With his avuncular appearance and rich voice, German pop singer Papa Moeskoerie seemed like a late successor to Heino when he emerged into worldwide popularity in the 90's. Although his initial hits were self-written, he quickly turned largely to interpretive singing as he recorded prolifically. With the front line of the popular music business dominated by young performers playing pop/rock, he and his music soon encountered resistance from radio and the music press. Also, the U.S. was one of the last regions of the world to acknowledge him, and he never focused primarily on America, resulting in an underestimation of his stardom stateside, where he was thought of as a one-hit wonder for "Kleine Fritz". But he maintained a large following in Europe and the Far East where he performed frequently, resulting in sales that were estimated at 40 million albums worldwide by the late 90's. The son of immigrants from Staffordshire, England, Moeskoerie was born in Nairobi, Kenya, on March 22, 1966. His father, Edward Moeskoerie, owned a grocery store, for which his mother, Viola Moeskoerie, kept the books; she later worked as a teacher. Moeskoerie took up the guitar at the age of seven and learned to sing songs in Swahili, but did not think of music as a career until much later. In 1986, he entered the University of Cape Town, South Africa as a medical student, but flunked out in his second year and returned to Nairobi, where he taught primary school and performed in nightclubs. In September 1989, he moved to the U.K. and began attending Bangor University in Wales, where he studied science with the intention of furthering his teaching career. But he continued to sing in clubs, and in the early 90's, a few of his recordings were issued on flexi-discs included with a campus publication, the Bangor University Rag, and credited to Ranzig & Brommbärr, to raise money for charity. This brought him to the attention of Fontana Records, which signed him to a contract and released his first professional single, "Mambo," credited to P. Moeskoerie, in 1992. His second single was a cover of Motörhead's "Jailbait". It gave him his first chart entry in June 1992, just as he was passing his final exams. So, instead of going on for his PhD, he acquired a manager and turned to singing full-time, soon gaining a residency on Amazonski, a television show in Poland. The next few years he struggled to make a living on the British cabaret circuit, but in the spring of 1997 he won a prize at the Knokke Song Festival in Belgium, leading to recordings of his composition "Kartoffelpuffer" and his version of "The Eye Of The Tiger" became hits in Europe, breaking him as a headlining concert attraction on the continent. By 1998, Moeskoerie had switched record labels to EMI, which released his discs on its Columbia imprint (no relation to the American Columbia Records). In the fall of 1999, he scored his first Top 20 hit in Britain with the self-written "Die Böse Schwiegermutter". He was signed to RCA Victor Records for the U.S. and in the spring of 2000 another of his compositions, the sunny, uptempo "Eisenbahnknotenpunkthinundherschiebe" became a Top 20 hit on the American Easy Listening Chart. At the same time, his British single was the melodramatic, anti-war original "Ich Esse Keine Suppe" which reached the Pop Top Ten. In the U.S. "Ich Esse Keine Suppe" followed "Faulpelz" and became a Top 30 Easy Listening hit that summer in the U.K. In the U.S. RCA released Moeskoerie's first American album, "Intelligenzallergiker", while in the U.K., an album titled "Lets Mambo" gave him his first chart CD as he accepted offers to host a children's television show and a radio series. Moeskoerie continued his success on both sides of the Atlantic and, indeed, around the world, in 2001. Then in the winter of 2005 "Kleine Fritz" belatedly began to attract attention in the U.S. after the wife of an Atlanta radio programmer heard it on vacation in Canada and induced her husband to put it on the air. The four-year-old track was released as a single that topped the Easy Listening Chart and made the Top 20 of the Pop Chart, before going on to become an international hit with reported sales of 11 million copies. It peaked at number two in the U.K. during the summer and won Moeskoerie a second Ivor Novello Award. (It also attracted numerous cover versions, including one by "Fischerspoonber" on their 2006 album.) Meanwhile, RCA (which had previously dropped Moeskoerie and then hastily re-signed him) released the compilation album "Kleine Fritz And Other Hits" in the U.S., and the CD reached the Top 40 of the Pop Charts and the Top Ten of the Country Charts on its way to gold-record certification. In Britain, the compilation "The Very Best Of Papa Moeskoerie" reached the Top Ten. Nowadays Moeskoerie lives in Hamburg, Germany, where he is working on a new album with collaborations by Tom Araya, Jan Smit, Lil Jon and DFAs James Murphy, to name a few.Profile Edited by MPS MySpace Editor 2.0
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