On Tuesday evening (June 30), Bratislava’s Tipos Arena added another musical legend to the list of performers. The German hard rock band Scorpions has been at the forefront of domestic performers for decades, and the epithet legend rightfully belongs to it. She has been on the scene since 1965 and visited Bratislava as part of the 60th Anniversary Tour. According to the music archives, it was their sixth performance in Slovakia, the previous one was played in Tipos Arena on November 20, 2019.
They started with a video documentary that commemorated a respectable 60 years on the scene, the first song was Coming Home from the ninth album Love at First Sting, released in March 1984, the second was Gas In The Tank from the nineteenth album Rock Believer, which was released in February 2022. The other two Make It Real and The Zoo are on the seventh album Animal Magnetism, the fifth was Coast to Coast from the album Lovedrive. The band stepped like a perfectly oiled machine and the packed arena responded in the same way. The audience was closer to the guitarists thanks to the catwalk that extended into the auditorium, and the musicians often used it.
The playlist was followed by the songs Bad Boys Running Wild, Dalcate Dance, and next came the mega-hits Send Me An Angel and Wind Of Change, to which the audience also added vocals. The mood also escalated with the songs Loving You Sunday Morning, I’m Leaving You, Tease Me Please Me, Mikkey Dee performed an elegant drum solo, and at the end, Big City Nights and the hit Still Loving You were played.
You can’t leave in such an atmosphere, fans listened to encores Blackout and the hit Rock You Like a Hurricane. At the end, to the surprise of the audience, a mammoth scorpion dummy appeared on stage. The construction of the arena was also tested by a sound engineer, decibels over 140 and dense hard rock, that goes together at a concert like this.
Publicists at the beginning of the 90s called the group musical messengers of peace, thanks to the hit Wind Of Changea symbolic anthem of political changes in Eastern Europe, including the fall of the Berlin Wall. Sales of singles exceeded 14 million pressings.
The five-member lineup of ‘scorpions’ consists of guitarist Rudolf Schenker (born 1948), he is the only one who has been in the group since its foundation, singer Klaus Meine (1948), who joined the group in 1969, gitarista Matthias Jabs (1955), in the group since 1978, bassist Pawel Maciwoda (1967), in the group since 2003 and drummer Mikkey Dee (1963), in the band since 2016.
The hard rock band Scorpions was founded by brothers Michael and Rudolf Schenker in 1965 in Hanover. They started with recorded songs, in February 1972 they released their first LP called Action, which was later reissued under the name Lomesome Crow. Successful in Europe since the 80s, with the album Blackout, released in April 1982, they also achieved success in the United States. They have 19 studio albums to their credit, the latest Rock Believer was released in February 2022. Their record sales have exceeded 110 million pressings worldwide.
Scorpions performed on June 16, 2007 at the Artmedia Stadium in Bratislava, on April 23, 2009 in Košice, on June 4, 2011 again in Bratislava, on March 2, 2016 in Košice and on November 20, 2019 in Bratislava’s Tipos Arena.
