Lüül
Lüül , real name Lutz Graf-Ulbrich , formerly Ulbrich (born November 30, 1952 in Berlin-Charlottenburg ), is a German singer, guitarist, lyricist and composer.
Life
1960s
Inspired by the Beatles, he learned to play classical guitar at the age of twelve from the same teacher who taught Manuel Göttsching . He made his first musical attempts from 1965 with the student group The Tigers and The Sentries . On the occasion of the Berlin Oktoberfest in 1967, Lüül founded the group The Agitation with childhood friend Christoph Franke as well as Lutz Ludwig Kramer and Michael Günter , from which Agitation Free emerged . Lüül played the second guitar in the group, which was significantly influenced by lead guitarist Lutz Ludwig Kramer. Kramer later left the group and joined Walpurgis .
1970s
After the end of Agitation Free in 1974, Lüül stayed in France and worked as a street musician. Manuel Göttsching , to whom Ash Ra Tempel had reduced himself in the meantime, needed support and so Lüül initially joined Ash Ra Tempel for live concerts and finally also for studio recordings. In 1975 Göttsching and Ulbrich also contributed the soundtrack for the film Le Berceau de cristal by Philippe Garrel , in which Nico , Anita Pallenberg and Dominique Sanda played.
From then on Lüül also played keyboards in order to give Manuel Göttsching more space to play the guitar. A brief reunion for a farewell concert by Agitation Free in 1974 was recorded for the album Fragments (released in 1995). In the same year he supported his former bandmate at Agitation Free , Michael Hoenig , on his debut album Departure from the Northern Wasteland . At a festival in France in 1973, Lüül met the singer and musician Nico , with whom he formed a couple over the next few years and, parallel to Ashra , as the group called itself from then on, worked primarily live. In 1976 he accompanied Nico as a guitarist on tours in Spain, France and Holland.
With the addition of ex- Wallenstein drummer Harald Großkopf , Ashra went on an extensive tour in 1977 in Switzerland , France and Belgium . In 1978 Lüül recorded the album Correlations with Ashra, which was produced by Mick Glossop in the Erd Studios and Studio Roma, Berlin and the Panne-Paulsen Studios in Frankfurt . 1979 Nico and Lüül went on tour in the USA and Canada and played there a. a. with John Cale in the CBGB’s and the Whiskey a Go Go .
1980s
In 1980 Ashra released the last album for Virgin Records , Belle Alliance , which was only released in Germany. In the same year he began to record his first solo album Lüül , for which he wrote, among other things, the kingdom of dreams sung by Nico . The album, produced by Christopher Franke and recorded with Harald Großkopf among others , also contained the song Morgens in der U-Bahn , which was first released on the Ahorn Records sampler Deutsche Welle in 1981. The catchy pop number corresponded to the zeitgeist of the emerging Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW) and developed into a hit in the independent hit parade, which was also released as a single in Czechoslovakia in 1982. He advertised the single on West German television with appearances on the programs " Formula One " ( ARD ) and " WWF Club " ( WDR ). Morning on the subway is one of the first songs in German pop history to feature spoken chants and underlines Lüül's pioneering status in German rock history as a pro rapper. Noteworthy is Lüül's sometimes throaty vocals on the piece, which is more like New Wave than NDW and has influences from the New York band Suicide .
Inspired by these successes, he recorded his second solo album Lüül und ich in 1982 , which was released in 1983 and underlined his compositional skills and stylistic versatility between wave, pop and lied. So he adapted Heinz Rühmann's Ich brech 'die Herzen der proudest Frau'n in a winking way. Parallel to his music career, Lüül co-founded the rock theater Reineke Fuchs and appeared in theater productions ( The Death of James Dean and Erich Mühsam Revue ). He also wrote music for plays and radio plays. In the 1980s he continued to play sporadically with Ashra , for example at the “Ars Electronica” in Sheffield in 1985 , and worked as a festival organizer due to his diverse contacts in the Berlin scene. So z. B. for the event "Desert Sounds in the Planetarium", which took place as part of the series "Berlin European Capital of Culture E 88".
1990s
In 1996 his third solo album, Mond von Moabit , was published, which dealt with the Berlin scene in general and life in his Moabit apartment building in detail. Lüül turned out to be an audibly mature songwriter, who lovingly documented the airs and delusions of his fellow men with typical Berlin subtlety and self-irony. He formed the "5 Star Combo" to promote the record live. Lüül also appeared in the multiple award-winning documentary film Nico Icon (1996) and told about his life with Nico. In the same year he founded the band 17 Hippies with other Berlin musicians , to which he still belongs as a banjo player. A Japan tour with Ashra - consisting of Manuel Göttsching , Harald Großkopf , Lüül and Steve Baltes - was a great success in 1997, which was also documented on audio media. The 17 hippies gave many concerts in the late 1990s, which they documented with the live album Rock'n'Roll 13 . In addition, they also set the world record for most concerts in one day (17 on the occasion of the “ Fête de la Musique Berlin”).
