Helge Schneider turns 70: a life without grades

At his first appearance, Helge Schneider was seven years old. He was supposed to play the piano in Essen at the “Day of House Music”. But prescribed grades have never been his thing: at the Mozart piece in front of 600 people, he played up, then hammered in the piano with his elbows, insulted the audience frustrated as a “stupid” and stormed off the stage.

Despite this fiasco, Helge Schneider should spend most of his life on stage. Before he could make money with his idea of ​​music – jazz, improvisation and stupid – a few rules had to be broken and bridges for prescribed ways. It was worst in puberty. The compulsory schooling and his urge for freedom did not match – he fledged regularly and remained sitting. His interest in drugs did not help either, at 17 he finally flew from school. His parents, a craftsman and a civil servant, also had to struggle with the teenager: “I was impossible,” he said in one

This was followed by an apprenticeship as a draftsman that broke off Schneider, a piano study that he broke back and an apprenticeship as a landscape gardener, which is not entirely clear whether he did not cancel it too. It doesn’t matter, everything was just background noise for what it was always about: the music. “Actually, I can only play the piano and make nonsense,” is a typical set of Schneider. However, it is not quite true: a dozen instruments should also be able to play the music virtuoso. The freedom -loving multi -instrumentalist, of course, consistently attracted the genre that promises the ultimate freedom: jazz.

After a few years with his jazz trio, his debut album “his greatest success” appeared in 1991. He wrote the first reviews himself, toured tirelessly, getting the stone rolling. Also because he had to. After his first child was born in 1992, he also had to push his career out of fear of existence. For his 50th birthday: “I knew that I was a good musician and that I could make people laugh. It was the only stock I had.” The plan opened. Schneider marketed himself as a “singing cake” and, with nonsense and jazz, attracted more and more attention – without any rules and with improvisation as his superpower.

In 1993 Helge Schneider arrived where he wanted to go: his fifth album “There is rice, baby”, this time with his band Hardcore, made him known throughout Germany. He was sitting on Harald Schmidt (68) on the talk show, brought out his first cowboy film with “Texas – Doc Snyder” and put his hit “Katzeklo” on “Wetten, dass ..?” an audience of millions. The hype about himself was at the peak. This also led to misunderstandings. As a result, people came to his appearances who expected Schneider to deliver a kind of clown performance with shallow melodies to clap. Instead, they got jazz music on their ears for two hours of jazz music with only occasional stupid insoles.

In the meantime, the audience knows what to expect from Schneider. His concerts are more live band test, his songs are created with the audience, he describes himself as a link between nonsense and jazz. In addition, you can enjoy a total work of art that goes far beyond mere live performance: 15 albums, six own films, guest appearances in films such as “The kangaroo chronicles” or “7 dwarfs”, the main role in “My leader-the really truth about Adolf Hitler” (with the finished film, however), several books, including the Kommissar-Schneider novel, one Musical, a theater production and, less public, drawing deals with the artist.

Despite his enormous output, his private life is a secret. It is not even clear whether Schneider really has six children is still talking about five, but it has not been updated for a long time. What is certain, however, is that his youngest son Charly (born 2010) has already accompanied him on the stage on the stage.

: A mixture of mockumentary and documentary that summarizes Helge Schneider for 70 years. Direction, script, music and cut, of course, come from him. Accordingly, it is a fever dream from Klamauk, Dadaism and actual insight into the life of Schneider, according to which you can only quote the artist himself: “Reason comes back. If it knew.”