NOTE: THIS IS CONTINUATION OF THE ARTICLE – “Thomas Anders – The Real Creator of Modern Talking Songs”
In the previous article, we wrote that the real creator of Modern Talking songs was and is not Dieter Bohlen, but Thomas Anders, his band partner.
Naturally, such a theory does sound very exaggerated, and considering the fact that it’s been more than 40 years, is quite impossible to prove who did what, and it is not just about this case alone: 40 years is a lot, a lot of years to hide a dirty secret.
What both band members have pointed out many times is that the record company, which is BMG (now known as Sony Music Entertainment), owns the songs, and of course, as always, they “make the decisions”. There are obviously lies to their statements, even if Thomas swears in his book from 2011, that he is not allowed to perform the songs of Modern Talking as they’re owned by the record company. Even if Dieter swears by the Bible that Thomas sings the songs without his permission and does not earn any money.
They tell the same fairytale, over and over again.
Of course, it is quite normal that such materials must not be leaked or published since a strong and strict law protects them and the author of the songs from having his work leaked.
In small segments in the previous articles, we talked about copyrights. And this is what we are going to talk about here. WHO really has the royalties of the songs? WHO really has the copyrights of the songs? And not just songs… Let’s say it’s a more comprehensive version of the previous article.
If it’s really Thomas and not Dieter, then how can this be proven?
In 2016, Thomas said, that, for the release of the “History” Album (a line up of “MT” greatest hits completely rejuvenated in Schlager style, plus two new songs in rather House/Eurodance genre) he had to receive permission from Dieter Bohlen to publish the album with MT hits where only Thomas sings them, with the choir provided by Christoph Bendorff and William King.
This “permission” was simply an open excuse for the doubters who would be very curious about where and how Thomas got the rights (and “the audacity”) to release an album under HIS name with the songs of the great Dieter Bohlen. So if Thomas announced that he received permission, he would be in the clear. After all, the fans of “MT” have been waiting for such a long time for their idols to release something related to the band.
It’s known that the album that Dieter published the following year (Back for Gold) was lazily produced. However, we need to take a look at what was used for the production of these albums.
Thomas’s album was produced by Christian Geller, a renowned Schlager producer in Germany, and also his friend who happens to be a childhood fan of MT. For the creation of the songs, Geller needed the master tapes and the acapellas from the original recordings; he received all these from Thomas, not from Dieter.
On the other hand, for the creation of “Back for Gold”, Dieter and his producers had to work with the finished versions of the songs. He used Thomas’ and Systems in Blue’s voices (the original choir singers of Modern Talking, and other various projects by Dieter) from the finished versions.
These “facts” we’ve already written before, but we’d like to remind them again. Huge (indirect) thank you to hobby producers and musicians who know their thing.
One can say that Dieter maybe “didn’t want to destroy the songs as Thomas did”, preferring the final voices from the recordings, too. But let’s not forget, Bohlen is the known big boss, the producer, the composer. He must have all master tapes, the multi-tracks, the acappellas, those are his royalties. He could create an album but with completely unheard-of acappellas of Thomas and SIB. He could choose any vocal track he wanted, even the worst sounding ones that ended up covered in the dust, and enhance their voices better in the mixing.
He could’ve done that, because that’s his right, as a producer.
But he could not and did not. What he rather did instead, were remixes out of the actual songs that were released in the 1980s.
It’s completely impossible, that a singer could’ve appealed to the record company to release their most precious and protected tracks to somebody who is “legally owned” by them. Even if the record company somehow decided to allow Thomas to make an album with old “MT” hits in a new style, it’s impossible that they gave their tracks to Geller.
And by “record company”, we also mean Dieter, because he was the assigned producer of the record labels HANSA and Intersong, the labels where MT songs were registered. These same labels are subsidiaries of BMG. It’s improbable that Dieter of all people would “offer” these materials to other producers.
In this period, Dieter not only released the “Back for Gold” album but two years later, also his own version of “Brother Louie”. In the meantime, Dieter finally started touring solo with songs from Modern Talking, and making a “Tour Album”.
“Finally solo with the songs of Modern Talking” is a sentence that can confuse the fans or the reader.
That is why, we need to explain what we mean by this.
In the 1980s, even when Modern Talking was still active, Thomas was touring in Europe alone with the songs. Dieter would say that Thomas sang playback there and if it were him, he would sing the songs live, unlike Thomas. This interview, which we are going to translate, is from July 1987.
