Scorpions abandon retirement plans

Scorpions guitarist Matthias Jabs has confirmed the group has call off its retirement plans, revealing he and his bandmates are having too much fun on the road to quit. The Wind of Change hitmakers announced their upcoming tour would be their last two years ago, but Jabs admits they’ve abandoned the idea while they’re still a popular live act.
In a new Rock Pit interview, the German rocker says, “We noticed already we have too much fun to really quit. We want to slow down and we don’t wanna play that many shows per year anymore… so we decided to slow down a bit. But when the final show was done, and it was shortly before Christmas, at the end of January in 2013, this MTV Unplugged offer came around the corner, and we couldn’t say no.
“We thought, ‘Wow, this is great. This is a great new challenge. We haven’t done it in our long career, so let’s go for it. And at the same time, before that, the record company put two contracts on the table, which is unusual, I think, for a band that says, ‘OK, we wanna quit’.”
The Scorpions will release a new album on 20 February (15) and their next tour won’t feature the word ‘farewell’.
Jabs adds, “We have more than 6 million Facebook (likes), and the research says 80 per cent (of fans) are between 18 and 28 years old. So, for a band that celebrates their 50th anniversary, that’s quite amazing… This is energy boosting. It’s much more fun. So we said, ‘Let’s do it again’.”