Dirkschneider & The Old Gang
It Takes Six To Rock

10.10.2025

When you have “Dirkschneider” in the name of a band, it leaves little room for doubt as to who’s running the show. If anybody reading this is unaware of who Udo Dirkschneider is, they have obviously made it to this website by mistake. But in this case it is “The Old Gang” that makes a difference. Sharing the stage with Udo and his drummer son Sven are two of his erstwhile Accept bandmates – bassist Peter Baltes and drummer turned guitarist Stefan Kaufmann, which already is a strong combination. They are joined by impressive female singer Manuela “Ela” Biebert, already familiar to U.D.O. fans through the orchestral album “We Are One” (2021). But for us the biggest surprise in the line-up was the return of guitarist Mathias Dieth, who had been absent from the big metal stage for decades. Mathias played on the first four U.D.O. albums in 1987-1991, and prior to that, he was a member of another great German metal band, Gravestone (his brief stints with Sinner and Ape should not be forgotten either). After the original U.D.O. run ended, Mathias chose a career outside music and only did occasional guest appearances, most noticeably with U.D.O. In 2019 he brought together Gravestone, but they have only so far been playing live, so Dirkschneider & The Old Gang (aka DATOG) is his first major hard rock / heavy metal undertaking in more than three decades. With the approaching release of the debut DATOG full-length, “Babylon” (out now via Reigning Phoenix Music), we got a crazy idea: what if we ask Mathias, not the ever-busy Udo, to tell us in detail about this intriguing project, and also find out from him about other interesting aspects of his life in and outside music that we wanted to know more about for years? And to our delight, he agreed…

A lot of people were waiting for you to play music again and kept asking Udo about you, and he would always answer in the late 90s and over the next decade that you were a lawyer and you didn’t really play guitar anymore. When and how did it happen that you took up the guitar again?

Udo was totally right at that time, I really quit music and I quit guitar playing. I did not play for something like 20 years. I became a lawyer, I got married, and I got two wonderful children. I think it was in 2011 when I discovered my love for the guitar again. It was when I visited an old guitar dealer, from time to time when I went to the hairdresser I would go to his shop and have an espresso, and there was this special guitar, black Gibson ES-355 hanging on the wall. This guitar screamed to me, saying, “Take me and play me!” (laughs) I remember that when I was 21 or 22, I studied for a year at a special guitar school in Munich, the Munich Guitar Institute (MGI), and there was a guitar teacher that was basically teaching jazz music, he was a fabulous guitar player, his name was Gunnar Greise, he’s now a professor at a university and doing very progressive things. He had a black ES-355 basically like the one B.B. King played, he gave me this guitar, this was in 1985 or 1986, I played this guitar, and I loved it. As I turned to be more of a rock and heavy metal player in the years after 1985, there was no space for a guitar like that, it was more of a jazz guitar. But I was always in love for that kind of guitar, and when I went to my old friend Uli from Uli’s Musik, the guitar store, in 2011, and I saw this guitar that looked exactly like the one I had 25 years before, I felt the need to buy it, and I started to play again.

In the beginning I played all these jazz rock things and didn’t think about doing metal again. And I had this friend who was a flamenco player, a fabulous flamenco player. We did one or two shows together, he with a classical Spanish guitar, and me with an electric guitar. We played some Latin tunes like “Spain” by Chick Corea, or “Egyptian Dance” and “Mediterranean Sundance” by Al Di Meola. This was, if you want to put it like this, my re-introduction to playing the guitar.

Then Udo came - see, you don’t have to ask any questions, I’ll tell you everything anyway… Udo came and asked me to join him for a couple of songs at the Wacken Open Air festival in 2012. So it all started again - a little bit.

You were the last musician to join Dirkschneider & The Old Gang. Everybody knows that you have always been in contact with Udo and Stefan, but did you ever expect that you would be working on music with them again?

No, I didn’t expect that. I always held contact with Stefan and Udo, and I have helped them out with legal issues a little here and there. And this thing at Wacken in 2012 - it was a one-off thing, we had a lot of fun, but it was over, and it was fine. I always say that I’m the only lawyer in Germany that goes to Wacken, plays in front of 70,000 people and then goes back to his office and does service for his clients. (everybody laughs) The DATOG project came as a bit of a surprise to me, I didn’t expect anything like that. To be honest, I didn’t even know much about that project in 2020 during the corona pandemic.

