LaFee

This article covers the singer who goes under the stage name LaFee . For information on her album of the same name, see LaFee (album) .

LaFee (2014)

LaFee (born Christina Klein * 9. December 1990 in Stolberg in the Rhineland ) is a German pop-rock - singer and actress .

Since 2006 LaFee has released four studio albums, three of them with her band. They all placed themselves in the German charts. Both the debut album and the follow-up album now especially (2007) reached the top of the album charts in Germany and Austria.

Career

Christina Klein's mother comes from Greece , her German father works as a driver. Klein grew up with her four years older brother in the Stolberg district of Büsbach . Her mother runs a snack bar in the Breinig district . Parallel to her work as a singer, she graduated from secondary school in 2007 .

Klein stood in front of the camera for the first time at the age of ten, encouraged by her mother. At this time she could also be seen and heard at Arabella Kiesbauer's . In a school band she mainly sang chart hits . In addition, she applied for the talent show Star Search , but forgot her text during her appearance and therefore did not get on television. In 2004 she performed at the Kiddy Contest , an Austrian singing competition for children, where she was discovered by the daughter of music producer Bob Arnz and signed by him.

LaFee at an autograph session in Essen (2006)

Her debut single Virus was released on March 10, 2006 under the name LaFee , which - massively supported by the youth magazine Bravo and the music channel VIVA - entered the German single charts. Songwriters Gerd Zimmermann and Bob Arnz are responsible for the musical implementation . LaFee made her acting debut in the mobile phone soap Ninas Welt , which was broadcast from November 2006 to spring 2007. On April 9th ​​and 10th, 2008 she was on the RTL series Gute Zeiten, haben Zeiten as Tina Gross , the ex-girlfriend of Dominik Gundlach ( Raúl Richter ), who was previously in the music videos of Heul but and Shut Up .

In 2007, LaFee's second album now even more so , which quickly achieved gold status in Germany and Austria. It had its biggest appearance on December 31, 2006 in front of the Brandenburg Gate with more than a million spectators. On June 27, 2008 she released a compilation album called Shut Up , in which the songs from the first two albums were combined as English-language versions. On August 25, 2007, LaFee had an appearance in front of 119,000 people as part of the “Don't look away” open air at the Brandenburg Gate.

On January 2, 2009, LaFee's third studio album, Ring frei, followed , from which the two singles Ring frei and Scheiß Liebe were extracted. At the end of the same year, the compilation album Best Of was released . Subsequently, LaFee took a professional break until April 2011. After the end of this break, her new single Ich bin rose to number 80 in the German charts. She also appeared on The Dome 58 with this song . I became the theme song of the RTL 2 program Family Stories . The studio album Frei reached number 14 on the Media Control Charts. On November 11th, 2011, a second single from Frei was released, Leben wir now . This rose to number 43 on the VIVA clipcharts. The song was the first from LaFee to fail to make it into the charts.

Until the end of March 2012, LaFee took part in the KiKa show Dein Song as a music godmother . She drove with Show yourself! the title song for the movie Hanni & Nanni 2 , which was released as a single on May 11, 2012.

In September 2012, nude photos by LaFee appeared in the German edition of the men's magazine Playboy . From the middle of November to the end of December 2012 LaFee played the role of Angel and Belle in the musical From the Spirit of Christmas in Essen.

From October 22, 2014 to October 23, 2017, she played the role of Iva Lukowski in the RTL soap Everything that counts .

Her biography Frei was published on November 14, 2014 , in which, in contrast to the biography LaFee: The first time , she was involved as an author.

Since 2015 a total of eight new songs have been released, which were presented in the series Everything was counts from her series role "Iva Lukowski". Among them was the song What remains , with which LaFee was able to place itself in the German single charts for the first time in four years in March 2015.

Her comeback single, Kartenhaus, including a music video , was released on November 16, 2018 .

On July 15, 2020 it was announced that LaFee is back in the recording studio. Your producer is Christian Geller.

