Two old white men start talking about one of their new albums and, before long, find themselves going off on tangents about the growing sense of calm that comes with a receding hairline, the weather, lapdogs, family, Mallorca, cultural appropriation, racist incidents at German festivals and scandal surrounding a roast chicken.
Text: Pete Lilly /// Photos: Christina Gotz
He has been on stage for 33 years and has been releasing records on major labels for 27. By now, his catalogue comprises eleven studio albums, three live albums – including an “MTV Unplugged” – as well as a “Best Of” compilation. He sells out venues and headlines festivals. In Germany, whenever reggae is mentioned, his name is guaranteed to come up first. And then no one else for quite some time. He is also held in the highest regard abroad – in South America, West Africa or even in reggae’s homeland, Jamaica itself, where he was something of a celebrity for a while, following the success of “Intoxication”, his contribution to Don Corleon’s “Drop Leaf” riddim, and his live DVD that was a fixture on the music channel RETV during the 2000s.
When he started out, cultural appropriation wasn’t a thing, yet. There was only cultural appreciation, something he has nurtured with love and passion ever since he first set foot on the shores of his favourite island at the age of 18. Wherever he went, people were delighted to see a tall, skinny white guy speaking almost flawless Patois and deejaying in the latest styles over the hottest riddims. This was long before social media and YouTube. There was still something romantic about discovering a kind of music and its culture for yourself, working your way into it through mixtapes and 45s.
A lot has happened since then. Gentleman has become a German superstar. Expectations from record companies and the public have risen. Between album releases and extensive tours, he appeared on TV shows such as “Sing meinen Song” and sat on the judging panel of a talent show. Commitments like these can take their toll on creativity. He compensated for it with collaborations with German rappers and pop stars, experimented with singing in German and developed a reliable, if predictable, formula for his take on modern roots. And the public became more critical. Is it even okay for a white Central European to play music from another culture? And make money from it?
Gentleman has never denied where his music comes from. He has repeatedly collaborated with Jamaican artists and producers, brought them along on tour as guests and continually returned to Jamaica to keep himself up to date with what was happening on the ground. And yet these days, hardly an interview goes by without him having to address the subject of cultural appropriation. When really, Gentleman only wants one thing: to bring people together, bridge divides, overcome polarization and spread love.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve interviewed Gentleman since his second album, “Journey To Jah”. We come from the same city, know each other, discovered reggae and dancehall at almost exactly the same time and celebrated them in the same clubs – he usually on stage or behind the decks as an MC or deejay, me in the audience or on the dancefloor. We like each other, follow and appreciate each other’s work. Which is why I’m all the more pleased that, with his new album “Gratitude”, he seems to have found his way back to himself.
What follows is an almost unabridged conversation from a video call four weeks before the album’s release.
Where am I catching you right now? That looks like a studio.
This is my studio here in Mallorca.
Okay, nice. Is it that hot there as well?
Yeah, I think next week it’s supposed to get up to 42 degrees again or something. We live up on the mountain and we always have a breeze. So you can handle the heat pretty well. But it’s pretty crazy. Although it’s the same in Cologne, isn’t it.
It’s 35, 36 degrees here at the moment, but it’s supposed to get even hotter again.
But climate change doesn’t exist, right? It’s all a lie. Just a figment of our imagination!
(Laughs) “Gratitude”! How does it feel to be just about to release another album? Especially compared to your previous albums, of which there have already been quite a few.
Actually, it feels different from the last few albums because… I mean, I wouldn’t say I didn’t put my heart and soul into my previous albums. But there’s a lot in “Gratitude”. It’s the first album in a long time that I actually enjoy listening to myself. And that’s always a good sign. So I’m very, very happy with the result and I just think every song is cool. That’s why I’m in a really good mood about it. I don’t have any expectations in terms of charts or anything like that. I think that train has left the station. But the important thing is that you put something out there and feel like, okay, I gave it everything and it’s good the way it is. Whatever happens with it after that. So I’m pretty relaxed, but obviously also kind of… positively nervous.
I get the impression – and that fits with what you just said – that you approached this album with a bit more calm than you did the last ones. I wouldn’t compare it to your first albums. When you’re doing it for the first time, you obviously approach things differently. But that was my impression this time: Gentleman sounds more relaxed, more at peace with himself…
Before I started working on the album, there was a phase when I genuinely thought, maybe I’ve done Gentleman to death. Maybe enough is enough at some point.
