“So much can happen, so much can happen, there is only one thing I know one hundred percent, I would never go to Bavaria!”, Campino sang with them at the end of the 90s Dead pants, At that time the lead singer was very sure of his cause. Uli Hoeneß had reacted with “Die Toten Hosen? This is the dirt that our society will choke on”, probably “the most beautiful sentence that has ever been said about us,” says Campino, and a grin crosses his face like that wide that even the back rows in the Olympic Stadium can see it. But even if the Liverpool FC fan could never have believed it back then: On Tuesday evening, he and his bandmate Kuddel will be on the summer stage in the Olympic Park and will be able to present his new book. It is called “Hope Street”, named after the street in Liverpool where the hotel is also to be found, where the team of the traditional club stays before home games.
Campino alternately reads and sings, long passages from his book follow well-known Tote-Hosen hits and cheeky jokes with chants. To read aloud, Campino sits down at a table with a Liverpool FC scarf attached to the front. The stage is soaked in red light, with England flags hanging in the background. The singer turns out to be a born storyteller with a voice like that of a villain. He reports on sins of youth and alcoholic escapades, the thrill in the stadium and backstage experiences with the band. In detail and with a twinkle in his eye, he tells, for example, of the rosé-drinking drummer Vom Ritchie, whose “Mick Jagger imitation, which he sometimes performs at night on the tour bus, is one of the funniest things you can experience on a trouser tour”.
Obvious: Campino is a fan of Liverpool FC.
(Photo: Johannes Simon)
Campino is clearly having fun on stage. “This beer …” he starts and puts his lager down next to him. At that moment, outraged shouts can be heard from his Bavarian audience. “… really delicious”, Campino finishes the sentence after a break from art. Meanwhile, Kuddel leans back, deeply relaxed, in an armchair and listens to the stories, his chin resting on his folded hands. Every now and then the left-handed guitarist supports his bandmates vocally, even after more than 40 years the two punks still know how to make a lot of noise. You can feel the bass vibrate through the green seats, and Campino swings his microphone holder towards the crowd like the pole of a Liverpool flag. It is slowly getting dark in the stadium, in the distance the glowing ferris wheel turns incessantly.
As self-deprecating and pointed the anecdotes from earlier and wilder years are, the almost 60-year-old Campino is just as reflected and thoughtful when it comes to his childhood and his deceased parents. Unsurprisingly, the thoroughbred punk had a rebellious streak even as a schoolboy. It was not easy for his parents with little Andreas Frege and his six siblings. “One of us always screwed up,” says Campino. His Protestant father, “this tough dog”, was often in opposition to the English “Mami”, as the almost 1.90 tall man calls his mother. In the very first chapter of his autobiographical debut, he wrote: “My orientation towards England, if I look at it from today, was never anything other than a concealed declaration of love to my mother”.
The songwriter skilfully draws an arc from grief and inner conflicts to comfort and hope. He has always associated it with “Hope Street” – even if the street is actually named after a merchant named William Hope. At the end, Kuddel picks up the electric guitar again. Actually, the chorus from the Toten Hosen hit “On days like this one wishes for infinity” would have captured the mood of the evening well. The subsequent Liverpool anthem “You’ll never walk alone”, which says: “Walk through the rain”, actually reflects drizzle in the light of the headlights, which falls like a curtain in front of the roof of the Olympic Stadium. Reluctantly, the rows of spectators in the south curve empty themselves after an encore, and occasionally fans sing the first lines of “Alles nur aus Liebe”.