Schandmaul Band Biography
The idea came to us in the summer of 1998 to join together as a colourful motley crew of local mates and have a laugh playing a few acoustic folk pieces.
In the spirit of this idea, we spent many a session playing out in the garden with only the sky for a roof, and many a balmy summer night, with quite a few beers along the way.
When we eventually included more cover numbers in our play-list (Bob Geldof, The Seer etc), where we had to swap an electric guitar for an acoustic one and drums for bongos, we gave up playing outside and went into the rehearsal room.
What a racket!
When we finally all realised that ONLY doing covers was stupid and boring, we came up with Teufelsweib, the first number of our own, and a musical style was born. It was a style that we hadn’t heard before in our little circle in F ürstenfeldbruck: German folk rock on medieval instruments.
We wrote a few more little songs, and because nobody else in the rehearsal room could hear what we were doing, we decided to do a one-off concert at Die HEXE, our local bar and second home in Gr öbenzell. Now all we needed was a name for it all. Inspired by the idea of an outspoken fool playing a hoax combined with the Joker in a pack of cards, we came up with Schandmaul.
So how did it go? The concert sold out and was a huge success. The audience were really enthusiastic, and everyone was desperate for a CD. We just stood around gaping, realising that this was more than just a project, and that it would be really stupid to leave it at just the one concert. We looked each other deep in the eyes and we knew: a band had just been born!
So we played a few more concerts and our commitments increased at an alarming rate. At the same time, we were putting all our energies into our first disc, Wahre Helden, which we brought out ourselves in the spring of 1999.
We did more and more gigs, and new songs just seemed to bubble up out of us. It was the right time to produce another CD. We brought out Von Spitzbuben und anderen Halunken ourselves in 2000, and our live show was already looking quite decent. Eventually we decided to reduce our workload and signed up our concert agents, Extratours, who really launched us. We hit the jackpot when we played Th üringen in Saxony, and were now busy most weekends – fantastic fun!
The band’s next break came with our contact with the record label. A real record label was actually interested in us load of no-hopers…our hearts were beating out of our chests with excitement! The chemistry was right from the start, and we signed a record deal. The first thing the record company did was to put out a remix of Spitzbuben 2001 in the record shops, and it actually sold quite well. The wheels were spinning faster and faster: more concerts, then bigger concerts (Mera Luna, Zillo-Festival, Taubertal, Wave Gothic Treffen, and loads more). We did our first really long tour with a proper tour bus, and then produced another disc, this time with outside producers in a professional studio. That’s how Narrenk önig came about, released in October 2002 and immediately jumping to number 70 in the album charts. We threw a party to remember!
In the summer of 2003, we fulfilled a long-held desire to produce a live CD and DVD. We invited New Backstage to one of our concerts at the “Circus Krone” in Munich. The name of this much-wanted child was Hexenkessel (“Cauldron”), and it was a damned good choice of name, because it certainly was that all right! 800 sweaty bodies in the auditorium, 6 sweaty bodies on stage and the kind of vibe that you just love! We had some really great support, too: Micha Rhein from In Extremo stepped up to the mike with a new interpretation of the song “Willst Du?” A big thank you goes out to him!
Hexenkessel stormed up to number 52 in the German album charts, far exceeding all our expectations.
Then came the next studio album. In hindsight, Wie Pech & Schwefel, as we called it, was the disc that launched us out into the open sea. We started by making a few musical and line-up changes. Matthias Richter took over as Schandmaul bassist, we took a look at the sound quality in the studio, and had an incredibly rich collaboration with our friend and producer, Thomas Heimann-Trosien. This took us to an album chart entry at number 13, and all without any plugging on radio or MTV! I must admit that we did feel just a little bit proud of ourselves, but it was no time to sit back and rest on our laurels. Quite the opposite, in fact: we took the Pech & Schwefel songs to over 80 concerts and festivals across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and the feedback from you was so positive, that only you can take the credit for what happened next…
In the autumn of 2004, we thought we ought to bring out something really special as a thank you to our audience and fans. We rejected any hideous idea of releasing a “Best Of”
Or “Ballads” CD right before Christmas, and opted to produce another live CD/DVD instead. But this time we didn’t want to end up doing a concert in just any old venue, and grabbed at an idea some of the fans had: “Schandmaul Unplugged”. The days were long gone when “unplugged” meant just pulling the lead out of an electric guitar, so we had to think of something new, and decided to dress our hits up in a different garb.