I’m always going to make music, and I’ll always drop a song here and there, but this whole music business, these 100,000 songs being released on Spotify every day, all the social media bullshit – all the stuff you need to do to stay visible… I feel like I can’t keep up anymore.
There was this moment when, for the first time, I thought, maybe now is the right time to say, okay, I’m stepping back and maybe I’ll start a label. We also kicked around the idea of opening a cocktail bar or a little guest house… What else is there besides music?
I don’t want to sound bitter, but there was this moment when, for the first time, I thought, maybe now is the right time to say, okay, I’m stepping back and maybe I’ll start a label. We also kicked around the idea of opening a cocktail bar or a little guest house… What else is there besides music?
The danger of repeating yourself was always there. And when I started making music again, I realized, no, none of this is really doing it for me anymore. I allowed myself to entertain the thought that maybe the time had come to stop hanging out in smoky backstage rooms.
And the moment I allowed myself to have that thought, suddenly I had this feeling: I’ve got this beautiful studio, I always feel like making music, so I’m just going to make something without having this ulterior motive of releasing it.
And that’s basically how all the songs came about. Always with this feeling of: I don’t have to play this to anybody. And moving away from: How is this song going to go down with people, where, and what are you doing wrong here and so on – and just making music, you know, the way it actually started in the first place, because that’s what brings you into harmony with yourself.
It’s about that goosebump feeling you get when you’ve written and recorded a song. Not about: Can I still keep up? That was the beginning of “Gratitude”. And gratitude in the sense of: Wow, there’s still so much I want to express musically. Without having this thought in the back of my mind about whether the thing is going to chart high or whether people are going to recognize it. Just doing it for myself.
I think that’s what you mean. That’s why there was this sense of calm, in the sense of: There’s nothing to prove. I could never imagine not making songs anymore. But this whole circus, this pressure to keep up and all that – at some point, that just fell away. I loosened up and said, it is how it is, so…
In the press release for the album, which is written in the first person, you hint at a kind of turning point, a moment when you questioned your career. What brought that on? Was it simply a case of getting fed up with certain structures you find yourself caught up in? Or were there personal things involved as well? I remember you had some health issues at some point. Something like that can put you in a situation where you stop, take a step back and start questioning things.
I already mentioned the danger of repetition. After twelve albums and 30 years in the music business, you start thinking: Okay, we’ve been here before. We know this already.
Health-wise, what happened was that I wanted to go on a South American tour with Alborosie, and I’d been having this ongoing back hustle. And then at some point it got to a level where I wanted to get up to go to the bathroom in the morning and my legs just gave way because I couldn’t feel them anymore. The pain was so intense that I had to cry. It was literally emergency-doctor level. It was clear that I needed surgery. An infection was pressing against the lower vertebrae and the nerve cord was already almost severed. I could have ended up paralyzed from the waist down.
After the surgery, the pain was gone. And that was another moment of gratitude, realizing that the things we always take for granted really aren’t a given. When we’re sick, we have only one wish. When we’re healthy, we have a thousand. But that wasn’t really the answer to your question.
The question was what that kind of reflection triggers that follows problems like that, where you say, I’m going to free myself from expectations, from…
I think it’s a dynamic process. It’s not something you decide on, it just happens. At some point you realize you can’t keep fighting against your inner voice all the time. You just realize: the thing has run out of steam.
Basically, it was Claye who came up with the defining sentence: “Let’s have fun again!” Let’s just go into the studio and make music – without a release date. And then some really cool things came out of it.
With the idea in the back of your mind that you don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Going into the vocal booth and recording a song without having that feeling of: Can I say it like this? How is this going to come across, to whom, where, when, how? That helped enormously. Realizing that there’s nothing to prove. I’m happy with myself. With the last 30 years.
I don’t have to keep up with all the youths anymore. I can just make music because it feels good and because there are still things I want to manifest musically and lyrically. You know what I mean?
Yeah, totally. Listening to the 17 tracks on “Gratitude”, I also noticed that your songwriting has really grown again.
Yeah, I think so too.