For his 45th birthday in 1997, Lüül organized a gala in the Tränenpalast . Agitation Free , Ashra , Rocktheater Reineke Fuchs , 17 hippies also celebrated and congratulated the birthday child. In the same year his fourth solo album Ahoi was released , which is about his 1993 trip to South and Central America . He recorded the purely acoustic album with 17 hippies colleagues. He recorded a new version of the song Bargeld especially for this album and wrote a classic with Bahnhof , which he refined with his psychedelic lead guitar. The 17 hippies went to the United States in 1998 and performed at the legendary SXSW in Austin , Texas . Ashra released the live recordings with Lüül at the “KLEM Festival” in Nijmegen on the album Sauce Hollandaise . The recordings of the reformed Agitation Free , produced by Bernhard Potschka (Ex- Spliff ), appeared on the 1999 album River of Return . The 17 Hippies released the album Wer ist das? and shot a video under the direction of Wolfgang Becker ( Good Bye, Lenin! ).
Since 2000
In 2000 he created the Trance Groove Remix of Reich der Träume with Nico-Gesang, which appeared for the first time in 1982 on his first solo album. In addition to the soundtrack for the award-winning film Half Staircase , in which the 17 hippies also appear, Lüül released the double album Kurzmusiken in 2001 , which combined various, purely instrumental theater and film music for the first time on recordings and was extremely interesting for friends of Berlin electronics. A reunion of Ashra at the Burg-Herzberg-Festival in 2001 was a great success. In addition to the 17 hippies , Lüül performed either solo or with accompaniment in trio and quartet form. The songs for the album Damenbesuch , which was released in 2004, were recorded with the following line-up: Kruisko (accordion), Kerstin Kaernbach (violin) and Klaus Janek (double bass). The album, which he promoted with a major tour of Germany, including at the Nuremberg Bardentreffen, received excellent reviews and was awarded the German Record Critics' Prize in the category of chansons, songs and lieder. Stefan Krulle called Lüüls albums like Damenbesuch as "humorigste shooting the comedy Republic Germania, whose counter-model to make it were, because it for comedy lacks any tendency to flat sense. Somehow Lüül seems to have reached its goal. At least he is no longer looking for the light like the moth. But that can be completely different in a few months. ”In 2006 his autobiography Lüül - A Musician Life Between Agitation Free, Ashra, Nico, the Neue Deutsche Welle and the 17 hippies in the publishing house Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf was published, in which he describes his eventful musician life Let pass in review. In addition to short, entertaining anecdotes, he relentlessly described his life with Nico , as in the film Nico-Icon . For the reader, it is fascinating to understand Ulbrich's life as a wanderer between the worlds - between West Berlin and the Federal Republic, between the old and the new world and various musical styles from the bombed post-war Berlin of the economic boom generation to the present. The political and social references that Ulbrich sometimes surprisingly make are also remarkable. At the same time, a retrospective of his various musical stations appeared in 2006 with Zeitreise . In 2007, Lüül and his band went on a club tour through Switzerland and Germany and then - as a tourist guide / contemporary witness, so to speak - to the Berlin district of Moabit as a guest in the TV report Lokaltermin Zwischenraum from the RBB (Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg). In autumn there were celebrated concerts by the '74 line-up of Agitation Free - Lutz Ulbrich, Michael Günther, Michael Hoenig, Gustl Lütjens and Burghard Rausch - in Japan. The band was invited by the Japanese businessman Gen Fujita. Fujita is a music fan in general, an admirer of the German music scene in particular and the owner of the wax figure cabinet in Tokyo Tower. The occasion of the Agitation Free concerts was the inauguration of the wax figure of Ulbrich's band colleague Michael Hoenig. He now stands alongside Lutz Ulbrich, Manuel Göttsching and Mani Neumeier ( Guru Guru ) as one of 160 world personalities in the Tokyo wax museum. The new 17 hippies album Heimlich from 2007 was only the band's second regular studio album, which was also released as the band's first album in the USA and Canada. It contained twelve new compositions that "refined, expanded and deepened the hippie sound ..." (press text) Their style is a mixture of French chanson, various Eastern European styles, polka, blues, zydeco, mariachi and certain oriental-north African influences. They are probably more popular in some parts of Europe than in Germany itself. At least in Berlin, however, their concerts also attract large numbers of enthusiastic audiences. After the album was released, the band toured Europe, the USA (including Chicago, Washington, New York) and a year-end concert in Paris' Olympia with the "Rolling Stones" of the Sahara, the Tuareg world music group Tinariwen . In January 2008 the Lüül album Spielmann