Almost all the members of Dirkschneider & The Old Gang are famous and established musicians, but not much is known about your singer Manuela Biebert. Can you say a few words about Manuela and her background?

The first thing I must say - she is fantastic. She’s a fantastic singer, she can sing everything, she’s a true professional from head to toes. She was born in Kazakhstan, she moved to Germany very early, when she was two or three years old, and she was raised in Germany. She plays piano, she studied playing the piano, and she studied vocals and singing, and she does a lot of different things. She sings songs in - not really musicals, musical singers are normally not the very best ones… She sings at gala shows, she signs variety and does a lot of studio work for third parties, and there’s a very good musician in Germany, Leslie Mandoki, I think he’s Hungarian, you may have heard of him through this German band called Dschinghis Khan, a very good musician and producer, and she always does projects with him here and there. She’s a fantastic composer, and many of the vocal ideas and even song ideas and song structures on the “Babylon” album come from Manuela. It’s an honor for me to work with a singer like that. And she’s a very nice person also, and she looks great! Manuela is a real treasure.

As far as we understand, originally there were no plans for the band to continue beyond the three songs on the “Arising” EP (2021). What pushed you to start working on the full-length album?

That’s a good question! The DATOG project is nothing that’s really planned. It’s an expression of freedom. They did the first song, “Where The Angels Fly”, with Manuela, and I wasn’t part of the project in the very beginning. They put that song on YouTube, it got great reactions, and they thought, “Maybe we should do two more songs with Manuela”. Stefan had this concept of three singers, with Peter Baltes being a fantastic singer also, and then they called me.

The EP was a real success. The people liked it, and there were many questions and demands for more of that material. Due to the fact that we had worked very well together on the first three songs during the pandemic, there were more songs because Stefan and Manuela had some song ideas, I had some song ideas… Udo is a very busy man, and Sven obviously the same, because they go on tour all the time, they have to do a new U.D.O. album, they do this Dirkschneider thing and everything. He’s old but really busy, which I think is really good for him, and I love that. But we said, “OK, we should try and see if we can get more beautiful ideas”. Then we met and sat together, not everybody, basically Manuela and Stefan, and then me and Stefan and Manuela, then Stefan and Udo, then Peter came along, Peter was with Stefan for a couple of weeks, and they put together some songs. Then the idea came, “Why don’t we work on an album?” I mean, we have time, we have no pressure from any record company, we don’t have to finish the record in six months or something like that. We had basically two years to develop the ideas and songs. Everybody in this project has his main profession, Udo being Udo, Peter being Udo’s bass player, Manuela having her engagements as a singer here and there, Stefan producing and doing studio work, and me working as a lawyer. So we met from time to time and put the things together, and Udo was the last one to say, “Yes, this is great, let’s do it”.

“Babylon” turned out a very diverse album. You have metal songs on the one hand and all these different influences, songs like “Dead Man’s Hand” or the title track, on the other hand, and they are pretty far away from each other. Was there any direction that you had in mind while writing the material? How did you decide that this and that song are going to make the album?

It’s a very good question. No, we didn’t have a direction that we wanted to follow. I mean, you have three members of Accept, you have me as a basically rock/metal guitar player, and you have Sven – it’s clear that we don’t play jazz rock. All of us like rock stuff, I’m influenced by big hard rock bands of the 70s, like Rainbow, UFO, a bit of Deep Purple and all these things. Sven and Manuela are much younger, so they have different influences, but it was clear that we were going to do what we like, and the songs came out like they were. You mentioned that song “Dead Man’s Hand” – it has a very unique guitar riff that was basically written by Manuela on the piano. This song as an original idea was a piano song with a female voice singing. This riff – dang dang ding a ding – was played on the piano. Stefan liked it when Manuela showed it to him, he said, “Let’s do something out of it”, and everybody else liked it too. We had to transpose the piano playing to the guitar, so you have a riff on the guitar that you as a guitar player would never play because it’s very uncomfortable (cracks), and you as a guitar player tend to avoid leaving your comfort zone. This was very hard work to put this on the guitar, but this is what makes the riff unique to me. I think it’s a very unusual riff. Then you have, for example, the title track, “Babylon”, which is based on an idea that I had. In the original version, this song was called something like “Arabian Sun and Stone”, because of this Arabian mode, which I liked very much, but it turned out totally different, because Manuela made the chorus. Everybody contributed with their things, and that’s how it became the album that you can now listen to, that we can all listen to now.

