Born in 1940, HANS BLUES & BOOGIE performs on his first live gig with his own
skiffle-Group during 1958 in his hometown HAMBURG, later developing into Dixie-style. Soon he is busy performing his unique brand of skiffle and Dixie in the cities thriving club scene. During this period he also develops solo skills, accompanying himself on a custom-built 4-string guitar while singing blues- and folksongs in and around Hamburg’s infamous Reeperbahn area. By 1959 he travels abroad, busking (something which was strictly prohibited at that time) in Amsterdam, Liége and Paris. Back in town he continues to perform both with his band and solo in the Hamburg area until the summer of 1960. When his engagement ends, he leaves Hamburg to try his luck in Scandinavia as entertainer, at talent competitions and, of course, with street music, which was also frowned upon in the Nordic countries. Abandoning his (by now) deep-frozen Vespa scooter in Stockholm, he returns to Hamburg at the end of 1960. Without a complete vocational training and wearing a beard (highly suspect at the time), the employment office offers him only one job, at a


... FISH FACTORY !

There he soon works his way up from scaling fish to driving the boss around in a black Mercedes-Benz 170 D to fish-auctions (once he buys – inadvertently – the whole catch) and mainly, at night, to various pubs in the harbour area, where the boss and his mistress have their drinking-bouts. At weekends he is making music, not only with his revived band, “les enfants du jazz ”, but also solo, performing his first own blues songs. Success at a festival at the “Stadtpark” in summer 1961 with a raving audience of more than 5.000 people brings him a great number of gigs in the area, but when the fish factory becomes bankrupt in late 1961, he decides to emigrate to Australia (where unqualified people were still welcome) in order to escape the narrow-minded inhabitants of post-war Germany. With his ticket in the pocket, he is waiting in a hotel-room above the jazz club “Pigalle” for his ship to leave town. When he meets there the Danish “Jazz Cardinals”, he sits in and gets a job offered with the band, so his ship sails without him.

By early 1962 he is fronting the band on vocal, banjo and 4-string guitar gaining a great deal of experience touring throughout Europe. Out of work again, due mainly to “TWIST”, he becomes an undesirable alien and gets kicked out of Denmark in August 1963. He than settles in WEST-BERLIN, converts the former band van into a one-man-transporter-business, and banjo and guitars are stashed away in the basement. His second romantic engagement develops to a marriage, which lasts until 1972. He retrieves (his unused) 1963 6-string BARSLEV guitar, very quickly learns how to handle it, and begins to perform his own blues material in and around the Berlin pub scene. During this period he discovers, that he is able to relate many of his own experiences to appreciated audiences, and as consequence performs “covers” very rarely. He also now begins to write songs with German lyrics, which receive a mixed, but encouraging response.

The fateful finding of a neck of a whiskey bottle on a beach, while vacationing on Sardinia, prompts him to teach himself slide-guitar, developing his own unique

“HANS BLUES & BOOGIE SLIDE- TUNING”.

as a consequence of a lack of spare strings.
When his transporting forwarding agency goes bankrupt at the end of 1979, he has already a solid reputation as bluesman, both solo and with his band “HANS & CO” in West-Berlin, West Germany and Denmark. Freed from the concerns of business, he embarks on his second musical career, which lasts up until the present day. He does his own booking, and is soon working all over EUROPE (25 countries since 1980). He covers the south as far as Sicily, Rhodes and Gibraltar and travels as far north as Spitsbergen, Iceland and Faeroer. For all of these gigs (except Spitsbergen and Rhodes) he uses his, by now, famous BLUESMOBIL, which has become a common sight on the motorways of Europe, covering some 80.000 kilometres every year. He still, however, finds time to write new songs. HANS BLUES & BOOGIE’s performing experience is considerable, playing in front of as few as 10 people in tiny pubs, and up to many thousand at some of Europe’s major festivals, where he meets many fellow-musicians, including Stevie Ray Vaughan (Stockholm), Luther Allison (duo-concerts in Berlin and Copenhagen, Johnny Winter and Otis Rush (Salerno), The Blues Band (Aarhus), Canned Heat (Aamaal), Screaming Jay Hawkins (Düsseldorf) and Louisiana Red (Zürich).
His first solo-LP is released in 1984, to be followed by many other recordings up until the present time. His third wife, whom he has lived with since 1986, helps him to gain control of his alcoholism, accompanies him on several rigorous tours (including the survival of two serious car-crashes) and inspires him to many songs, some of which can be heard on his LPs and CDs. His songs demonstrate the range of his considerable creative power and convey his self-ironic view of life and showing him to be an uncompromising artist.