Anniversary Udo Jürgens didn't want to be "old-fashioned and yesterday's news"

Udo Jürgens pushed the boundaries of pop music with his hits. His children John and Jenny look back on their father's life. However, they don't want to talk about some aspects in public.

Udo Jürgens' artistic ambitions extended far beyond light entertainment. The singer, who helped shape German-language show business for decades, not only incorporated current political events into his hits, but also popular music trends, as his children John and Jenny Jürgens tell us. Their father would have turned 90 on September 30.

"What he didn't want was to be old-fashioned and old-fashioned," says John to the German Press Agency. "Dad also showed us more progressive music - rock bands and the most kick-ass stuff," the son recalls in a joint interview. "We were all very funky," says his sister Jenny, who is three years younger, during the interview in Vienna.

Against the Schlager image

His first single, entitled "Es waren weisse Chrysanthemen" ("There were white chrysanthemums") from 1956, was still dominated by the pop genre. Around ten years later, Jürgens asserted himself as an independent song composer with the hit "Siebzehn Jahr, blondes Haar" and then at the Eurovision Song Contest with the winning song "Merci Chérie".

"He always wanted to set himself further and further apart from this pop singer image," says Jenny. He was "always slightly annoyed" when he was referred to in this way.

A best-of collection entitled "Udo 90" is being released to mark his posthumous 90th birthday. There are flashes of contemporary influences in some of the songs. "Immer wieder geht die Sonne auf" (1967) sounds a little like the then successful Beach Boys; "Deine Einsamkeit" (1970) is reminiscent of the sound of a recently released Simon and Garfunkel album.

But there were limits to the singer's spirit of musical discovery. In 1981, Jürgens produced the English-language album "Leave A Little Love" in the USA, which musically pointed in the direction of pop. His children thought it was cool. "But it didn't work out that way," says Jenny, describing the record's lack of success with the public.

The content of his songs also went far beyond shallow pop lyrics. In "Lieb Vaterland", he sang about the socially disadvantaged in the shadow of corporations. In other songs, he addressed crises and social issues in an indirect, humorous or sentimental way: Environmental pollution and a political assassination in "5 Minuten vor 12", alcoholism in "Der Teufel hat den Schnaps gemacht" or migration in "Griechischer Wein".

"Papa had a way of always delicately putting his finger in a wound somewhere in the lightness of his songs - very often with a wink," says Jenny.

Controversy over a word

His songs contain not only criticism, but also self-irony - when it comes to his image as a womanizer, for example. "He knew exactly who he was himself and his absolute credo was to run forward," says Jenny Jürgens. These two of Udo Jürgens' four children do not want to talk about how they and their brother experienced their father's relationship with women.

However, the siblings are more relaxed about the controversy surrounding the Jürgens classic "Aber bitte mit Sahne". For the "Giovanni Zarrella Show" on ZDF last year, the word "Mohrenkopf" was replaced by "Schokokuss" in the lyrics. There was criticism of this move in online comment columns. "Actually, I say it can be changed," says John. "I don't know what the big fuss is about, it's not Goethe, it's a satirical text by Eckart Hachfeld." Jenny would have preferred to leave the text in its original form, but she agrees with her brother that the term "Mohrenkopf" is no longer acceptable.

The show must go on

Instead of controversy, the siblings would rather talk about the rediscovered Jürgens song "Als ich fortging", which has now been released for the first time. "It's a beautiful ballad," says John about the song, which has been clicked more than 300,000 times on YouTube in just a few days. The song had been gathering dust in an archive as a demo tape for decades. Using artificial intelligence, Jürgens' voice has now been filtered out of the old recording and recorded with new instrumental accompaniment.

Posthumously, the entertainer lives on on stage. The "Da Capo Udo Jürgens" tour starts at the beginning of November. During the shows, concert recordings of the singer can be seen and heard on an LED screen, while a band accompanies the songs live. However, John does not want to see his father on stage as a digital avatar in the future, even though the cult band Abba now performs in the form of such 3D holograms. "I find that creepy," says John.

SDA