I felt like there used to be a kind of Gentleman formula, where you’d say, okay, that’s a typical Gentleman song. But now there are a lot of songs that break away from that formula and sound fresher because of it. “Lion”, “Unity”, “Nah Worry” on the “Hill And Gully” riddim, “What If” with Queen Omega, or the final track, “When The Sun Goes Down”.
Oh yeah, “When The Sun Goes Down” is my favourite song. That one is very close to my heart. At some point I suddenly got really into country! It actually started with Tracy Chapman back in the ’80s, realizing how much country has to offer, lyrically and melodically…
I had certain ideas and knew exactly what I wanted to say, and I went into the studio with Claye. And suddenly we were just playing these few chords on the guitar. It was just there. We should really put that song out as a single.
No, but the whole album process, including writing in this small team – with Claye and Keeley (Keely Bennett)… That feeling of simply allowing things to happen and not having to keep up with anybody runs like a red thread through the whole thing. Also allowing yourself to be vulnerable to a certain degree. That made it easier. It was often different before. Back then, I often wanted to please other people.
Speaking of vulnerability. I had the feeling that the new songs are a little more personal than what you’ve done before. Songs like “Same Struggle”, maybe “What If”, “When The Sun Goes Down”…
It’s nice when you can still see some kind of development. But like I said, I stand behind every product I’ve made, every song. There’s nothing I should be ashamed of.
I really, really enjoy listening to these songs, my own songs, and that wasn’t always the case before. That was kind of the benchmark we set ourselves: every song has to have some kind of connection with me.
But it’s actually true with this album. I really, really enjoy listening to these songs, my own songs, and that wasn’t always the case before. That was kind of the benchmark we set ourselves: every song has to have some kind of connection with me. There were 40 demos, and 17 of them made it onto the album. There was an incredible amount of input. With this feeling of lightness, of just going, “Let’s do it.” There’s still so much to tell. There are still so many forms you can put a song into. This is nowhere near over. That was the vibe.
There were also albums where I felt like: The release date is in three months, I’ve only got six songs and now I have to squeeze something out. And this time it was completely different. The whole way of working was ultra relaxed. It felt really healthy.
You’ve already mentioned a few names, Claye, Keeley… I know Don Corleon was involved. One song is by Di Genius. Jopez was involved. What was the production process like? Was it all done online, sending things back and forth, or were you actually together in the studio?
No, no, we were actually here in the studio. I’m not really the type to send things back and forth. With Corleon, it was like this: one night he sent me more than 20 riddims, and I thought 17 of them were fucking great. That was at a point when something happened in Claye’s private life and he had to step away. So I thought, okay, I’m gonna make the album with Corleon.
But then Claye came back and we started building riddims together here in the studio, writing songs… Jopez was, let’s say, the co-producer when it came to vocal sounds and arrangements. He has incredible expertise.
At some point we had this luxury problem: Everything is fucking good, but we can’t put 30 songs on the album. Suddenly there was this flow, this magic moment where everything fel into place, everything we did was cool. Jopez did the “Unity” song, the rest was produced by Claye and Corleon.
The biggest surprise for me was “Nah Worry”, simply because “Hill & Gully” is such a hit riddim. Did you hear the riddim and think, I definitely have to get on this for the album?
No, it was like with the “WYFL” riddim. I thought: Okay, I’m feeling a vibe right now, I’m just gonna kick something on it. It was more spontaneous. But then I also wanted to make a bit of an international push again. On “WYFL”, I just did 16 bars, and that already created a little wave, where suddenly I was getting feedback like I hadn’t had in a long time. And then “Hill & Gully” came along and I felt it immediately. The album was actually already finished by then. But I kicked about 16 bars on that one too. Stephen liked it and sent me a DM saying: “Let’s do the whole song.” It all happened very naturally and, yeah, I think it’s the craziest riddim in a long time.
It’s definitely a heavy one. Although I was at Reggae Jam last weekend and no matter who was playing, where or when, “Hill & Gully” was guaranteed to come on. You start getting a little tired of the riddim after a while, just like back then with “Diwali”.
Or “Punaany” and “Sleng Teng” before that. But that’s kind of the culture, isn’t it? Did you see the chicken at Reggae Jam? It was painful to see what that triggered.