Thomas: “I was on tour in the Eastern Block as “The Thomas Anders Show”. The posters at the bottom say Modern Talking because, among other things, I also perform the repertoire of “Modern Talking”. No one can blame me here, because I am Thomas Anders and at the same time “Modern Talking”, even without Dieter. I was in Budapest, Ljubljana, Potsdam, Wroclaw, Gdansk – we were seen by 120,000 fans in total. The Budapest Sports Hall with 14,000 seats is the second-largest hall in the Eastern Block, and it was sold out! My backing band was “Man-X”, and Nora and Jutta were also on stage”
BRAVO: Are you going to do your own solo show like Thomas?
Dieter: “Nope, not like that. I would do it live, not with a full backing track like they do. I also wouldn’t want to perform on stage with Nora. I would do a show, but 100% honest: with 6-7 musicians, Thomas and I in front – all live.”
Everything sounds so funny and ironic when you read these statements.
Years passed, and Thomas continued to tour all over Europe, even after the first break-up of “MT”, but also beyond it: South Africa, Chile, etc. He became the first artist in Chile to sing in the famous festival “Vina del Mar” for two consecutive years, ever. (1988-1989)
For these concerts, he did not just use multi-tracks as live instrumentals, (a small but very important detail caught by hobby producers of disco sound) but also the original recordings of voices of the vocalists: Rolf Köhler, Michael Scholz & Detlef Wiedeke.
Before we show some video/audio footage here from the concerts that were made in the USSR, Chile, South Africa, etc, first you need to see the infamous “multi-track recorder” used in Thomas’ concerts that every hobby producer is talking about with so much enthusiasm and curiosity. 
From Google searches: “Within this process, each instrument or voice is recorded onto an individual ‘track’ (often at different times) and can then be played back simultaneously. Each track can also be mixed to the correct volume through a mixing desk and a variety of audio effects (such as reverb, delay, compression, etc) can be added.”
For this, everybody is welcome to correct us, but it seems like Thomas had in possession ALL tracks available: guitar, bass, drums, synth, as well as the backing vocals of Systems in Blue.
Now let’s show some of the audio and video footage.
(Just like an Angel, You’re the Lady of my Heart, Princess of the Night – USSR 1987)
“You and Me” (South Africa 1987)
“Cheri Cheri Lady” (South Africa 1987)
Atlantis Is Calling (South Africa 1987)
Brother Louie (1987)
Geronimo’s Cadillac (1987)
Brother Louie (Chile 1988)
Geronimo’s Cadillac (Chile 1988)
Jet Airliner (Chile 1988)
Atlantis is Calling (Chile 1989)
Stranded in the Middle of Nowhere (Chile 1989)
Brother Louie (Chile 1989)
Geronimo’s Cadillac (1989)
Even without vocal isolation software, you can visibly hear that the vocal tracks of Köhler-Wiedeke-Scholz that are used here, are exactly the ones present in the original songs. In fact, sometimes their voices have been raised so high that you could barely hear Thomas’ voice itself.
This means he has copyright and royalties to use their voices. Which is incredibly interesting. Are Scholz and Wiedeke aware of this? Or they are and are silent?
On the other hand, after the first break-up, Dieter also toured solo and live, but only singing the songs of his newest project Blue System, and sometimes, the artists he produced for, such as Bonnie Tyler or Nino de Angelo.
The songs of Modern Talking, on the contrary, were sung with a playback track of the original versions. And what is noticeable in these footage, is that the playback tracks that are played in the background is a “medley” only with the falsetto choir of “MT” songs.
(You’re my heart you’re my soul)
(You’re my heart you’re my soul, Cheri Cheri Lady)
(Atlantis is Calling)
(You can win if you want, Brother Louie)
This means that, at that time, Dieter ONLY had copyrights of the voices provided by Koehler-Scholz-Wiedeke and the copyrights of the original instrumental versions. (The boys of Systems in Blue already said that their voices belonged to Dieter because they were forced to sign a contract where they had no copyright over their own voices. The dispute that led to a lawsuit in 2001, however, was the fact that they were underpaid)
Thomas had, or let’s rather say, STILL HAS copyrights over the voices of these vocalists, over his own voice (of course), royalties to the instrumentals, and the rare and rough materials he used for the concerts. This almost makes him THE real producer of Modern Talking.
Fast forward over thirty years later, for the first time, Dieter goes solo with the songs of Modern Talking, sung by him. This means that he finally received the copyrights to sing the songs.
