With his two colleagues Günter Timischl and Gert Steinbäcker from the Austropop group STS, he celebrated successes in the 1980s and 1990s. They achieved their breakthrough in 1984 with “Fürstenfeld”, and other titles such as “Da kummt die Sunn”, “Grandfather”, “Kalt und colder” or “Sometime I’ll stay there” are still popular to this day.
Helmut Röhrling grew up in Sinabelkirchen and Fürstenfeld. In the 1960s he was brought into the band “FBI Man” by Boris Bukowski, and he also worked as a radio and newspaper journalist and as a freelance writer. Boris Bukowski gave him his stage name when the two of them passed a construction site and saw a sign with the name of the architect in charge, Helmut Zsifkovits. Because of the same first name and Röhrling’s ambitions to study architecture, Bukowski immediately called his music colleague only Schiffkowitz – a name that was to stay with him.
Eleven STS albums, two solo CDs
In the mid-1970s, Schiffkowitz, Steinbäcker and Timischl came together to form STS. Their sound of three acoustic guitars and three-part choruses became legendary. They recorded eleven studio albums and their concerts – from the Munich Circus Krone to the Wiener Stadthalle – were regularly sold out. In 2012 they went on a farewell tour.
Schiffkowitz recorded two solo albums. Since 2017 he has been performing with Markus Schirmer under the Schiffkowitz & Schirmer label. In 1990 the musician published his book “We are the ones our parents warned us about. Scenes and people from the American sixties” including interviews with great musicians he had conducted for radio stations.
Source: Nachrichten