After the opening party in the festival’s Dancehall area, a video went viral showing a four-metre-high papier-mâché installation behind two white selectors: a faceless Black female dancer, upside down in a headstand, with an oversized batty and wearing tiny denim shorts. With her spindly, ridiculously short legs, she looked more like a roast chicken – hence the term “Chickengate”. Strings attached to the figure’s legs could be pulled to make the buttocks move. In front of the stage was a sign reading “Women At Twerk”, apparently intended to give the whole thing the air of a bit of harmless Dancehall fun.
Women in particular began speaking out from around the world at a rapid pace. They objected to the sexualized depiction of a Black female dancer, reduced to colonial-era stereotypes and presented primarily for and by white men. The video, which has since been deleted, drew hundreds of comments by the following morning. The festival responded with an apology and had the questionable stage decoration removed.
Yeah, I feel sorry for Sheriff (the organizer of Reggae Jam) that he had to go through such a shitstorm. But I also have to say, it could have been avoided.
I saw the video on Insta before the Jamaican media jumped on it, and I was like: Whoa, that’s not cool. I don’t think the intention behind it was malicious, but the way the video came across and everything… It wasn’t great. And then the reactions came the next day. If that had happened at a dance in Kingston, it would have had a different vibe.
As a white person, you just have to be careful about how you portray Black people.
What do you mean, careful? I think it’s about having some sense, common sense – you either have it or you don’t. They took it down afterwards. But what it triggered, the debate that followed… Crazy division. That made me sad. This image of Germany, one of the biggest reggae festivals… that’s the vibe. And in this social media age, something like that has a completely different dynamic than it used to.
Yeah, of course. I wouldn’t have expected it to blow up like that either. But you could immediately feel that it wasn’t okay, and a lot of people there said the same thing. On Insta, though, there were also comments like, “It’s not even that bad”, “Why are they apologizing for this?”, “Why are they taking it down?” But that’s kind of the vibe at the moment, I feel – that anything perceived as “woke”, like not being racist, not being sexist, is a red flag for a lot of people. That Markus Söder, that AfD way of thinking: “I’m not gonna let anyone tell me what to do. They’re trying to ruin something for me, take something away from me that I’m used to, something that’s normal to me.” Instead of just questioning themselves for a moment.
But hey, I’d actually rather talk about “Gratitude” than Chickengate.
(A small dog jumps onto Gentleman’s lap.) That’s Bruno. (Laughs.) He’s a terrorist, but you can’t really do anything but love him. He’s completely obsessed with Tamika (Gentleman’s wife) and spends the whole time waiting for her to come back.
I thought he was your daughter’s dog.
Yeah, that was the leverage we used to get her to move to Mallorca with us. (Sings) “Ooooh, it’s a lion!”
Exactly, let’s talk about “Lion”. The album opens with the song and the line, “What is life without purpose?” That really hits you straight away. You immediately start thinking: Purpose, where am I actually at? It does something to you right from the start.
That was exactly the idea, that people would see it the same way. With every song, I made sure the first line hits. With the short attention spans we have today, that’s ultra important. If you’re picking up on it like that, I guess it worked.
What is the purpose? What is the motivation? Why do we do the things we do? Those are really essential questions that come together in “Lion”. At the end of the day, the song is about that sense of wonder, about realizing that there’s something out there that’s much bigger than us. So let’s loosen up a little, let’s be aware of our own impermanence.
Whether you believe in God or not, the fact is that at some point we’re gonna leave this place. I’m 52 now, and if I make it to 82, I’ve got 30 summers left. Eighty years is roughly 4,000 weeks. The thought is kind of shocking at first, that it could all be over the day after tomorrow. But it makes you stop wasting your time with people you don’t want to be around. And stop doing things you don’t want to do.
That’s the essence of “Lion”: I’m honest with myself, and I can keep that sense of wonder. I don’t have to explain everything, and at 52 I don’t have to understand everything anymore. That actually feels good.
I also find the Melekú collaboration, “I’ll Be There”, really interesting. I know you’re a big Sizzla fan. So to end up doing a combination with his son… Melekú sings so beautifully, like Sizzla in his prime. How did that collaboration come about? Did you think, this song really needs Melekú on it?
