Scooter

German rave machine Scooter rank among the most commercially dominant dance outfits ever, with millions of records sold, numerous chart-topping singles and albums, and repeated worldwide tours launched after their launch in the early nineties. The trio personifies dance music in its brashest, most extravagant form by pushing the KLF’s stadium-house idea to its absolute limit. Fronted by the stern H.P. Baxxter, their tracks typically deliver enormous singalong choruses that nod to everything from mainstream pop to underground anthems, overlaid with audience roars and the heaviest, most thunderous rhythms possible. Beginning with happy hardcore and hard trance, the relentlessly active group quickly absorbed newer styles such as jumpstyle, dubstep and electro-house. Their flamboyant stage spectacles feature lasers, pyrotechnics, dancers and nonstop crowd involvement. Scooter sustained enormous popularity while staying independent, issuing material through Edel’s Club Tools imprint in the nineties and launching their own Sheffield Tunes in 2000.

The band came together in late 1993 when H.P. Baxxter, Rick J. Jordan and Ferris Bueller, already working with producer Jens Thele as the remix collective the Loop, decided to record original material. During the eighties Baxxter and Jordan had already notched club successes as the new wave and synth-pop outfit Celebrate the Nun. After debuting with “Valleé de Larmes,” Scooter broke through with the follow-up “Hyper Hyper,” which moved more than 700,000 copies inside Germany. Further Top Five singles arrived in quick succession—“Move Your Ass!,” “Friends” and “Endless Summer”—all gathered on the 1995 debut album …And the Beat Goes On!. Their 1996 release Our Happy Hardcore delivered the first British Top 20 entry, “Back in the U.K.” Wicked!, also released that year, introduced noticeably slower tempos, highlighted by the techno ballad “Break It Up.” Following 1997’s Age of Love, Bueller departed and Axel Coon joined in time for 1998’s No Time to Chill, which included the massive “How Much Is the Fish?” plus covers of Kiss and Billy Idol. The same year brought the first singles anthology, Rough & Tough & Dangerous. Back to the Heavyweight Jam arrived in 1999, its title another overt nod to the KLF.

Sheffield appeared in 2000, marking the debut of the Sheffield Tunes label, and featured the club tracks “She’s the Sun” and “I’m Your Pusher” alongside a cover of Soft Cell’s “Sex Dwarf.” We Bring the Noise followed in 2001. The year 2002 yielded the live set Encore and the compilation Push the Beat for This Jam, whose standout track “Ramp! (The Logical Song),” a dance reworking of the Supertramp original, became their highest-charting British single at number two. Another collection, 24 Carat Gold, closed out 2002 and introduced “Nessaja,” the first single to showcase Jay Frog after he replaced Coon; the song topped the German chart and reached the British Top Five. Three further singles—“Weekend!,” “Maria” and “Jigga! Jigga!”—dominated European clubs in 2003, while the album Stadium Techno Experience paid additional homage to the KLF through its title and artwork. Mind the Gap, issued in 2004, first appeared in a basic edition, then a regular version with extra multimedia content, and finally a 2005 deluxe edition containing a bonus live disc.

After 2005’s Who’s Got the Last Laugh Now? and the 2006 live album Excess All Areas, Frog exited and Michael Simon, already known for remixing several Scooter tracks, took his place. The group’s extraordinary output never slowed, with nearly one album per year (including two in 2007), regular world tours and a run of hits that established them as Germany’s biggest-selling singles act ever; among them was 2007’s “The Question Is What Is the Question?,” which lingered on the chart for an extraordinary 26 weeks. Its parent album, Jumping All Over the World, proved one of their strongest releases, reaching number one and earning platinum status in the United Kingdom. Such prominence led to Baxxter’s appointment as a judge on the 2012 season of Germany’s X Factor.

Late 2013 brought the celebratory 20 Years of Hardcore collection. Jordan subsequently revealed he would leave after the 2014 tour; his successor Phil Speiser debuted on the seventeenth studio album, The Fifth Chapter. Ace followed in 2016 and Scooter Forever in 2017.