Could you also comment on the final song on the album, “Beyond The End Of Time”. To us it has some elements that quite clearly remind us of the Accept classic “Princess Of The Dawn”. Was it an intentional homage, so to say?

It’s the same key – D minor. (laughs)

And the tempo is pretty much the same.

(pause) Maybe you’re right. This riff comes from Stefan, and to be honest, I agree that there is some kind of approach and some kind of mood which reminds of “Princess Of The Dawn”, but the song is not as heavy as “Princess Of The Dawn”, and it’s got its ups and downs. I don’t know, maybe Stefan unconsciously had “Princess Of The Dawn” in mind, but it was not intended, like, “Let’s do a second ‘Princess Of The Dawn’” or something like this, because it always fails. You know, Accept often tried to come up with a second “Balls To The Wall”, and every effort they did, like every other band that tries to reinstall their big hit - they normally fail. Maybe “Beyond The End Of Time” will be considered a failure, everybody can have their opinion, but it was not planned, as far as Stefan told me, to be a new version of “Princess Of The Dawn”. But I agree with you, there are certain references, it’s in the same key, and it’s a similar kind of riff playing. If the people like it, I’m happy, I like the song very much.

The album and all the singles from it have a very distinct style of cover artwork. Who is responsible for the visual aspect of the band?

This is basically based on ideas that Stefan had about doing these gold and black things. When we found out that the album title would be “Babylon” – we had “Queen Of Babylon”, but then we said that “Babylon” is much shorter, and everybody in the world can understand the word “Babylon”, it has the same meaning to everyone – he tried to come up with the tower of Babylon using artificial intelligence to see what we can do, what we can have. And we already had this kind of artwork on the “Arising” EP. Then Stefan got this wonderful artist doing these graphic design things, and he worked with Stefan very closely together to develop this kind of aesthetic approach, like art deco. We liked it, and nobody said, “Oh, this is horrible, we want skulls and we want bones” or things like that. I think this is a very artificial thing that suits the music very well. 

Are there any plans to bring Dirkschneider & The Old Gang to live stages? Are you already receiving any offers from festivals?

To be honest, so far we haven’t received any. We have no plans, nothing is concrete, I’m sorry. If there comes an offer, we won’t say no, but at the moment everything is open.

On your personal Facebook page, you recently posted a clip from a U.D.O. show in Finland back in 1991. Back in the 90s we had a recording on that show on VHS. Is there a chance that this footage, or probably some other rarities from your days with U.D.O. will be released officially?

This festival show in Hameenlinna was the last U.D.O. show we did with this line-up, it was my very last show with Udo of all time. It was filmed by Finnish TV, and I don’t think any DVDs of it are out, with the exception of bootlegs. I do know we played more songs than you can see on YouTube, we played “Heart Of Gold” and some more. As to an official release, I don’t know. One should clear the rights first. (laughs) I would love to see it because I think it is a very good document of what we did before we split up the first time. I would love to see it as a product, but I’m not in that position, I’m not in charge to clear the rights. Maybe I’ll talk with a record company about it one day, but there’s nothing to my knowledge so far.

A lot of people say that your guitar playing is one of the reasons why they like the early U.D.O. albums so much. What were your early influences, the sources of inspiration for developing your playing style? 

This is an honor to hear it, thank you very much! My main influences as a guitar player were basically… I started to play the guitar when I was 12 years old, I learned the piano first, and then I saw these bands with the long hair, like Sweet – that was my first influence and the very first long-play record that I bought at the age of 12 or 13. I tried to find out how to play guitar solos that Ritchie Blackmore played, I learned a lot from my idol Michael Schenker, he’s really my idol, I love his playing. And already in the early days I bought some records by Al Di Melola, I like his playing too, he’s one of the very best, it’s incredible what he does. These are the fundamental bricks of my playing. Later on I played some jazz stuff and learned more out of this hard rock / heavy metal box, but probably my biggest influences were Michael Schenker and Ritchie Blackmore. This tells you how old I am. (everybody laughs)  

What is currently happening with Gravestone? Are there any shows planned?

