FRANZ STAHL

Ain’t no two ways about it, Franz Stahl was born to play the baritone saxophone. He found his calling very early, when he was roaming the scrapyards of his youth to collect stray pieces of metal piping and craft unusual musical instruments out of them, inspiring his famous composition „Think I Found Something“, which he first recorded on the limited edition cassette „The Adventures of Grandmaster Franz on the Wheels of Stahl“. He then formed his first band, called My Name Is Franz And I Have No Shame, with bagpipe player Rick O’Suave, whose debut album, „It’s a Katja Riemann’s World“, got favourable reviews and was awarded five stars by „Amateur Gardening“ magazine.

Other outfits that have benefited from Franz’s inimitable playing style include The Flip-Flops, Les Petits Chanteurs à la Gueule de Bois (who scored a big indie hit in Belgium with „Heinz n’a plus sa machine“), Shut Your Gob And Dance, Du und Deine Plastiktüten, Vélo de Minus and I Spit On Your Gluten.

Some of the stars of stage and screen that have inspired him include Polish schlager singer Krzysztof Krawczyk, English comedian and „Carry On“ star Charles Hawtrey, Brazilian yodeller Bob Nelson, Turkish heartthrob Azer Bülbül and anyone vaguely connected to Frank Farian. Favourite pastimes include collecting snakeskin boots (some of them purloined from Imelda Marcos’s personal collection), throwing cupcakes at innocent passers-by in trendy Friedrichshain bars, and snoring loudly during Max Richter concerts.

Current projects in the pipeline include producing a reggae album for Moritz Bleibtreu with Sly & Robbie in the Bahamas and a Magma tribute record with Beyoncé (That’s Beyoncé Finkelstein, a young chiropodist from Wuppertal who likes nothing so much than to let her hair down on weekends)