Michael Cretu

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Michael Cretu (birth name: Mihai Crețu, pronounced "Kretzu") (born May 18, 1957 in Bucharest ) is a German - Romanian musician who is one of the most successful music producers today. He was an artist himself on stage, but mostly works as a composer and producer in the background, for Sandra , Peter Cornelius and Enigma , among others .

biography

Childhood and youth

Michael Cretu's extraordinary musical talent was discovered and promoted early on. In Bucharest he was trained as a concert pianist. Cretu's father is Romanian, while his mother had an Austrian passport. At the age of 16 he was allowed to visit his grandfather in Austria and took the opportunity to take the entrance examination at the Munich Music Academy , which he passed as the youngest applicant. Shortly afterwards, his parents moved to Germany. He then lived in Bucharest with his grandmother until he was also allowed to leave for Frankfurt as a stateless person. In 1975 Cretu received German citizenship. Immediately after leaving the country, he completed a degree at the Frankfurt University of Music .

While still a student, Cretu turned away from classical music, discovered his passion for electronically produced pop music and swapped his piano for synthesizers . Already in his early 20s he was successful as a studio musician and producer. He worked in Offenbach with Frank Farian ( Boney M , Eruption ) and Peter Cornelius .

First successes

In 1978 Michael Cretu released the first album under his own name: Moon, Light & Flowers . The single "Wild River" was used in the early 1980s as an advertising melody for the deodorant "My Melody". In 1980 Michael Cretu received his first gold record. At that time he was also producing other artists and also working as an author for them. In addition to Peter Cornelius (whose 1980 album Zwei was recorded with the members of Cretus' later band, Moti Special ), this includes: a. Hubert Kah , Nicki , Peter Schilling , Inker & Hamilton , and later Andru Donalds and last but not least Moti Special.

His first successful album was released in 1983 under the title Legionaries . The last album under his own name was released in 1985 in German ( The Chinese Wall ) and English ( The Invisible Man ) version and contained the song Samurai , with which he had great success in Europe . However, the last solo single Gambit could not build on these successes. In the following years he concentrated on v. a. on the musical career of his girlfriend and later wife Sandra. In 1988 the album Belle Epoque followed under the name Cretu & Thiers with his ex-Moti-Special partner Manfred "Tissy" Thiers and in 1992 with Peter Cornelius the album Cornelius & Cretu . In 1999 he began working with Andru Donalds and produced two albums with him, the hit All out of Love , a cover version of the Air Supply track of the same name from the 1980s.

Moti Special

After contributing to the success of various bands and solo artists such as Boney M (since Rivers of Babylon ) or Juliane Werding (album Ohne Angst ), Cretu released the album Motivation in 1985 with the group Moti Special , on which he worked as a keyboardist and Producer was involved. The singles Cold Days, Hot Nights , Don't Be So Shy and Stop! Girls Go Crazy were well-known hits. The band's singer was Manfred "Tissy" Thiers, with whom Cretu founded the project "Cretu & Thiers" in 1987.

Sandra

As early as 1982 Cretu met his future wife Sandra Lauer as a member of the teen-girl trio Arabesque . The two fell in love and became a couple. In 1984 Sandra tried her hand at a German version of Alphavilles Big in Japan (for the second time after a single in 1976) as a solo artist. Despite the lack of success, Cretu took over the command and produced the song Maria Magdalena and the accompanying album The Long Play with Sandra and the singer and songwriter Hubert Kemmler known as Hubert Kah . The song became number one in 21 countries and sold over five million copies worldwide. Many more hits followed, always with Cretu as producer, mostly in collaboration with the composer Kemmler.

From 1988 to 2008 Sandra and Michael Cretu were married. They lived with their two children on an estate near Santa Agnès de Corona in Ibiza .

To date, Michael Cretu and Sandra have sold 32 million records worldwide.

Cretu & Thiers

Under the name Cretu & Thiers , Cretu had a duo project with Manfred “Tissy” Thiers, who also belonged to the synth-pop band Moti Special , in the late 1980s . After a cover version of the original Alice Cooper title School's Out , Cretu and Thiers recorded the album Belle Epoque in 1987 , from which the singles When love is the missing word and Don´t say you love me were released. The piece Mona Lisa was musically identical to the piece Silver Water from the album The Invisible Man , but sung with new lyrics by Thiers. The remake of the song Snowin' under my skin was the theme song of the same name album later Andru Donalds , the Michael Cretu for that 1999 produced .

producer

In addition to Sandra, Michael Cretu has worked as a producer for various other pop artists, including a. for Hubert Kah , Peter Schilling , Peter Cornelius and Inker & Hamilton . In 1993 he and Jens Gad produced the album Welcome To The Soul Asylum by the Munich musician Angel X (real: Andreas Harde). In 1999 and 2001 he recorded two albums with the Jamaican Andru Donalds . With the cover hit All Out of Love they reached number three in the German charts. In 2007 he produced the album by the former singer of the British group Olive, Ruth-Ann (one of the female lead voices in various Enigma songs), which is available exclusively on the online platform iTunes and no longer as a CD .