Yes! Gravestone is a great band with my old friends. We had this band when we were very young, then I had a fight with the singer (Berti Majdan), and we didn’t talk to each other for more than 30 years, but then in 2019 we came together again. We are doing some recordings for maybe one or two songs to be released in early 2026, and the next show which is already booked will be in September next year. A little festival in the south of Germany, I think the 20th of September or something like that. 

Everybody in the current line-up of Gravestone played in the band in the 80s. How did it happen that you all reconnected after all these years and everybody was up to playing again?

A very good question! With Gravestone, we all come from a very rural area near Ulm in the south of Germany. When we were 17-20 years old, it was a huge community of young long-haired musicians, and it was not only Gravestone - we were friends with Tyrant, we were friends with Vampire, there was this other band called Stranger, which later on turned to Chroming Rose. This all is a bunch of people that all come from the same area, everybody knows each other, we’re big friends - we all got drunk and we all had fun, parties and things like that. Gravestone was only one of those bands, probably one of the better ones, but it’s my personal opinion. (laughs) Every year since then, one day before Christmas, there is one restaurant booked, and everybody who was in this big bunch of people is invited to come home to this small place. People live all around the world, but every year they come to this small village and meet each other the day before Christmas. Sometimes I was there, sometimes I didn’t have time to go there from Cologne, because it’s 500 km, but this is how we kept in contact, at least through Thomas Sabisch, the bass player, and Klaus Reinelt, the other guitar player. They still live there, they didn’t leave the area. Klaus Reinelt is a medical doctor, Thomas Sabisch is an entrepreneur, he has some software companies, the drummer, Thomas Imbacher, is a managing director of one of Germany’s biggest scaffolding and formwork companies, PERI, and Berty the singer is... how do you call that? He trains children, I don’t know the English word for it, I’m sorry. Everybody has his job. Well, Klaus has always played guitar, Thomas had to refresh a little bit, I had to refresh too, and Berti, he’s 64 or something now, it’s difficult for him to sing, because everything gets older obviously, but he went through some very hard training, and he’s getting better and better, so I’m looking forward to this next show. Maybe that one will be the last one for Gravestone, we don’t know yet. It’s difficult, you know – we all get older, and one day you have to say, “OK, now it’s enough”. So everybody is invited to come and see maybe the last show of Gravestone next year.

When you joined Gravestone back in 1982, it was a progressive rock band. Would it be correct to say that it was you who pushed the band to start playing hard rock and heavy metal?

You are incredibly well informed, and you dig back a lot! (laughs) Yeah, it was a kind of progressive band, they didn’t have a structure or anything like that, and they were not very good, to be honest. If you listen to the first two records, it’s like music for drug addicts (everybody laughs), it’s like hippie music, they were hippies. Their guitar player left, and in our area, everybody knew the band, Gravestone was some kind of local celebrities. I had a band called Dust, we played as the opening act for Gravestone, and we thought that we were way better than Gravestone, but it turned out we weren’t. (everybody laughs) Anyway, Gravestone changed their guitar player, and Doc Reinelt, who is now the other guitar player, joined them. I knew Doc Reinelt and I admired him because he was so fucking good. Hearing that he had joined Gravestone and played with them made me think I have to join Gravestone too, because they had a second guitar player who was anything but good. I thought that if I could be the second guitar player next to Klaus, maybe I could learn a lot from Klaus, and maybe we would be able to do something. So Klaus was the first, then I came and they took me. I told them, “Listen I want to play with you, I wanna leave my band Dust, I want to play with Klaus, I want to play rock, and I would love to do this”. They said, “OK, come for an audition”. I was 18 or 19 years at that time, I joined them, and they liked it. Klaus and me, we were friends, and we decided to put the pedal to the metal, to make it a bit more heavy, bring this kind of twin lead guitar thing, challenge each other and things like that, basically the same like Accept did in the very beginning with Wolf Hoffmann and Jorg Fischer. 

Gravestone were signed to a division of GAMA Records, and many musicians who used to work with GAMA say that this label had exceptionally bad contracts with its bands and did nothing to promote them. Would you as a lawyer agree with this standpoint?

