Every skirt strives for eternity in the raging moment. Peter Maffay is on the right track. Around 20 number one albums in 53 years on the stage, no one can match the roughneck from Tutzing. Now on the home straight, the 73-year-old is in a creative frenzy. He uses the time “that runs through our hands” (from “Tomorrow”, which is about the dying earth), for records, a radio show, a second “Anouk” children’s book with his young partner for the three-year-old daughter and for TV appearances, for example as a juror on “The Voice”. That was surprising: The dumpling Peter as a voice coach?
Yes he can. Unmistakably, Maffay grinds and growls through the Olympic Hall, loud and quiet, also far up into falsetto, training like never before. Just like his body, which he chases across the guitar-shaped center stage for almost three hours in order to be close to all the fans, who are called “friends” here. Leder-Peter sheds the studded jacket in the first song, including biceps and triceps, which look as if their operator called in the band for arm wrestling every evening.
Everything is bursting with power, especially the music, which is sometimes German rock (“Now!”) but not Rammsteinhauerei, sometimes energetic praise of God, sometimes a motivational anthem: “Forever young” – programmatic. His world-class band has been loyal to him for years, his drummer Bertram Engel for 45. That will last for a while, also thanks to the young entertainer group including bassist’s son Leon Taylor and band boss’s son Yaris. And then? Doesn’t Maffay need avatars like Abba, he has the eternally wrinkle-free dragon Tabaluga, who will audition three new tracks from the forthcoming World Rescue album. It’s not the hits (“Du”) that seem old-fashioned, just the screensaver videos and a few announcements: Of course, lamenting the change in “the” politicians from pacifists to militarists is a clear opinion, but in view of the Ukrainian guests in the hall who are now asking how they are supposed to deal with Putin without weapons but with love, out of place. The finale with the singer-songwriter Burg-Waldeck-Geist (“Freedom, which I mean”) and a group of singers with goosebumps sentence singing (“The tones have faded”) are moments almost for eternity.