The band

Part of the band behind LaFee were guitarist Ricky Garcia, drummer Tamon Nuessner, bassist Goran Vujic and keyboardist Klaus Hochhäuser. At the beginning, bassist Omar Ibrahim was a member of the band, but he quit at the end of 2006 due to a music degree. According to Klein, the original band with Ibrahim was a well-rehearsed band even before LaFee. In interviews, Klein reports that when looking for musicians, she consciously looked for more experienced people. At a concert in Aachen she is said to have finally found the musicians, whom she then approached with her manager. The band announced their exit on their website in December 2009 in order to continue making music with the singer Jana Wall as the new group "Tief" at the beginning of 2010. Musical differences were given as the reason.

Style and reception

Often LaFee wore an adhesive tattoo on her left temple and can be found on publications

From 2006, Klein appeared in public as LaFee, mostly dressed in dark clothes. In this regard, the Frankfurter Rundschau called it “a mixture of Shakira and Gothic mouse”. Her tattoo on her left temple with the abbreviation "LF" for "LaFee" was striking.

Musically, LaFee relied on "simple, hard guitar rock" according to a review from 2007. Live she was meanwhile accompanied by "broadly grinning rock musicians who hide their eyes behind dark sunglasses". In terms of content, LaFee addressed, among other things, sexual abuse , violence, bullying , young people's longing for death, mental illnesses such as bulimia or the effects of marital problems on the respective children. The texts that "took getting used to" were often hard, hearty, crude and "provocatively vulgar". Songs from LaFee were rarely heard on the radio, and sales successes were largely generated through their live performances and the constant support of youth media such as Bravo. "80 percent of their fans would like to have LaFee as their big sister," according to descriptions from 2007, these largely consisted of primary school children. The main audience at concerts was "six to fourteen years old"; partly accompanied by their parents. Studio albums LaFees tended to do better in the charts than the respective singles, which was interpreted as an indication that she “has many discerning and financially strong listeners and buyers”. In order to further develop this class of buyers for itself, the management also turned increasingly to "serious media such as Stern , Vanity Fair or the taz " from 2007 onwards .

Music critics often reported rather negatively about LaFee. David Kleinger described LaFee 2007 on Spiegel Online as "Rhineland rock Rumpelstiltskin [...] whose texts make every tutor blush", criticized the same as a "unfamiliar cliché of youth language" and the music as "tough gummy bear - Gothic , the no more frightened grandma ”,“ in the background the same guitar riffs rumble ”. In the record review for the third album Ring frei , which was released in early 2009, laut.de agreed with this assessment. So the singer started “again for a merciless dive into level nirvana”, the “LaFee worldview is a simple one” conveyed in the lyrics. In the Nürnberger Nachrichten , LaFee's “Kuschel-Gothic” with its “euphoric sing-along refrains” is also referred to as a kind of “ surprise egg version of Rammstein ”. LaFee belongs "to the new guard of teenage aggro rock", which is mainly about "expressing aggression and grief with distorted guitars and faces like that". Younger carefree, however, does not take place at LaFee.

Sometimes the judgments were less harsh. So although "meticulously planned, tinkered with and a coherent marketing concept developed in advance" in order to sell the "product" LaFee in the best possible way and the specially composed LaFee band "apparently didn't play a single note on the album", LaFee delivers " authentic teen pop [...] with some amazingly hard rocking guitars [...] and fluffy synth and keyboard carpets ”. You have to congratulate the makers on a "perfectly styled art product". During the live performances, "the singing and music [...] are convincingly good," LaFees said, "Poses sit and on stage she always has control over the show and the audience."

Discography

Logo used until 2010

→ Main article : LaFee / discography  and list of songs by LaFee

Studio albums

year	Title music label	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements (Year, title, music label , placements, weeks, awards, notes)			Remarks
		DE	AT	CH
2006	LaFee EMI / Capitol Records	DE1 × 3 Triple gold (64 weeks)DE	AT1 platinum (43 weeks)AT	CH19 (29 weeks) CH	First published: June 22nd, 2006 Sales: +320,000
2007	Now especially EMI / Capitol Records	DE1 platinum (36 weeks)DE	AT1 gold (24 weeks)AT	CH14 (13 weeks) CH	First published: July 6, 2007 Sales: + 210,000
2009	Ring free EMI / Capitol Records	DE6 (15 weeks) DE	AT5 gold (13 weeks)AT	CH21 (7 weeks) CH	First published: Jan 2nd, 2009 Sales: + 10,000
2011	Free EMI / Capitol Records	DE14 (2 weeks) DE	AT21 (1 week) AT	CH34 (2 weeks) CH	First published: August 19, 2011

