Martin Praetorius, born in Essen, Germany on June 19th, 1964, grew up a middle-class kid in one of Germanys biggest industrial areas.
Introduced to music at a very early age by his parents, he started singing in the school choir and was soon overheard singing The Beatles "Ob la di ob la da" in the bathroom, a song considered to be obscene in those days.
His dream to become a rock'n'roll star was fired up by a small woman from Detroit called Suzi Quatro. Sexual awakening of a nine year old fed by the unproven tale that she wore nothing underneath her tight leather overall.
"Singing in school and church choirs wasn't really the thrill I was looking for, so I broke my fingers trying to learn my first few chords on daddy's "guitar". More a piece of wood with barbed wire than anything else but it didn't break my guts."
Martin Praetorius then started playing locally in various bands and was influenced by artists like The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Jackson Browne, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle, just to name a few.
In 1988 he formed Scooter and the Streethearts, a band that would last for more than eleven years and peaked in a European tour hitting 11 major cities from Barcelona to Glasgow and London supporting "Joe Grushecky & the Houserockers", a Pittsburgh, USA Springsteen protégée band. (Scooter was Martins nickname for more than two decades, but, unfortunately, the name was at a later stage taken up by a German Techno act)
Here the story of the band ends, with a distributor gone bankrupt taking with him most of the copies of the debut album Stories to tell which received a nice little review in the US Billboard magazine.
Martin Praetorius started working as a solo artist, accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and over the past 10 years played mostly Irish pubs in Germany, The Netherlands and Ireland, developing his style as a singer/songwriter.
He has also been running a recording studio until the end of 2003 where he produced a great variety of radio programms, comedy, bands and solo artist such as the well known irish singer/songwriter Ronan Leonard with whom he produced two albums.
Now he is back with a new band that includes some of the finest musicians in Germany and a strong set of new songs that deal with some of Rock'n'Rolls most beloved themes:
Good love and good love gone bad, leaving home and coming back, always looking for the place where the road and the sky collide
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