Alexander Klaws claimed victory in the inaugural season of Deutschland Sucht den Superstar, the German edition of the Pop Idol franchise. Born in 1983 in Ahlen, North Rhine-Westphalia, he spent his childhood in Sendenhorst. Demonstrating precocious talent, Klaws performed Haddaway’s “What Is Love?” on national television at the age of ten and began working with a vocal coach three years later. During the 2002 edition of Deutschland Sucht den Superstar, he advanced through every elimination round before defeating Juliette Schoppmann by a twenty-percent margin in the finale. Immediately after the broadcast concluded, Sony BMG offered him a recording contract. His first single, “Take Me Tonight,” released in 2003, debuted at number one on both the German and Swiss singles charts; within Germany it surpassed one million copies sold and ranked as the year’s second-highest-selling single, trailing only the DSDS anthem “We Have a Dream.”
A few months afterward, Klaws issued his debut album Take Your Chance, which reached the summit of the German album chart and produced three additional Top Ten singles: “Stay with Me,” “Behind the Sun,” and the chart-topping “Free Like the Wind.” The following year brought his sophomore effort Here I Am, another number-one album in Germany that yielded two further Top Ten hits, “Behind the Sun” and “Sunshine After the Rain.” His third studio album, Attention!, appeared in 2005 and barely entered the German Top 20; consequently Sony BMG extracted only a single track from the project. Following a two-year period of relative inactivity, Klaws returned to the spotlight in the role of Alfred for a German theatrical production of Tanz der Vampire, the stage adaptation of Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers.
