Review by Paul Monkhouse for MPM
One of the best and biggest hard rock bands of all time, Scorpions have been an unrelenting force and ‘From The First Sting’ is a suitably career spanning tribute to their sixty year reign.
Since forming in Hanover in 1965, the band have gone through a few line-up changes and developed from their earlier, slightly psychedelic, material into the stadium-filling global-straddling behemoths we know and love today. From 1972 debut album ‘Lonesome Crow’ through to 2022’s ‘Rock Believer’, few bands have come anywhere close to the consistency of the quintet, their nineteen studio albums full of gems barring the arguable misstep of 1999’2 head-scratching ‘Eye II Eye’.
Given their titanic output, the selection of tracks to cherry pick for this celebration was a huge task and whilst obvious fan favourites and big hits were grabbed, there’s a nice range of deeper cuts and the addition of two new tracks for the completists or just someone new to the band who want a scintillating overview.
Whilst guitarist Rudy Schenker has been at the core of the band since its inception, singer Klaus Meine having joined in 1969 as its second longest serving member, other guitarists have come and gone over the years, each stamping their sound on the material. In his first stint with the band, Schenker’s younger brother Michael brought his own flash but when UFO poached him, turning them into the phenomenon they rapidly became, Uli Jon Roth joined, bringing his Hendrix-influenced style with him. With Matthias Jabs replacing Roth in 1978 another subtle twist in their sound developed, catching the zeitgeist and turning them into the metal monsters they became as the guitarist brought his own wild fire.
It’s a real pleasure to stroll down these various paths, following the journey that the Scorps have taken over the years, each track revealing its own delights. Early gems like elegant opener ‘In Search of the Peace of Mind’ and the rambunctious ‘Speedy’s Coming’ have a raw authenticity that shows how much the band were ready to take on the world, having both the talent and drive to do so. No retrospective of the outfit would be complete without numbers like ‘Holiday’, ‘The Zoo’ and ‘Big City Nights’ but the curious omission of the stellar ‘Blackout’ is tempered by the self-same albums brilliant ‘When the Smoke is Going Down’. Riotous anthem ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane’ appears twice, both in its studio and live format and heavy hitting tracks like ‘Mind Like A Tree’ and ‘Humanity’ sit well next to ballad-like material in the form of ‘Maybe I Maybe You’ and ‘House of Cards’.
Bringing things up to date, the title track of ‘Rock Believer’ shows there’s still plenty of gas left in the tank and ‘The Best Is Yet To Come’ sounds more like a promise, given their original intent to say farewell until the irresistible thrill of thousands of fans continuing to line up to see them became too strong to deny. Adding the sweeping orchestral version of ‘Wind of Change’ where the band are joined by the Berliner Philharmoniker and a live take on ‘Still Loving You’ featuring violinist Vanessa Mae sweetens the pot, the previously unreleased ‘This is My Song’ another compelling reason to grab the set. Still one of the greatest live bands in the world, Scorpions have the catalogue of songs that propel them into legendary status and ‘From the First Sting’ captures them at their peak. Nobody does it better.