For over six months, we wrote songs and melodies for strings, harp, piano and percussion and……drummed up a whole host of guest musicians, such as a 40-strong string section in the shape of the Puchheim JugendKammerOrchester, and organised the most lavish concert ever at the famous “Circus Krone” in Munich. Recorded by 7 cameras, and with a technical display that surpassed all our expectations, Kunstst ück appeared – specially designed for one purpose only – to say a big thank you to you lot!
In the summer of 2005, it was finally time to devote ourselves to another studio album. Tons of ideas had already been flying about over the months, and were now stored in our heads. Snatches of songs, ideas for lyrics and separate little passages were all jumbled up together, so we really had to bring some kind of order to the chaos
With this in mind, we holed ourselves up in seclusion for nearly two weeks with our friends at the Ronneberg Castle in Wei ßensee, Th üringen. We rehearsed, wrote and arranged the whole lot, and 17 new songs sprang into the world from the inspiring atmosphere within these venerable walls. And that was how Mit Leib und Seele was born.
Work on our new baby was interrupted only once, in October 2005, when we took the Kunstst ück DVD show on the road with the orchestra (Rockharmonix) one more time on an extended tour of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It was a successful conclusion to our acoustic project, and the positive memory of it will stay with us for a long time to come.
But then we went straight into the House of Audio studio in Karlsdorf, put ourselves in the hands of our long-time producer Thomas Heimann-Trosien and laid down the tracks for our fifth studio album. It appeared in the spring of 2006 after a few weeks of promotion (interviews, advertising, launch parties and more of the same) under the title Mit Leib und Seele. You can picture our joy when an ecstatic Tom B üscher (the head of our record label) called a week after it was released to say that this time we had managed to reach number 10 in the German album charts!!!
And boy, did we have a big party…..
We were on a high, and set to work to finish things off. We wanted to make the songs that we’d come up with in the studio good enough to take on stage. But then we finally had to go on the road again and play our new set live. After so many acoustic concerts, we were all happy to on a Rock’n’ Roll tour (not least Ducky, the electric guitar Meister ).
All in all, in 2006-2007 we did three concerts tours throughout Germany, neighbouring Austria and Switzerland, and eventually Holland again. We also had two summers of festivals to do, each with their own highlights – definitely the “Amphi-Festival” in Cologne and the “Taubertal-Festival” in Rothenburg in 2006, and the “Wacken-Open Air” and “Mera-Luna” Festivals in 2007.
All in all, you could say that they were probably our most successful concerts to date: countless sweaty bodies in countless cities, countless wonderful experiences and memories, and countless parties – two brilliant years!
But the half-life of a rock record is considerably short these days. Just at the point when our first keen audiences could sing along with the new lyrics of Mit Leib und Seele, the question of another album came up. We were really quite relaxed about producing something, as so many ideas had been buzzing around in our heads for such a long time already.
And so pre-production began on Anderswelt in the summer of 2007 in our home rehearsal room, with production finally in October of the same year. We tinkered about with the new work in a tried and tested place (the HOFA Studios) and with the support of our seasoned producer Thomas Heimann-Trosien. We’d never before allowed ourselves so much time in the studio, and never rehearsed so much, and we think it shows in the results!
Everyone knows that it’s always the same with musicians. If you ask them which is their best album, they’ll you it’s the one they’re working on now. It’s only natural. But we REALLY think this is true – well, at least that’s what WE think !!!
Anyway, here we sit in eager anticipation at the end of February 2008, full of impatience and joyful anticipation, as if we’re on hot coals, waiting for our new baby to arrive at the pressing factory.
14 new songs – 14 fairy tales and stories – 14 myths and legends from the Anderswelt (parallel universe)! Stories just waiting for you to hear them. And so it shall be: on April 4th 2008 the gates will be opened into another world! Where? You’ll have to go to your trusty record shop and find out
http://www.myspace.com/schandmaulmusic
http://www.schandmaul.de/en/
