Dieter Bohlen
Germany’s mega hit machine is celebrating its 70th birthday
A fixture in the German pop business for four decades: Superstar Dieter Bohlen.
© imago/Eventpress
On his 70th birthday, “Pop-Titan” Dieter Bohlen looks back on a long career that didn’t just consist of successes.
Of course, a pop titan like Dieter Bohlen doesn’t celebrate his 70th birthday with his closest friends and family at the Italian restaurant around the corner. Someone like Bohlen will celebrate his mega birthday on February 7, 2024 “together with his fans with a mega concert in Berlin.” Like planks revealed to the “Bild” newspaper, he decided on this not particularly intimate setting in order to finally have some peace and quiet that day. There he explained: “Every birthday is horror. People call or send text messages all day long and expect an answer. I’m actually on the phone all day.” This year he didn’t feel like having that kind of stress. Luckily, his concert organizer found a mega solution to avoid having to be at home: “We’re doing a birthday concert, then a little party, and everyone is happy.”
Deep gratitude for the loyal fan base
The birthday child shouldn’t be bothered by the fact that the cash register will ring a little as a side effect, even if from his perspective the income is more like peanuts. At his birthday party in the Theater am Potsdamer Platz, the main thing for him is to express his gratitude to his fans who have remained unwaveringly loyal to him over many decades. “When thousands of people accompany you so faithfully throughout your entire career,” said Bohlen in one Press statement about the concert event“then it goes without saying that I give you the opportunity to experience an unforgettable show together with me on February 7th, 2024.”
Mega media brand Dieter Bohlen
Over the course of this career, which has now spanned around 50 years, Bohlen has grown into a gigantic media brand. He has long since ceased to be “the blonde guy from Modern Talking” and is instead considered “Germany’s pop titan”. In this role, his activities as a music producer, composer, singer, talent show pope and advertising medium merge seamlessly.
This can be observed particularly well in the RTL format “Deutschland sucht den Superstar”, where he has been the most prominent face on the jury since 2002 (apart from a short, scandal-related interruption in 2021 and 2022). In the first season he not only limited himself to the role of a juror, but also produced a hit single with the candidates (“We have a dream”) that they sang together, which of course immediately reached the top of the German charts for six weeks charts. The first “DSDS” album “United,” produced by Bohlen, was also a commercial mega-success.
Reliably at the top of the charts with “DSDS”.
More than ten winning songs from the “DSDS” winners, which Bohlen composed for young superstars such as Alexander Klaws (40), Mark Medlock (45), Pietro Lombardi (31) and Beatrice Egli (35), among others, made it through the high-rating TV booster, which has since been at number one in the German singles charts. The RTL show also offers the top-selling pop titan a perfect stage for his role as brand ambassador for the clothing manufacturer Camp David, whose effects on the German fashion market can always be observed most impressively every summer.
Bohlen is a constant presence and caught up in his routine role as a perfectly illuminated wisecrack that one almost wishes for the good old modern-talking days back, in which the music market did not yet function like a production machine that was professionalized down to the last corner. In order to get today’s media figure Dieter Bohlen, polished through countless RTL shows, out of your head and to understand how this man fought his way to the top over a period of 50 years, it is worth taking a closer look at his musical career Starts to throw. So to the time when he wasn’t yet mega-successful and mega-famous.
The business economist in the dance band
Bohlen’s music career is characterized by the fact that he had an eye on the laws of the musical mass market from the very beginning and, as a business economist, drew his conclusions from them. In one Interview with the “Berliner Zeitung” He explained how, as a member of a dance band at the end of the 1970s, he gained the essential knowledge for his entire career. He reported on his time as a business student in Göttingen: “At the weekend I played in the dance band. This enabled me to finance my studies. In addition, with the dance band you learn exactly what people want to hear – and how they sometimes react to them “The most stupid numbers. Back then, ‘Song of the Smurfs’ and stuff like that. Of course I was horrified to play those numbers! But sometimes you learn for life.”
Unusually unsuccessful: Bohlen’s dazzling start to his career
At the end of the 1970s, Bohlen set out to put his hard-earned basic knowledge of the German music market into practice. In addition to his job as a producer for the Berlin record company Hansa, he tried his hand at being a solo artist with his self-composed songs. Between 1980 and 1981 he appeared under the pseudonym Steve Benson and made a name for himself with songs like “Don’t Throw My Love Away” or “Angel Blue Eyes” for consistent flops.
His stint as the frontman of the music band Sunday wasn’t a big success either, but it did allow him to gain his first experience in the limelight on television shows such as the “ZDF-Hitparade” or the “Show-Express”. To get an idea of how hard Dieter Bohlen had to work before he was finally able to celebrate his breakthrough with Modern Talking in 1984, it’s worth taking a nostalgic look at the performance of his, unmistakably inspired by “Song of the Smurfs”, Holiday anthem “Young and Free” to throw in 1981. Which sayings today’s pop titan would use to mercilessly sweep the mega-happy Sunday trio off the “DSDS” stage is, of course, a completely different story.