Yeah, that’s really how it happened. The “Finally” riddim is also on the album – “Watch Over Me”. That’s how I got back in touch with Corleon a few years ago. He was doing a riddim selection and really wanted me to be part of it. Melekú was on the riddim as well. His tune is my favourite on there, the guy is so sick, man. So I asked Corleon: Hey, why don’t we do a collaboration? And Melekú was immediately down. He’s got these incredible melodies, and the way he switches from his regular voice to that kind of falsetto… I told him I’d love to do the song with him, and four hours later he sent something back and it was amazing. His timbre alone, which he inherited from his father – it’s crazy how clearly you can hear it.
I think as I get older, I’m getting more and more of a grip on how to be laid-back. Either you become more laid-back or you become bitter. Your environment is really important in that. I don’t define myself only through Gentleman, you know? That’s just one area of my life. There are so many other areas.
We already talked briefly about “Nah Worry”. I think you can also feel that sense of calmness in the song. It’s there in the title, too, in the way you deal with life and the challenges that come your way.
I think as I get older, I’m getting more and more of a grip on how to be laid-back. Either you become more laid-back or you become bitter. Your environment is really important in that. I don’t define myself only through Gentleman, you know? That’s just one area of my life. There are so many other areas. I mean, the whole family-man thing – I’m completely outside of this music bubble there. That probably makes up 80 percent of my life.
So it’s not that bad if something in this one area doesn’t happen the way you imagined it would. I’m definitely becoming more laid-back about that. Of course, there are always moments when I feel like I don’t understand shit anymore, like somehow I was much wiser ten years ago. But that kind of calmness, in the sense of not having to prove anything anymore and really listening to your inner voice, runs through the whole album. I’m glad you picked up on that too.
Another interesting thing about “Nah Worry” is that you’re the only one with a conscious song on the whole selection. Everything else is slackness galore.
“Nah Worry” was goosebump vibes from the very first verse. It’s the flow, the riddim does everything by itself, I just had to put my vibe on it. It happened without thinking, without asking myself: Oh God, how can I say this? It was just… very easy, in a positive sense.
I’ve got nothing against slackness, but I’ve never made a slack song myself. And it was important to me that I wasn’t gonna get slack now either.
Another central song on “Gratitude” is the Queen Omega combination “What If”. I don’t have the lyrics in front of me, but lines like “What if wrong is the right and mediocre is great” seem to me to be pointing towards something political in the broadest sense, towards the general state of the world. Did I get that right?
With “What If”, every line stands on its own. It’s about imagination, about trying to think about things differently, changing your perspective. The inspiration came from the movie “Dead Poets Society”, where Robin Williams climbs up onto the table to change his perspective: What if we just looked at things differently for a moment? Something like that old saying you used to see written on walls everywhere: “Imagine there’s a war and nobody shows up.”
Another song where I feel there’s really something going on is “Same Struggle” with Richie Campbell. It describes your own situation and Richie’s situation as artists – that you’ve left the struggle of the early days behind, trying to somehow make it, but you still have your own battles to fight.
I think we come together much more when we realize that everyone has their own cross to bear and everyone has their own story.
I’m a middle-class dude from Germany, but I still have my struggle. And somebody who grew up in Waterhouse has a different struggle. “The same struggle, but different streets.” The connecting element is the challenge we have to overcome.
We can have completely different stories, grow up in completely different circumstances, and still everyone knows that feeling of struggle and doubt, of being lost. At the end of the day, the song is about the fact that what connects us is stronger than what separates us.
A lot of the time, you make a song and only afterwards you start thinking, what is this song actually saying? That doesn’t happen during the creation process, it comes later, like when you’re asked about it in interviews. That’s often the first time you really start thinking about it: What is this song actually about?
We make it out of a vibe, you know? We hear a riddim and start writing and start bouncing, and suddenly something happens. Without thinking about what we actually want to communicate. And yet, of course, the song has a message.
The subject of cultural appropriation comes up in almost every interview these days. Sometimes I feel like, at this point, it’s been appropriated itself.
And then there are always people who interpret a song in a completely different way, and it still contains a truth. “Dem Gone”, “Superior” – how many people interpreted those songs completely differently? Maybe that’s not what was intended, but it still makes sense. That’s the beautiful thing about music. It happens on so many different levels.
