“Uschi, don’t be silly”: singer Stephan Sulke turns 80
Published: Tuesday, Dec 26th 2023, 11:00
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Stephan Sulke shows himself without make-up on Facebook. In December, for example, in a bathrobe and with a cigar in his mouth. "I think I'm crazy, I'm normal," he jokes to the camera.
That would be a line for the next Sulke song. For more than 50 years, he has been singing about ordinary life, cynical, biting, funny, sad. At the beginning of the 80s, he landed his biggest hit with "Uschi, mach kein Quatsch". The Swiss singer turns 80 on Wednesday (December 27).
"I don't think you get any older mentally. I'm the same childish person I've always been," says Sulke in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur. However, he sounds quite melancholy on the new album, which is due to be released in spring 2024. One of the as yet unreleased songs reads: "The most beautiful pictures fade with time/in the photo album of the past/until at some point the past too/disappears in the haze of never-being." "The phenomenon of transience has always fascinated me," says Sulke. "Things are incredibly important and at some point they simply disappear."
Sulke goes on tour next year
"Niedagewesenheit": such lyrical word creations are pure Sulke. When others can't pull themselves together to get something done, they talk about fighting their inner bastard. Sulke, on the other hand, poetically calls this phenomenon, which he knows well, "a strange curve of the soul". But he is coming out of this curve for his 80th birthday: Not only the album, but also a tour he has planned for 2024.
In his celebrity days in the 80s, Sulke filled large arenas, today he plays on smaller stages, and enjoys doing so, he says. He likes to be able to smell the audience. Back then, it was the time of the Uschi earworm: "I'll never kiss you again without asking/never again dare to touch your bosom". He was cynically taking aim at the emancipation movement. "I've become even more biting and impatient," says Sulke. "Impatient with stupidity, sheer malice and absurdity." But he is also more relaxed. "In view of the insults that nature inflicts on you by making you grow older, in view of this slow decay while you're still alive, I've become more modest. I consider myself less important every day."
Sulke is an early citizen of the world with roots in several continents: He was born during the Second World War in Shanghai, where his parents had fled from Berlin. He grew up in Switzerland, with detours to visit his aunt in the USA. Today, the Sulkes live in France, without children.
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