New musical territory / Enigma

Towards the end of the 1980s Cretu ran out of ideas and he felt increasingly uncomfortable in his musical realm. After separating from his longtime musical companion Hubert Kemmler, he was looking for something completely new and finally found it in the Enigma project in the early 1990s . The first album MCMXC aD (read as a Roman number: "1990 anno Domini") was released in Europe in 1990 and in the USA in 1991 and quickly became a huge global success. MCMXC aD became number 1 in 24 different countries, went platinum 17 times and gold 25 times. Enigma served as a pioneer for many other performers who followed Cretu on the path of meditative, religiously influenced ambient music.

The single Sadeness (a play on words from the English sadness and the name Marquis de Sade ) was released from the album and became a big hit. The borrowings from Gregorian chant used in it were then widely imitated. The original, the monk chant in the tradition of Gregorian chant, also became very popular as a result of the Enigma hit, while this type of music had previously been almost unsaleable. The piece caused a sensation because of a short, "admittedly very striking" (Cretu in a talk show) passage in which a woman's violent breathing can be heard, which could be interpreted as moans of pleasure.

The success of MCMXC aD came about without the originator being known. It was only later that it became known that Cretu was the creative mind behind the project. According to Cretus (in an ARD television interview in 1994), he would have preferred it if it hadn't been known that Enigma was his project. People who were involved in the production of the first album alongside him would eventually have passed this information on, Cretu said. On the first album he used the pseudonym "Curly MC". Curly means "curly" in English (behind this is a play on words with a Romanian background: "creț" means curly / curly in Romanian). MC are his initials and also the abbreviation for " Master of Ceremonies ", a term used by many rappers at the time (MC Hammer, Ice MC, MC Miker G). His full name appeared on later albums as a producer. According to Universal Musics , Cretu and Enigma had sold over 70 million records worldwide by 2016.

He also broke new ground in 2010 when he made it possible for Enigma fans to contribute to the creation of a new song. For the song, which was released on the occasion of Enigma's 20th anniversary, fans could send in passages they had sung themselves, decide on the musical style of the song and make suggestions for a cover. Michael Cretu mixed and produced the song MMX (The Social Song) from it .

Michael Cretu lives in Munich .

Discography

Chart positions
Explanation of the data
Albums
The Great Wall of China / The Invisible Man
  DE 62 04/01/1985 (1 week)
  CH 24 October 27, 1985 (3 weeks)
Singles
samurai
  DE 12 October 28, 1985 (14 weeks)
  AT 3 10/01/1985 (12 weeks)
  CH 2 09/08/1985 (12 weeks)

Studio albums

  • 1979: Moon, light & flowers (Michael Cretu)
  • 1983: Legionnaires / Legionnaires (Michael Cretu)
  • 1985: The Invisible Man / The Chinese Wall (Michael Cretu) (published in 1986 as a second edition with the title Gambit )
  • 1985: Motivation (Moti Special)
  • 1988: Belle epoque (Cretu & Thiers)
  • 1990: MCMXC aD (Enigma) (published in 1991 as "Limited Edition")
  • 1992: Cornelius + Cretu (Cornelius + Cretu)
  • 1993: The CROSS of Changes (Enigma) (released in 1994 as "Limited Edition")
  • 1996: Le roi est mort, vive le roi (Enigma)
  • 1998: The Energy of Sound (Trance Atlantic Air Waves) (with Jens Gad)
  • 2000: The Screen Behind the Mirror (Enigma)
  • 2003: Voyageur (Enigma)
  • 2006: A posteriori (Enigma) (also released as DVD edition)
  • 2008: Seven Lives, Many Faces (Enigma) (also published as "Special Edition")
  • 2016: The Fall of a Rebel Angel (Enigma)

Compilations

  • 2001: Love, Sensuality, Devotion (Enigma) (released as "Greatest Hits" and as "The Remix Collection")
  • 2001: Remember the Future (Enigma) (released as "DVD" and as "DVD Re-Release")
  • 2005: 15 years after (Enigma) ( Box-Set )

Awards

RSH gold

  • 1992: in the "Producer of the Year" category

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Focus of March 14, 1994
  2. ↑ Please do not disturb , Süddeutsche Zeitung May 17, 2017
  3. ↑ Michael Cretu presents new album , MDR November 11, 2016
  4. ↑ Markus Lanz ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Markus Lanz May 16, 2017 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.zdf.de
  5. ↑ Enigma, “The Fall Of A Rebel Angel”, 2016. universal-music.de, accessed on February 22, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Please do not disturb , Süddeutsche Zeitung May 17, 2017
  7. ↑ a b Chart sources: DE AT CH
personal data
SURNAME Cretu, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Romanian music producer
DATE OF BIRTH May 18, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Bucharest , Romania