When Campino doubted his punk career

Michael Britkoff, guitarist with Totten Hussein, has been in the same campino class for a while. The two became friends and later did community service together.

At the age of 16, Campino founded the punk band Zentralkomitee Stadtmitte, ZK for a short time. Also on board were later Totten Heusen members, guitarist Andreas von Holst and Andreas Meurer as the road. Andreas Frigg founded Die Toten Hosen in 1982 with two of them and his childhood friends Michael Breitkopf, Trini Trimpop and Walter Hartung. Funny anecdote: at their first concert in Bremen in April, some of them were announced as Die Toten Hasen.

When Die Toten Hosen – with an o instead of an – things went uphill. The debut album “Opel-Gang” became the band’s first success and made it known throughout Germany. Even in East Germany! t-online spoke to the singer about an illegal concert in East Berlin. Düsseldorfers made their final breakthrough with the album “Ein kleine Bißchen Horrorschau” (1988) and the popular song “Here come Alex”. The rest is history: countless hits followed, such as “Wünsch Dir was” (1993), “Alles aus Liebe” (1993), “Bonnie & Clyde” (1996) and “Days Like This” (2012).

Over the years, the huge success has also aroused suspicion. In the mid-’90s, Die Toten Hosen saw a concert that brought them to a “dead end”. Campino said of the 1997 show: “At our 1000th concert at the Rheinstadion in Düsseldorf, a girl died in the crowd. That evening was so tragic, it was terrible, we were upset for months and always met again and asked: Do we have a kind of music at all compatible with such Such large crowds? Could something not happen all the time? Shouldn’t you have to boil it?”