Does "Wind of Change" come from the CIA? At least that's what one journalist said. Scorpions singer Klaus Meine can only laugh about it.
Klaus Meine (72) has already celebrated some successes as the singer of the German rock band Scorpions. The song "Wind of Change" became the anthem of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But at the beginning of the year a rumor about the classic caused a stir. The American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (44) raised the question in his podcast "Wind of Change" whether the song might not have been written by the US secret service CIA and thus the cold war ended. How did Klaus Meinert react to the conspiracy theory? "I laughed out loud," he explains in an interview with the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung".
"Then it took me a moment and I quickly realized that he really meant it," says Meine. "If I had told someone that, they would have thought: Mine is now completely crazy. It's so crazy." But Keefe believed in his theory. "Then I found out that he had really been there for a year – and had interviewed fans at one of our concerts in Kiev." Keefe also approached fans in Moscow. They almost became aggressive "when they heard that he insinuated that 'Wind of Change' was propaganda."
"That would be a fantastic plot for a Netflix series"
Meine continues, at the same time he thought: "That would be a fantastic plot for a Netflix series." However, the musician himself is amazed at how cool he has remained despite the crazy accusation. "Because basically he didn't say anything else except: Klaus Meine lied to people for 30 years," Meine told the newspaper. "I just tried to put the story away with a laugh because I know what it really was like," said the 72-year-old.
Nevertheless, he was shocked by how many people had gratefully accepted these rumors: "According to the motto, we always knew it, this song can't be from this 'Hair Metal' band from Hanover, only they can Have been Americans. "
The idea for the song "Wind of Change" came to Klaus Meine in 1989 in Moscow. In November 1990 the song was first released on the album "Crazy World", the single followed in February 1991.