the music to review. But its these additional visual treats that sees the likes of live performances from Japan in 1979, (‘Lovedrive’), a performance from Dortmund’s Rock Pop festival in 1982 (Blackout’), the World Wide Live VHS (‘World Wide Live’) and a host of other promo clips being made available for the first time in donkey’s years that will see me dipping into my pocket money this time around.
Did I mention these albums are available on vinyl too? No? Well I have now. All you have to do is choose your weapons, then get a few mates around (don’t forget a mandatory slab or two of Meister Pils), crank one of these up on the death deck, and you’ll soon find yourselves human pyramiding long into the night. How do I know? Just ask my long suffering wife…..well I hope she still is after two weeks of listening to nothing but these reissues. Ha!
To pick up your copies of the remastered Scorpions back catalogue – CLICK HERE
