‘A guy from our record company told me to take out the whistling. I said no way. When the song went through the roof, he came to me, bent over and said, “Kick my ass!”’
Being a West German band made playing the Soviet Union in the late 1980s particularly special. We’d grown up in a divided country and had tried many times to play in East Germany, but they would never let us in. When we did our first gig in what was then Leningrad, the atmosphere was a bit grey, not very colourful or rock’n’roll – but hearts started opening up over the course of the 10 gigs we did in the city. It ended up a bit like Beatlemania, with fans circling our cars after every show.
In Leningrad, we realised we were being watched by the KGB. But when we played the Moscow Music Peace festival the following year, the soldiers in the stadium turned to face the bands, joined in the cheering and became part of the audience. It was like the world was changing in front of our eyes. Suddenly, with Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin – and perestroika and glasnost – it was possible for this Russian Woodstock to happen. It was hard to believe that people had been sent to prison for listening to western rock music – because now there was a Russian audience going nuts to Rock You Like a Hurricane.