was released , which he recorded again with the line-up of Kerstin Kaernbach (violin), Kruisko (accordion) and Klaus Janek (bass) as well as guests Danny Dziuk (organ) and some 17 hippies musicians. Gitti Gülden wrote that “his world travels clearly sound like: polkaschwof, cajun waltz, reggae, raga, rumba. Here the peoples come closer, in 13 songs around the world. And he's funny anyway. ”After that, Ulbrich toured the USA again with the 17 hippies - including an appearance at the legendary SXSW Festival in Austin / Texas, followed by concerts in Greece, Algeria and Spain. On August 8, 2008 Lüül married his partner Daniela Graf and from then on bore the surname Graf-Ulbrich. On October 17th, 2008 Lutz Graf-Ulbrich organized and moderated the tribute concert for his ex-partner Nico - Nico 70/20 . The 70 stood for her 70th birthday and the 20 for the 20th anniversary of her death. At the tribute concert at the Volksbühne Berlin on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Lüül & Band u. a. the German pop singer Marianne Rosenberg, Marianne Enzensberger, Gudrun Gut (Ex- Malaria !) & Michaela Melián, The Golden Hunger (feat. James Young - the keyboardist of Nico's last band “ The Faction ”, MacGillivray, Captain H. Morgan), Soap & Skin , Jutta Koether and Ari Boulogne, the son of Nico. The tribute concert took place as part of a large-scale homage to this icon of subculture, in which the Babylon-Mitte cinema also participated with a Nico film retrospective and the Christian Nagel gallery with a Nico art and picture exhibition. In the same month, the Museum of Applied Art Cologne dedicated a four-month multimedia show to Nico for the first time, in which fashion, films and music were shown and performed. Graf-Ulbrich, who had made a large number of exhibits (handwritten letters and other devotional items) available from his possession, performed at the opening of this exhibition by a pop icon with a musical reading. The year 2009 was reserved exclusively for activities with the 17 hippies . The third studio album El Dorado , which was recorded in late 2008, was released. During the recordings, the band noticed that their playing together - after 14 years and over 1,500 concerts in 20 countries - had matured over the years. According to their own information, they had found their own style, which gave them a solid foundation. Influences of music from the Balkans, American rock, British pop and film music were still clearly visible in her compositions. El Dorado is her term for the perfect mixture of melancholy and “ultimately quite simply dance music!” “The Berlin ensemble blends musical styles from all over the world into a furious blend. The 13 musicians briskly break all stylistic conventions, combine unfamiliar things into new, unexpected alliances, as if they had always been one. Their ninth album (six of them live!) Is the primus inter pares: a real gold treasure from the El Dorado of folk and pop. ”(Kulturnews.de). In the course of this album extensive touring followed by the USA, Canada, Spain, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, England (incl. A concert at the "WOMAD Festival"), Ireland, Germany, China, Israel, Jordan and a final concert Paris Theater de la Ville . For Valentine's Day 2010, Graf-Ulbrich organized a live special from the BKA Theater in his irregular Rockradio.de show Lüüls Live Lounge under the title Solos for Love , in which a total of 23 artists took part - u. a. George Krantz without t, Danny Dziuk, Cora Frost, Astrid North (Ex- Cultured Pearls ), Katharina Franck ( Rainbirds ), Hans Werner Olm, Stefan Hiss, André Herzberg. Afterwards Lüül & Band, meanwhile bassist Klaus Janek had been replaced by Carsten Wegener, gave concerts in Germany and Switzerland. In addition, Graf-Ulbrich again went on extensive tours through Europe with the 17 hippies . This time Germany, France, England, Italy (including the WOMAD Festival in Palermo) and Austria were on the route. Lüül spent the rest of the year working on his new solo album and the joint production of the Agitation Free live album. The singer / songwriter Manfred Maurenbrecher released on his 2010 album Maurenbrecher for all Lüüls version of the Tom Waits song in the Neighborhood ( in the neighborhood ). In the spring of 2011 he went on a world tour with the 17 hippies again . This time they played in New Zealand and Australia - also as the first German band at the WOMAD Festival (Adelaide - New Plymouth). This was followed by the release of the 17 hippies album Phantom Songs, followed by a long tour of Germany. In the same year, the Agitation Free live album Shibuya Nights was released , which was recorded in Tokyo in 2007. The record was released by the English Cherry Red sub-label Esoteric . In addition to old songs from the 70s in a new arrangement, four new tracks were also included. The album received good to euphoric reviews, but was unfortunately difficult to obtain outside of England. In the meantime, Lüül released the album Tourkoller as a soloist and completed a Tourkoller tour through Germany. At the end of the year Graf-Ulbrich appeared on November 18 on the TV show Zibb at RBB.