And this is what we meant by: “Finally went solo with the songs of MT”
It’s unclear how Dieter received the rights to the songs after such a long time.
And if he sings these songs by himself as a very old man, it debunks the assumption that “Dieter maybe did not want to sing the songs in the past because he knows his voice is not good”. That would be too contradicting. You can hear that he sings live to the playback tracks too.
This whole topic of “royalties” and “copyright” is very intriguing. It would change the entire history of “MT” completely, as far as purely music is concerned.
There have always existed interviewed “insiders” who don’t belong to the entourage or the staff of Dieter, but are also musicians or work in the studios, and most of them claim that it was Dieter who came up with the demos, which is also really vaguely confirmed by the Systems in Blue in an interview with “Akte” in 2003. Koehler for example would just say: “Dieter gave us some of his demos, so yes, you can say the ideas were from him”
Another group of such insiders claims that Bohlen bought these songs from American disco writers and some others, and is said to have told them: “Either you get 10% of the success, or you get 100% of nothing”
But this is a very less likely theory. Knowing Dieter’s character, he surely can pull off such intimidation, as all producers who buy from ghostwriters do. But at that time, Dieter was still at the beginnings of his producing career, writing for Schlager artists and receiving small amounts of success on the way. He was way too obscure to be considered seriously by those who would agree to sell their songs to him, especially Americans, regardless of all means of intimidation.
Some food for thought.
Luis Rodriguez Salazar, Bohlen’s right-hand man and co-producer of Modern Talking and other Bohlen projects, accompanied the blonde for nearly 40 years, for as long as Dieter’s international career as a producer has been. His participation at MT pre-1986 remains a mystery. Dieter always introduced him as an assistant producer, but there are suggestions that he was only a technician.
In an interview for Americans in 2014, he said that the staff searched for nearly a month to find a suitable “Bee-Gees”esque style of choir vocalists to sing “You’re My Heart, You’re My Soul”.
We already know that this is a huge lie as the boys of SIB already accompanied Dieter since 1983. But back to the copyrights topic and Luis, there exists a very incredible remastering of “YMHYMS” made by the group “Creative Connection”, produced by Rodriguez, which consisted of none other than MT’s studio musician and piano player Leroy Skeete Davis, and Lian Ross, Rodriguez’s wife and Italo-Disco’s new queen. The remastered version was released only at the end of 1985. And just by listening to it, you can clearly notice Skeete’s hand in the arrangement. Absolutely brilliant and a really underrated member of the group.
Even with Rodriguez’s participation, we can already see that he does not give away too much information and is rather very secretive. He has not worked with Bohlen anymore for over 20 years.
As we said before, the songs were already finished beforehand and were not meant to be for “MT”. To repeat what we emphasized before: only a band that wants to end itself quickly would release two albums every year, in three years, with such songs finished and released so quickly. Only the arrangements and the recording of the vocals were missed.
When you look at Dieter’s work, you can see that he found a hook (made by others) and has stuck to it since the release of “YMHYMS”. An international producer with 40 years of experience would usually welcome making songs in different genres, as well as making different compositions that don’t sound too similar to each other, but even when he tried to attempt the first one, he usually ended up copying the hook of international songs in charts. This was massively the case, especially at Blue System and other artists he produced for in Germany. For example, “Nobody Makes Me Crazy Like You Do” by Blue System is straight up a copy of “Together Forever” by Rick Astley,
But the main question that we all want to find the answer to, is already written as the title.
Who really has the copyrights of the songs? Who is the maker and the producer of the songs? Has it really been Thomas all along, and not Dieter?
A myth that Thomas “cannot compose” exists thanks to Dieter. He once said that you cannot compose songs if you do not know how to play piano. Which is 100% true.
As a soloist, Thomas let others make the songs for him, instead of making them himself. And for these extremely expensive albums made by others, where Thomas had absolutely no say in compositions and songwriting, he constantly had to go back to Germany to promote them, only to be met with rejections both from the media and the radio stations. The silver lining was the fact that Thomas showcased he could sing in any genre. By his own words, he’d never realized he could sing like that.
Even though he completed training as an arranger/technician and had 12 years of piano lessons, it seems like he’s never had a real shot at making songs. Or if he had, and we had never known… That mixing room in Nora’s house in Munich (from the Cheri Cheri Lady music video) is already a major discovery.