Yeah, when a song develops a life of its own in people’s heads. What also spontaneously comes to mind, because I know that Richie Campbell thinks a lot about his role as a European reggae artist – cultural appropriation being the keyword. So maybe the song is also a way of saying: We may have a different background, but like you just said, we’ve got our own burdens to carry, too. Am I reading too much into it?
But what is that the question now?
Whether “Same Struggle” is also an engagement with this whole tiresome issue of cultural appropriation.
Yeah, of course. Accusations like that can completely throw you off track. Like with the Reggae Jam thing. Or there are two white people, Pete Lilly and Ellen Köhlings, and they run a reggae magazine and make money from it.
We don’t. (Laughs.)
Of course, I know that. But from the outside, RIDDIM is the most successful reggae magazine and it’s run by two white people. Or there’s a festival, Summerjam, Reggae Jam, that’s run by white people. At some point I stopped worrying about it.
If it weren’t for the motivation coming from Jamaica and Africa and Central America and from so many places around the world, if people didn’t give me that feeling of: Hey, we love what you’re doing, we celebrate it and it gives us strength, then I’d really have a problem with it.
The subject of cultural appropriation comes up in almost every interview these days. Sometimes I feel like, at this point, it’s been appropriated itself. I always come back to the example of “Intoxication”, that the song became a huge hit in Jamaica without anybody even knowing who this guy was.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not accusing you of cultural appropriation. I’ve known you for long enough and I know how you approach the culture…
No, that’s not what I mean either. But since you were asking about Richie Campbell and how it affects him – it affects me, too, again and again. Right now as well, with this whole Reggae Jam story. That really hurt me, because once again it’s creating this ultra-division around the whole Black-and-White issue.
But I actually don’t let it get to me too much. I know when I feel a song and when I go on stage and I really mean what I’m doing, then everything is good. Everything else is out of my hands. These debates come and go, you know?
But at the end of the day, I think either you mean what you’re doing or you don’t. Either you do it with love and passion, or you have an ulterior motive behind it, like wanting to make money from it and exploit somebody.
I think Richie hadn’t really been through that before. I’ve been through it a few times. He was here with me in Mallorca for the documentary and we talked about it openly. For him, it was the first time he had really been confronted with it through this whole social media dynamic. And strangely enough, it was always coming from people who aren’t really in touch with what’s happening or who aren’t in Jamaica. In Jamaica, he got an incredible amount of love, and then suddenly this accusation came up in his home country, Portugal. That’s the paradox, where this is actually coming from. And there we are again, back to appreciation or appropriation. But a chicken isn’t exactly helpful in that discussion. That chicken, man!
To get back to “Gratitude”: Are there any songs that are particularly close to your heart?
You want to know which child is my favourite child? That’s a very difficult question to answer. I’ll say this in general: the album is very close to my heart. And every song… I really meant every song. What’s the last song called again, the ballad?
“When The Sun Goes Down”.
Have we already talked about that, or was that in the interview before?
No, we talked about it briefly.
Oh, right, yeah, that one is very close to my heart. But also “Friends” with Collie Buddz. That’ll be the next single. I’ve also realized this within my closer circle, that suddenly you find yourself taking a path that isn’t the same path as your bredren.
It’s a bitter realization: We had a past together, but does that also mean we have a future if, in the present, everything is based solely on the fact that we shared something in the past? So, “Friends” with Collie Buddz, if you’re asking me.
But I have a connection to every song. I can stand behind every single one of them and perform every single one – really, every song.
You were talking earlier about the different aspects that define you. How do you keep those different aspects in balance? Your role as a family man and your role as an artist? With your wife Tamika being your backing vocalist, she’s always very close to your life as an artist.
We’re lucky, Tamika, Charlie and I, that whenever we go on tour, I always have my home with me. Everyone else in the band has kids, too, and they’re separated from them while they’re on tour. Having your home with you is an absolute gift. Um… what was the question again?
