Scooter
Germany as well as USA and Great Britain presented the world with many music talents. A lot of groups, such as Scorpions or Rammstein went down in history as prominent representatives of their genres. Scooter, an outstanding, known, and world-respected band playing the qualitative electronic music, was not an exception.
Before the group settled its lineup and got the name Scooter, its members played in other bands that proved their experience. No one from musicians was a beginner and they had already been able to heat the public in the early 90s. Even the band’s members cannot name the official date of its formation as persons and titles changed since 1986 from time to time. But it is assumed that Scooter first appeared in winter of 1993 when a single “Vallée de larmes” was released namely under this label. However, it is commonly stated that the single is not the band’s work because other musicians are its authors and Scooter was not mentioned as an author of the song. But it must be noted that Scooter’s next song “Hyper Hyper” was successful and the exclamation “Hyper Hyper” took root in the German youth’s slang and became a generic designation of something hot and superinteresting.
In1995, this song was included into the Scooter’s debut album entitled …and the Beat Goes On! The album’s title characterizes the group’s performance and style very precisely – a strongly pronounced, sometimes even sharp rhythm that perfectly corresponds to the mood of the majority of German dance clubs. Not only “Hyper Hyper” but many other songs from this album, for example, “Move Your Ass!” and “Endless Summer” became real club hits. Finally,…and the Beat Goes On! was certified as golden and platinum in Germany and other European countries.
That was the beginning of the Scooter’s active work. During 1996, German guys released two albums titled Our Happy Hardcore and Wicked! The band’s members with their three released albums tried to show the whole world how different and many-sided their works can be. The hard sounding of the songs from the album Our Happy Hardcore and the new edge sounding from Wicked! combined with instrumental episodes helped Scooter to win the hearts of a wide audience and not to lose the group’s individual style and original performance.
In August 1997, the Germans released their fourth album Age Of Love, which, like the previous ones, demonstrated the public the musicians’ thirst for different music experiments. European listeners met enthusiastically the combination of hard rock songs and lyric ballads. Both the album and its several songs were listed in charts of Germany, Austria, France, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden and many other countries, being not the last in them. The video clip to the song “The Age Of Love” earned an award for The Best Video during ANIMAGO’98 festival and the song’s leitmotif became a soundtrack to the famous film Terminator and made the band popular on the North American continent.
After releasing of this album, the lineup changed. One of the band’s founders Ferris Bueller decided to try himself as a producer and he was replaced by a DJ and composer Axel Coon. The group with its new member recorded the Scooter’s fifth, and the most successful, album, entitled No Time To Chill, released at the end of 1998. It peaked at number four in the German chart of albums and became golden in six European countries. One of the most known songs of the album “How Much Is The Fish?” became a superhit and still puts into groove “veterans” of rave discos. In a distant 1998, it was this song that together with popular tracks of the previous years made Scooter one of the most popular and best-selling bands of the world. According to MTV Russia channel polling, it was called The Best Band in the World.
Within 1998-2011, Scooter released 16 albums in total, including hit collections. The band still performs successfully, writes songs to films, and its members spend their free time working for charitable causes. Scooter’s songs appeal people for peace, friendship, and a good education but some critics see a political overtone in them. However, musicians object these comments stating that their prior purpose is to create the audience’s good mood and a very serious attitude to dance songs texts is far from the mark.