This is the guy who sang “MT” songs in one try. And if Thomas was really the creator of these songs, it doesn’t really make him the one who made the songs “sound” the same. Because the demo and final arrangements are completely different. And Dieter’s role here seems to have been to decide the direction of the songs, and with the arrival of Rodriguez after the third album, the songs really started to sound the same.
Finally, the conclusion is simple: If you’ve made the demo, the foundation of the song, you have authorship and copyrights over the songs, according to Germany’s copyright law for musicians. And Thomas does have all this said copyright and authorship for decades, unlike Bohlen. This means it was Thomas who made the demos. It doesn’t matter if we hear Dieter singing in the demos or not.
Only through black contracts, Thomas could’ve been forced to give away a large percentage of the profit (as well as recognition) to Dieter Bohlen and Luis Rodriguez. On vinyl, the authorship of the songs might “belong” to Dieter and Rodriguez, but on contract, it belongs to Thomas.
Are people ready to come to terms with the harsh truths?
If we could let out these black contracts, it would blow up into a sensational documentary
I spent 7 hours reading all the articles and here are some questions that came to mind.
Almost every article mentions the poor quality of the music because Dieter supposedly doesn’t understand anything about music. And then you assume that Thomas was the real author. So who doesn’t understand anything about music and who wrote these primitive, monotonous songs?
In various interviews in the 80s and 00s, Thomas himself often spoke sarcastically about the quality of Modern Talking’s songs. But if everything was so bad and unworthy of him, why does he still torture himself and sing this? Because it’s his or because it brings in money?
If the first 6 Modern Talking’s albums were released one after another like hotcakes, because they were written long before the duo was created, for other artists, and their author is Thomas, then how did a young man who was subjected to daily sexual abuse by three sisters for 10 years and had serious health problems manage to write the notorious “40 songs a month”?
And C.C. Catch and Blue System released albums with whose songs twice a year?
If Thomas had problems with alcohol during the reunion, how could he write the last 5 albums?
Hello Oleksander. We thank you for taking the time to read the articles. But we suggest you go back to reading them again, as it is evident you have not understood anything and are asking questions out of frustration.
In almost EVERY article we wrote that the music of Modern Talking is very good and “ahead of its time”. We have no idea where you got such claims.
As for Thomas’ statements, we’d like you to give the sources of these various statements, in exception of: “I am not singing this sh*t. I will be a famous Pop Star”, (because we already have it) which not only is the one you are talking about, but also for this we already did a separate article on such fabricated statement. In short: Dieter knew what Thomas was going to “say” that they planned his “comeback” response in advance. Pro tip: Thomas never said any of that.
By the way, Dieter Bohlen makes 10000 covers of Cheri Cheri Lady, even though he was the one who wanted to throw the demo on the trash until Thomas intervened and the song became a hit. Now he finds it good… because, it made him money. Right?
Dieter also claimed that he wrote 30 songs a week, and that he stayed everyday in the studio. Really? Is that why he had long enough time to give interviews for the media every single day? Michael Scholz, choir singer said that Bohlen was rarely in the studio and only had time to speak for the medias. So how did he make 30 songs a week? How did he create the disco sound? Did someone else make it for him? Or it was an exaggerated amount, as always?
Now seriously, it is getting ridiculous. Whether Thomas “created” the songs we already showed technical proof about it and it is something nobody can disprove. Yes, he was abused since he was a teenager. Just like he had the strength to go on tours with Dieter, he definitely had the strength to be a ghost-writer, too. But since you cannot be convinced: Kurt Cobain, who was very ill all his life, composed all Nirvana songs while he was taking medicaments and drugs. Even Adele said she composed songs while being drunk. Even Van Beethoven himself, was known a drunkard, and most importantly, deaf.
We’re looking forward to your response.
“In various interviews in the 80s and 00s, Thomas himself often spoke sarcastically about the quality of Modern Talking’s songs”
Source: the voices in my head.
or maybe you slept in class and didnt pay attention? funny cus it was Dieter who always found the songs trash as he did with Cheri cheri lady.. before You’re my heart you’re my soul became famous Dieter immediately wanted to sell the song. then said that the Modern talking songs “sounded the same” because of Thomas’ limited vocal abilities. and idiots like you believe that.
btw about Dieter there was a newspaper in 2003 that wrote about two young people finding Modern Talking vinyls and CDs in the trash next to Dieter’s house in Totensen. this is the idol you put to pedestal lol