Litter box, sir! – Helge Schneider in Salzburg
Helge Schneider brought a lot of enthusiasm for improvisation to the quickly sold-out stage at the “szene” in Salzburg. At the second concert of his Austrian tour, the multi-instrumentalist was in a good mood and enjoyed playing his “old piano” and deconstructed his piece “Katzenklo” in a “divine” way.
Schneider does not have a band like in the pre-Corona years, just his guitarist Sandro Giampietro, who has been with him for three years. The long-term stage partner Bodo Oesterling, who served Helge Schneider peppermint tea again and again when asked, also came along. So the evening begins with the adventurous story of peppermint tea, continues with an encounter with the Pope while sightseeing across the street and ends in the Swiss home of Tina Turner, who does not wear high heels and appears so small that Helge Schneider, for illustration, is Tina crawls across the stage on his knees.
The following conversation in the change of roles between the 66-year-old singer-songwriter and the now 82-year-old rocker is ludicrous and typical of Schneider. The art of presenting something unprepared and spinning it further into the abstruse is in the blood of the stage man, who was born in Mühlheim an der Ruhr. No matter how daring and lost the performance may sound, the audience thanks him with loud laughter and lots of applause.
Instrumental virtuoso Helge Schneider also improvises in music, in which he combines jazz, slapstick, blues and rock and creates his own personal freedom, far away from the composer’s intentions. On the vibraphone he plays the jazzman Duke Ellington, then switches to the guitar, the drums, the double bass, but most of the time he sits at the piano, where he plays the “telephone man” and takes on the role of the sausage saleswoman.
In the well-known “Katzenklo” Bodo Oesterling took over the first voice, Schneider the second and chopped up the catchy tune in sausage saleswoman style with “Hallelujah” and “My Lord” interludes. After about two hours it was over.
Helge Schneider let himself be carried away to a single encore, but it was so short that the audience would have liked to hear more. Killian Pfeiffer