How you bring family life and being an artist together…
Right now, during festival season, we pack our stuff on Thursdays, drive somewhere on Friday, concerts on Saturday and Sunday, and then we’re back here on Monday or Tuesday. From Tuesday to Thursday, it’s not about Gentleman, you know? We have our own rhythm here…
My circle of friends, my social environment, is maybe only one or two percent people from the music business. It’s really healthy not to be stuck in that world all the time and constantly comparing yourself. It’s more like: How are the tomatoes growing? Where are we getting the meat for the barbecue? Simple things.
I’m a serious family man. That’s where I feel most comfortable. When I’m with my kids, with my wife, or when my parents come over or my siblings are here – that’s no place for Gentleman. Maybe someone will briefly ask how the last tour was, and that’s it.
And then I can dive back into that world again, and I enjoy doing it, and I do it with passion. But if I were only in that world and constantly comparing myself, then I don’t think I’d be able to handle it. I think that’s also what a lot of artists end up breaking under.
Yeah, I can imagine that. One more, rather personal question: When I interviewed you about “Mad World” last time, you had only just established a base in Mallorca. Now you’ve been there for five years.
Five years ago was the Ahr Valley flood.
Yeah, I remember your place got flooded and…
Exactly, you guys came to see us in Cologne once, too. The entire ground floor was completely under water. But luckily, the insurance covered it. They told us it would take a year and a half to two years before the house would be habitable again. They would have paid for a hotel, but I thought, two years in a hotel room? I’m gonna get depressed. We’d rather rent a house somewhere.
Then we visited some friends here in Mallorca and suddenly we thought, wait a minute, I can fly from here to my shows. I get to see a sunset every evening, a starry sky, we go out on the boat and go snorkeling and I bring back a fish…
I still love the Chlodwigplatz (square in Cologne), but not every single day. So we thought: Okay, we’re doing this now. We’re going to build something here.
I used to not be able to go to the toilet without my Walkman, you know? And these days I need a lot of silence. I’m not the kind of guy who comes home and turns the music on. I listen to music in the car.
Before, we had fallen in love with Hawaii and even wanted to move there. We spent three months there once and thought, okay, at some point Germany had run its course and we wanted to go somewhere else. Somewhere with an ocean, mountains and nature.
But then it quickly became obvious that with a twelve-hour time difference, I’d be completely out of the loop. Flying from Mallorca to Germany is like taking the train from Cologne to Dortmund.
What I actually wanted to ask is, what’s life like for you guys in Mallorca now? You’ve settled there, your daughter goes to school there. Can you describe what life is like for you?
It’s very quiet, very agricultural. We have horses and chickens and two dogs and two cats. We’re really out in nature. We live in a forest on a mountain and look out over the sea.
And at the same time, I’m still in Cologne. One doesn’t exclude the other. What’s getting more and more exhausting, though, is the travelling, especially during the summer holidays, when you’re sitting on a plane with all the party animals heading to Mallorca. That’s tough.
But the beautiful thing is, just like with Jamaica and Negril, that you can reduce all of that to about a mile. Mallorca is basically zero Ballermann. It’s a very peaceful, quiet island.
Sure, there are problems with mass tourism. There are problems with water. I’m glad there aren’t any wildfires here yet and that climate change isn’t as noticeable here as it is elsewhere. It’s peaceful here.
At 25, Mallorca wouldn’t have been for me. But at 52, it’s the perfect place. I think that sums it up.
Last question: What role does music play in your life when you’re not in the studio, recording, performing, doing promo – in your private life? Do you still spend a lot of time with music?
Well, Pete, no bullshit, the other day we came off stage and were in the tour bus, and Stahl (Florian Münzer), our guitarist, pulled out his boombox and put on a mixtape. And I was like: Whoa, Diggi, please turn that off. So yeah, I can definitely tell I need more peace and quiet.
I used to not be able to go to the toilet without my Walkman, you know? And these days I need a lot of silence. I’m not the kind of guy who comes home and turns the music on. I listen to music in the car. That’s where I really pump it. Then I listen to mixtapes from Jamaica, because I still find them inspiring.
But for the most part, it’s still Dennis Brown, Bob Marley, Garnett Silk, Jacob Miller, Tracy Chapman, Sade, old Motown stuff and things like that. With the 100,000 releases and all the artists who suddenly get hyped up, I can’t keep up anymore. But I don’t have to.
I think the best thing about getting older is that you don’t have to understand everything anymore. But no, really, I just really like having some peace and quiet.