Awards

LaFee at the Jetix Award ceremony as part of the YOU youth fair in Berlin, 2008

Bravo Otto

• 2006: "Silver" in the "Super Singer" category
• 2007: "Gold" in the "Best Female Singer" category

ECHO Pop

• 2007: in the category "Artist National Pop"
• 2007: in the category "Best Newcomer National"
• 2008: in the category "Artist National Pop"

Golden tuning fork

• 2007: in the "Shooting Star" category

Jetix Award

• 2007: in the category "hottest singer"
• 2008: in the category "Best Solo Act"

Nick Kids' Choice Awards (Germany)

• 2007: in the "Favorite Singers" category

literature

• Michael Fuchs-Gamböck , Thorsten Schatz : LaFee. The first time . Droemer / Knaur, 2007, ISBN 978-3-426-78047-3 .
• Christina Klein, Anne van Straelen , Roxy Jenkins : FREE: Millions of teenagers would have liked to swap with LaFee. But life is not a pony farm, especially not if you were the most successful German teen star .. Becker Joest Volk Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-95453-066-3 .

Web links

Commons : LaFee  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• LaFee on MusicBrainz (English)
• LaFee in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Literature by and about LaFee in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ LaFee - The Comeback of the Year new album Frei. BASS-MUSIC, May 31, 2011, archived from the original on September 3, 2011 ; Retrieved September 3, 2011 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c} LaFee: How a Star is Made Stern, December 17, 2006.
3. ↑ Guest stars at GZSZ , accessed on November 19, 2018.
4. ↑ memo-media.de: "New Year's Eve in Berlin - Europe's largest New Year's Eve party impresses with high sound quality", December 14, 2007 ( Memento from February 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
5. ↑ LaFee at the "Don't look away" Open Air on viva.tv ( Memento from June 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
6. ↑ https://www.vip.de/vips/lafee-t2703.html found at vip.de, accessed on September 4, 2019
7. ↑ We now live at number 43
8. ↑ Chart placements
9. ↑ https://www.musixmatch.com/de/songtext/LaFee/Zeig-Dich-Kinoversion-feat-Lilly
10. ↑ Singer undresses for "Playboy": LaFee has grown up. In: rp-online.de , August 16, 2012.
11. ↑ rtl.de Everything that counts , accessed on November 15, 2014.
12. ↑ Comeback: LaFee is back and it sounds very different , accessed on November 16, 2018.
13. ↑ Joscha Hansen and Ina Keller: You can communicate without talking. General Anzeiger Bonn, June 20, 2009, accessed on October 2, 2019 . 
14. ↑ Maarya: about TieF. Tief-band.jimdo.com, accessed October 2, 2019 . 
15. ↑ ^{a b c} Frankfurter Rundschau: "The princess from the snack bar", April 17, 2009
16. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Lutz Debus: "Alles muss raus", in: taz of August 7, 2007 ( Memento of April 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
17. ↑ ^{a b} Lutz Debus: "Teenagers love LaFee fairy tales", January 3, 2009
18. ↑ David Kleingers: German Girl Pop - Dance the Rumpelstilz! , in: SPIEGEL-Online, August 16, 2007, accessed on August 16, 2007.
19. ↑ laut.de: Record review for "Ring frei", January 2009
20. ↑ quoted from: taz: "Schmähkritik (52): Lafee", December 2007
21. ↑ Julia Bähr: "Singer LaFee - Between peel-off tattoos and cellulite viruses" . In: FAZ , December 11, 2006.
22. ↑ cdstarts.de: album review for “LaFee - LaFee”, 2006; Retrieved online January 9, 2009
23. ↑ Aachener Zeitung: “LaFee in the Eurogress: The teenagers scream with every movement”, December 4th 2007