Now, because there was no producer involved, we could hang loose.” We’ve also had a lot of experience working with the best producers in the world, but they always put us a little bit right or left. "The problem is always that you’re stopping too early because of the pressure that you have to go on tour again. We couldn’t follow up with a tour, and we had to wait for Klaus, so we used the time to really make songs in a natural way. “You wanna know why? On Blackout we had our own pandemic, because Klaus had a problem with his voice so he couldn’t really sing. “It was the same situation!” says Schenker. That was fantastic, and it got us through these terrible times.”ĭespite a revised writing method, the classic feel of Rock Believer is undeniable, and it seems to share a common genetic strand with the fork-eyed brilliance of 1982’s bombastic Blackout. Enough time to not finish songs, to leave them and come back to them. “It’s amazing, because when you’ve got a routine it’s really hard to break out of it,” says Schenker. Sending him the lyrics was like saying: ‘Hey, come on, give me some killer riffs, my friend! I want gas in the tank!”
It was like, dialogue, you know, because Rudolf was not in Germany at the time – he was in Thailand. And so I was asking myself what the hell is it that I want to write about, and I sent Rudolf some lyrics.
That’s the way we used to work for so many years – always the lyrics came second. “That’s why when we said, okay, let’s make a new album, of course the question is: can we deliver? I started writing lyrics in 2019, not waiting for demos from Rudolf. “Creativity is not something that is always granted,” says Meine. “It fits together, but you have to be careful you’re not becoming a machine.” “On tour you get a lot of feelings from the people, from the audience, and that influences the music you play,” says Schenker. The demands of Scorpions’ lifelong touring marathon – despite a 2010 farewell tour that we swiftly breeze past – don’t always lend themselves to the creative freedom necessary for writing a new album. Not to say that this enforced pause was without benefits. “Maybe the last time was eighty-six?” Schenker offers. But the enforced halt to touring, after they finished their Australian and Southeast Asian run in March of 2020, led to a creative respite that these touring juggernauts don’t often experience. “We locked the door, took a deep dive into our creative world and left the cruel reality outside.” There was already a hatful of ideas to choose from for the album, he explains, as it had originally been planned in 2018. “We came here every other day,” Meine says. “It’s been our bubble, where we had the chance to move out of the pandemic and make music.
“It’s been our home base for the last hundred years,” says Schenker. This is where they wrote and recorded Rock Believer. Right now the band are sitting in a lounge in the bowels of Hanover’s Peppermint Park Studios, where they’ve interrupted rehearsals for an upcoming tour – and a Las Vegas residency – to chat to Classic Rock. It’s hard rock mastery, matured to perfection, and it’s overflowing with that key ingredient: fun. And it’s no muted latest entry sitting in the shadow of former glories this is an unapologetic, anthemic affirmation of Scorpions’ commitment to deliver on a promise that has shown no sign of erosion or compromise. It has a hard-edged immediacy that Scorps fans will have a hard time dissociating from their hit-studded 80s output. Spend some time perusing the euphoric highs of their latest (nineteenth) album, Rock Believer, and it’s not difficult to see why.
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