State visit: dead pants in tails

In a world where you live only to walk robots every day, the greatest excitement left is the nightly television picture. It has been an unbelievable 35 years since Andreas Joachim Wolfgang Konrad Frege sang these legendary lyrics. At the time, the punk rocker, who called himself Campino, was the only provocation for the bratty West German establishment.

With torn jeans and wild hair, he wouldn’t even have been allowed into a Bavarian beer tent, let alone onto a red carpet at the Federal President’s. But the time will come (oh-hooo) when rebels like Campino and his “Toten Hosen” will no longer rebel.

Tote-Hosen singer Campino has a British passport

This is particularly evident on days like these. The British king is in town and the now 60-year-old lead singer is a guest at the state banquet. And that’s what the evening television picture wants, that there is a neatly coiffed, patent-shod gentleman in tails and a flawless white shirt – in the middle of the establishment that he once loved to provoke. “But is that still punk rock?” one might ask with a line of text from “Ärzte” – the rebellious rival before days like these.

And as expected, digital onlookers gossip that even a home savings contract is now more punk than Campino. To save the honor of the fine Mr. Frege, however, one must say that, as half an Englishman, he was quite good at receiving King Charles III. fit at Schloss Bellevue, and secondly that he can age more gracefully than many of his colleagues – so no longer trying to be the Campino from the 80s. He knew even then: Nothing lasts forever.

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