Big screens are merciless. In the close-ups, Udo Lindenberg can’t hide a furrow of Keith Richards-like dimensions, even with make-up on. Like his Rock’n’Roll colleague, Udo has also worked this out not least through the chronic intake of substances that are not kind to the skin. The fact that the 76-year-old still rocks the Olympic Hall for two and a half hours without a break with the typically casual, shuffling dance steps could also have a parallel to Richard’s fitness secret, which he recently revealed: He spares his body any unnecessary exertion. That’s probably how Udo, Germany’s most famous hotel occupant in Hamburg’s “Atlantic”, can be taken care of for his tours. Tours whose shows have always set standards in German-language pop. Also this “Udopium” tour.
Special flight to Munich: Udo Lindenberg, the “Panic Orchestra”, dancers and a children’s choir got off the “Panic 1” jumbo jet.
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
As usual, the “Panic 1” jumbo jet rushes in from space, which then really happens panic orchestra, a dozen dancers and a group of children – afterwards singing and dancing enchantingly – get out. Carried by this big “panic family” – by eternal buddies like the bassist Steffi Stephan and the famous singers Nathalia Dorra and Ina Bredehorn up to the age of ten – Udo then does “his thing”, as a song is so beautifully called. With 29 pieces (of his 800 or so published) including many nostalgic insertions, he reviews his more than 50-year career, from “Cello” to “Rock’n’Roller”, from “Johnny Controltetti” to the “Sonderzug nach Pankow” . An iconoclasm including countless costumes, stagings and confetti cannons, in which Udo is still ahead of the game not only thanks to the then groundbreaking everyday slang in the songs, but also thematically: Whether he with “Well And?” and “Bunte Republik Deutschland” celebrates social diversity, takes a stand against the right with “From Victim to Perpetrator” or with “What are wars for?” and “We’re moving to peace” castigate the senselessness of institutionalized murder in an oppressively up-to-date manner. It may be old school and a bit kitschy at times, but it is also real, clear and emotionally inescapable.
At that point at the latest, the “Clan of the Lindians”, who have been making pilgrimages to Udo’s concerts for decades, come together. And who, like him, got a few more wrinkles from “three years of the hardest withdrawal”. As in the horror film “Shining” he felt in the empty Hotel Atlantic, Udo says in between. He can finally “go to Bavaria to celebrate” again, after all it all started here “when I lived in Schwabing”. Furrows or not, the eternal panic rocker will always be welcome here with his monster shows and message.