(laughs) Absolutely! We were fucked. They were not interested in supporting their bands, they were interested in signing them, because they were hippies too. They were hippies that wanted to make a lot of money, and they realized that this new hard rock thing that was coming, with all these bands, could be a good opportunity to make quick money. They had a studio of their own, and they signed these bands like Tyrant, Tyran Pace, Stranger, Gravestone and whatever. They made these records – cheap, cheap, cheap, and that was it. We had just one tour with Gravestone, and we organized it ourselves with a couple of other bands. It was a big rip-off. As a lawyer nowadays, if I saw some of those contracts, if my clients showed me such a contract, I would rip it into pieces, it’s like, “No, we don’t do this shit”. But we were 18-19 years old, we didn’t care, they told us, “We are the biggest, we’ll make you big”, and when you’re a guitar player, or a drummer, or a singer, and you’re 18 years old back in the 80s, you believe them, and you sign it, and there you go!

Peter Garattoni, one of the owners of GAMA, played drums on your last album with Gravestone, “Back To Attack” (1985). How did it happen?

(surprised) How do you know it? I’m impressed, I’m really impressed. Peter Garattoni was of the two guys at GAMA, he in fact was a drummer, and quite a good drummer. He played the drums on that album due to the fact that our drummer Dieter Behle had some problems and got sick during the recordings. These recordings were very quick, they had to be made in a very quick period, I think we had about 10, 12 days or something like that, so Peter said, “OK, I will jump in”, and he did it on the fly. He played the songs, and we shouted, “Now comes the chorus”, “Now comes the bridge”, “You keep that time” and things like that. It was big fun, and he did a very good job. He was a better drummer than a label manager from the band’s point of view. (laughs)

Many bands that were signed to GAMA gave the label lifetime rights to their recordings. Was it also the case with Gravestone?

Yes. 

Does this mean that you don’t get paid when the albums are re-released?

Never. We considered making a court case out of that, but then we said, “No, it’s not worth it, we’ll just leave it as it is”. We get our royalties from GEMA (German society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights – ed.), when our songs are played and used, but we don’t get any royalties from the record company. They sold the whole catalogue anyway years ago to a guy called… I forgot his name. I tried to follow all the deals, and I got all the deals, but we decided not to put any effort or money into getting the rights back. Maybe we’ll do it next year or the year after when we have quit, but now we’ve got other things to do. Gravestone is not a number-one-hit-selling band, so you always have to consider whether it’s worth all the effort and the money you put in regarding what you may get back.

Coming back to your career as a lawyer, why did you decide to study law after U.D.O. stopped in 1991? Why did you want to be a lawyer, not anything else?

What else could I be? Before I joined U.D.O., I studied economics, and I quit these studies to become Udo’s professional guitar player. When the Udo time was over, I didn’t want to go back to economics. My original idea was to stay in the music business as a lawyer and become kind of a music lawyer. But when I did become a lawyer, I found out that all the musicians that came to me didn’t have any money to pay me! It took me eight years of development from a student to a lawyer, and I had clients with long hair that would come to me with difficult questions, difficult problems, and they couldn’t afford a lawyer. I had a wife and a family, so I had to think, “What can I do?” Then I decided to be a part-time music lawyer and do some serious business for the rest of the time. That’s how I do it up to this day, and I’m very happy with this decision. I’m very happy that I quit the music and was able to do a totally different thing that was really good for my brain and my mind. I wouldn’t regret anything I have done so far, because at that point it was the right decision, and being a lawyer is a great thing to be. I love being a lawyer, I love it as much as I love guitar playing, and sometimes I think a day should have 48 hours so that I could be a guitar player for 24 hours and a lawyer for the other 24 hours, and maybe have some hours for the family as well. (everybody laughs)

Is it difficult for you to combine working for a law firm with several music projects?

To be honest, it is difficult time-wise. DATOG does not make us rich. We’ll see how that goes, but I still have to do my job for a living. Which is not a bad thing – as I told you, I love doing this. And I’m not working at a law firm, I have my own law firm, we are two lawyers, we have a couple of employees, so I’m totally free as long as we pay all the bills, and I can do whatever I want. This is the best position. If I should go on tour for a week or two, that’s my decision, I will just check it with my partner whether he lets me do it. I would love to have more time for music, but that’s the way it is. I’m very happy to be able to contribute to a project like DATOG. Gravestone is not that time-consuming because we play our shows, we do some rehearsals, and the work on the new release, on the new songs, was already done two years ago. But I have another project, a kind of blues band, with which I play once a week, and we’re trying to book our first gig. It’s only with friends, no records or anything, we’re just playing some blues cover songs to stay in shape with the playing. (laughs)

And you also continue with Tiffany Kills, right? 

