Germany equals soccer, metal and beer. What better combination could a human ask for?
The best soccer (ok, ok... football) team in the world, very fast and loud heavy metal and nice cold beer.
German thrash metallers Tankard completely destroyed The Hi-Fi in Melbourne on Saturday (July 12). Tankard have been playing the world over since 1982 and have 16 albums that lead singer Andreas Fritz John Geremia (aka Gerre) satirically admits: “are all the same albums, just the cover artwork is different”.
I had the opportunity to ask Gerre a few questions about this not so well-known band here in Australia and asked him to shed some light on the band's history. "We started as 14 year old kids who had the same tastes such as AC/DC and the new wave of British heavy metal [Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Sazon, Def Leppard, Judas Priest] and the thrash movement [Metallica, Slayer] and we started to play in a little room and we got a record contract in ’86 — and we are still here even though in the ‘90s thrash was not very popular."
Tankard at The Hi-Fi 12.07.2014 © Carl NeumannAlthough they’ve sold hundreds of thousands of albums during their career, for 32 years each of the band members have had regular jobs. “We are totally independent. We can do what we want. We don’t have to sell a lot of CDs, although we do, or play a lot of shows. We can do what we want, when we want. We have so many offers to play all over the world, so we get to choose a little bit. We are very proud to be still here and very proud to visit Australia for the very first time. We are going to drink a lot of beer together.”
Tankard are not a serious band at all. That’s what makes them so appealing to many. They just don’t give a flying fuck about fashion or about the mainstream - they do what they love and that’s all they do. It’s just metal, soccer, family and beer.
