You have to be careful about mocking Scooter. It sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. I mean that almost religiously. Because there you stand, grown-up, tired and more or less civilized, thinking you’ve developed into someone. And then H.P. Baxxter walks onstage, and your entire personality is reset by fire, hardstyle and German rave command.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
I hadn’t actually planned on standing at the front for Scooter.
That’s what you tell yourself when you’re still trying to come across as a person with some kind of inner structure. You stand with your friends, have a beer, nod along in a controlled way, maybe talk about logistics or the next bar. You still have a face on.
But then it started pulling at me.
Not like ordinary concert excitement. More like an old childhood illness suddenly flaring up again in the middle of adult life. I could feel something from down in childhood. My brother’s Scooter single. That feeling that music could be so stupid, fast and aggressive that it almost became sacred. A sound that didn’t ask to be understood, only kicked the door in and shouted something in German.
So I left my friends.
Not dramatically. Not with a speech. Just a little shamefaced and determined, like a man heading toward a mistake he has already forgiven himself for. I pushed forward through the crowd, closer and closer to the stage, while my adult self was slowly dismantled like a bad Ikea piece of furniture.
And then there was H.P. Baxxter.
Platinum-blond. Upright. Impossible. Eternal.
I know how that sounds. I can almost hear myself from the outside. A grown man standing in Vestegnen getting misty-eyed over Scooter. But there was a moment during the concert when I was, quite sincerely, crying. Not from sadness. Not only from nostalgia. But from that rare, stupid happiness where the body is faster than self-respect.
Scooter was not a joke that night. It was a revelation with pyrotechnics.
Of course, it started long before Festegnen. Back in childhood, when my brother bought a Scooter single and I first understood that music didn’t always have to be beautiful to be true. Sometimes it just had to be fast. Dumb. Overcaffeinated. Hard enough to feel illegal. There was something about Scooter that felt like getting access to a room you weren’t old enough to be in yet.
Back then it was silly. Of course it was silly. “How Much Is the Fish?” is still a title that sounds like a German tourist panicking in a harbour restaurant. But it was also brilliant. Not in the way music magazines usually use the word brilliant, while holding a cup of black coffee with both hands. More in the sense that something is so uncompromisingly itself that it forces you to surrender.
And that’s where Scooter won.
For many artists, time makes them smaller. They start explaining themselves. They turn the volume down. They put on black clothes and make “mature” versions of their old hits. Scooter did the opposite. They got harder. Tighter. More precise. It’s as if the concept has been boiled down over three decades until only the essence remains: bass, shouting, light, fire, drop, more fire, more shouting. No psychologizing. No tasteful detour. Just full-frontal rave church.
H.P. Baxxter is the centre of it all. He’s not just a frontman. He’s a principle. A man who has somehow managed to look as if time hasn’t bitten him, only stood outside in line and waited in vain. He moves with that special energy found only in fitness instructors, cult leaders and German rave men with complete control over their own madness.
And the dancers.
They didn’t look like people hired to fill out the stage. They looked like a paramilitary rave unit from a future where everyone has abs, sunglasses and very little interest in daylight. The costumes were wild in the right way. Not elegant. Not pretty. Wild. They were part of the machine. Human strobe lights. A corps of sweat, leather, reflections and total lack of self-preservation.
Everything was extreme. Fire. Fireworks. Hardstyle bangers. Love. A stage production so shameless it ended up becoming pure. There is something liberating about a concert that doesn’t try to be “tasteful.” Scooter doesn’t want to charm you with hints. Scooter doesn’t enter through the front door. Scooter drives a forklift through the wall and asks if you’re ready.
And we were.
Festegnen was ready. The audience was ready. Apparently I was more ready than I knew. Because this wasn’t ironic nostalgia. Not the kind of concert where you stand there laughing a little at the past while secretly enjoying every second. It was sincere. A collective capitulation. The big hooks arrived like old commands from the body. You didn’t have to remember them. You obeyed them.
“God Save the Rave” didn’t land like a punchline. It landed like a creed.
And yes, that’s a ridiculous sentence. I know that. But that’s how it felt. As if the whole square was lifted out of itself for a moment. Out of everyday life, the bills, the responsibility, the bad knees, the small worries, the big worries, all the things we normally call life. There was just bass in the chest and fire in the field of vision. And a platinum-blond German standing there shouting us free.
Scooter didn’t ask for my analysis. They asked for my pulse.
And they got it.
Reflection
I came to Scooter as a man with irony in my back pocket and left as a newly converted rave disciple with slightly damp eyes. H.P. Baxxter stood onstage as proof that some things don’t get smaller with time, but bigger, harder and more necessary. It was fire, bass, dancers, community and total surrender. I cried. God save the rave.