Of course! Tiffany Kills is another time-consuming project. I love this band, we’re a live band! We made this record, “World On Fire”, by stealing time from other things, and we released it on our own, no record company. So far we’ve played some shows with Vandenberg in the Netherlands, because three members are Dutch, and we haven’t played in Germany yet, but maybe this will happen. Everybody in this project, or band, is also busy, so it’s difficult.

We also wanted to ask you about your session work. You’ve played on albums by Thomsen and Wicked Sensation, but it was of special interest for us to find out that you contributed to the latest solo album by keyboard player Ferdy Doernberg. We have known Ferdy for almost 25 years, so it was a kind of pleasant surprise for us. How did you get to play on this record (“Before The Sun Goes Down”, 2020)?

He’s a great guy. I got to know him 35 years ago when he had this band called Rough Silk, which was produced by Stefan Kaufmann. I’ve known him since those days, we’ve always had some contact, we talked here and there every couple of years. Then there was the pandemic, and I tried to install a kind of a home studio at home. Being able to record some guitars at home for a production that goes anywhere else was a very big step for me, also with DATOG and Tiffany Kills. Since the pandemic I’ve been able to do a lot of work at home - an opportunity I didn’t have before, I was just playing, but now I can also record. Ferdy Doernberg was basically one of my test things, I called him and I said, “You are making this record, I heard or read about this on Facebook. If you want me to play a solo, I would love to do this”. He said, “Sure”. I said, “But I won’t come to your place, I will do it at home, and we will see if this serves the purpose and is technically fine”. This was kind of a test – and it worked. Then I played on some more stuff like this. That’s how it came to Ferdy Doernberg. Whenever I do a solo album, Ferdy Doernberg will play the keyboards. 

What do you think of the current heavy metal scene? Is heavy music still as exciting – for you personally and in general – as it was in the 80s?

No, it’s not as exciting as it was in the 80s. I don’t listen very much to heavy metal, to be honest. I love Judas Priest, and I love the things that I listened to when I was 18-19 years old. That was the time when everything was heavy metal. Nowadays I love Joe Bonamassa, I love these blues players, although he’s not a real blues player, but he makes a kind of blues. I listen a lot to French chanson, one of my favorite singers is a French female singer called Zaz. I love this gypsy style. I don’t listen to speed or thrash metal bands, I didn’t then, and I don’t now. I’ve listened to the new album by Primal Fear, I’ve listened to the new album by Helloween – just to hear what they are doing, because they’re basically of the same age and things like that. Both are very good albums, but to be honest, I can’t listen to a whole album from the beginning to the end. I couldn’t then, and I can’t now. I couldn’t even listen to a U.D.O. album from the beginning to the end. (everybody laughs) It’s too intense, and it takes too much energy from me. I prefer listening to smoother music. You know, I have to work a lot, and I don’t have much free time, and when I do have free time, I learn songs, or I compose for Tiffany Kills or for DATOG, I collect ideas and things like that. The moments when I sit there and just listen to music are very rare, basically only in my car. I don’t know much about the actual metal scene, I’m sorry. This is not because I’m arrogant, this is just because I don’t have the time. I respect everything they do, I respect everything I hear, I saw this concert of Ozzy Osbourne, and it broke my heart to see it, and even more when he died a few days later. Given that we were on tour with Ozzy Osbourne, and I knew him personally, that was really… impressive. But there are so many releases by metal bands, and there are so many metal bands that I can’t even read the names of! (everybody laughs) What sense does it make to buy a T-shirt with a name of the band that you can’t read?! I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. I don’t have the time to mess around with all this.

Dirkschneider & The Old Gang on the Internet: https://datog.de/ 

Special thanks to Maxim Bylkin (Soyuz Music) for arranging this interview

Interview by Roman Patrashov, Natalia “Snakeheart” Patrashova
Photos courtesy of Soyuz Music
September 16, 2025
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