In 2012 there was another line-up in the line-up of the band von Lüül. For Carsten Wegener, 17 hippies bassist Danda (Daniel Cordes) was added. With the new line-up, Lüül & Band went on the second part of the Tourkoller tour across Germany. Immediately afterwards Graf-Ulbrich performed successful comeback concerts with Agitation Free in Berlin, Paris, Manchester and London. Then he acted - again as a tourist guide / contemporary witness - with stories from Charlottenburg as a guest in the documentation from the RBB (Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg). After that, the 17 hippies spent two weeks in Mexico for six concerts for the first time. On his 60th birthday, Lüül organized a sold out "request concert" in the Berlin club Wabe - with 17 hippies , Axel Prahl, Andreas Dresen, Danny Dziuk, Dota Kehr, HPDaniels (Ex- Escalatorz ), Ludwig Kramer (Ex- Agitation Free ), Whipped String and The Bees .
In 2013, Agitation Free provided the film music for the documentation by Gerd Conradt Video-Vertov . At the premiere of the film, the band played at the Achtung Berlin Film Festival in the Kulturbrauerei and then at the legendary Burg-Herzberg-Festival near Fulda. In the meantime, Graf-Ulbrich performed - alongside James Young (without a band) - as a soloist with a concert reading at the Nico Tributo! on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Nico's death in Ibiza. After that, Lüül & Band went on Tourkoller tour in Germany again and the 17 Hippies released a long-planned project with the children's album Titus dreams .
In 2014 Graf-Ulbrich published a revised new edition of his - now out of print - autobiography - but now under the title … and I follow my lead with the self-publisher Wunderbar Media . After that, Lüül & Band was back in Germany for the fourth year as part of the Tourkoller Tour . Also in 2014 was the re-release of the agitation-free live album Shibuya Nights - which was only available in England until then - as a special edition including bonus DVD with concert excerpts from the band from 2013, recorded in Berlin ( Kesselhaus ) and at Burg Herzberg (open air -Festival). The DVD contains agitation-free classics like Laila and Rücksturz , newer songs like Nomads and the title track Shibuya Nights , as well as In da Jungl, a completely new and previously unreleased track. On the occasion of Record Store Day , Shibuya Nights was also launched as a limited vinyl edition on April 19.
Discography (solo and as Lüül & Band)
- Lüül - GeeBee Records, 1982, LP (re-released as CD on Spalax Records)
- Lüül and I - GeeBee Records, 1983, LP
- Mond von Moabit - Pool Musikproduktion, 1996, CD
- Ahoi - Hipster Records , 1997, CD (Re-release: 2006 on Grundsound / Indigo)
- Short music - Manikin Records, 2001, DoCD
- Ladies visit - Grundsound / Indigo, 2004, CD
- Zeitreise - Grundsound / Indigo, 2006, CD (sampler)
- Spielmann - Grundsound / Indigo, 2008
- Tourkoller - Mig (Indigo), 2011
- Wanderjahre - MadeInGermany, 2015
- Bed & Breakfast - Mig (Indigo), 2018
literature
- Lutz Ulbrich: Lüül. A musical life between Agitation Free, Ashra, Nico, the Neue Deutsche Welle and the 17 hippies . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-89602-696-8
- Christian Graf: The NDW Lexicon . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89602-529-5 (on the NDW phase)
- Lutz Graf-Ulbrich: Lüül: ... and I follow my trail . Updated and completely revised new edition of his out-of-print autobiography (Wunderbar Media Publishing) ISBN 978-3-00-045438-7
- Lutz Graf-Ulbrich: Nico - In the shadow of the moon goddess . CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016, ISBN 978-1523289981
Web links
- Official website
- Portrait at deutsche-mugge.de
- Lüül at myspace
- Lüül video clip of "And I" on youtube
- Fan website
- Lüül in theInternet Movie Database(English)
- Lüül video clip from "Tourkoller" on youtube
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lüül |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Ulbrich, Lutz (real name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German singer, guitarist, lyricist and composer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 30, 1952 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin-Charlottenburg |