A very rickety bandwagon

Its easy to mock, but after getting on for 20 years hammering away at it, the wheels finally appear to have fallen off the bandwagon that is Scooter. Their success in the UK has been a rather hit and miss affair, with two periods of relatively decent success punctuated by long periods of being ignored. In their homeland of Germany, the success has been pretty consistent until now.

The warning signs were there after the 2007 Jumping All Over The World album. Scooter went away for a longer hiatus than they had ever previously taken. Having produced albums roughly annually since 1995, there was silence from the band after a long tour which had seen them sell out venues the likes of which they hadn't even attempted before. The album backed in the UK by a Greatest Hits CD took the top spot in the album chart, which raised many eyebrows and remains something of a thorn in the side of those always claiming the album chart is the one for grown ups. Unusually for Scooter, this album spawned five singles rather than the usual two or three and all went top twenty in Germany.

They returned in 2009 with Under The Radar, Over The Top which acheived reasonable home success, with two of the four singles lifted from it going top twenty. The sound had reverted from the stadium jumpstyle of the previous album to a ragtag mixture of their previous styles that didn't really have any cohesion. Worse was to come with 2011's The Big Mash Up, an alarmingly weak range of lifted samples and rip offs of other tracks in a vague attempt to catch up on the already tired fashion for mashups. Opening single The Only One was (broadly speaking) a cover of the Charlatans' similarly named song and it just sneaked into the German top 50 despite heavy promotion across mainstream TV. Three more singles were dragged off the album, but none inspired the public to reach the top half of the top 100.

Which brings us to 2012 and new album Music For A Big Night Out which is a pissweak title even by Scooter's standards. Lead single 4 AM is a thinly veiled mixture of Otto Knows' Europewide club hit Million Voices, amended just enough to put off the copyright lawyers and the opening couple of lines from Beverley Craven's Promise Me sung by someone who sounds like Rihanna with a cold. Really. Again, this isn't anything that hasn't already been done to death - the Bingo Players had a minor hit with a similarly looped couple of lines from Brenda Russell's Piano In The Dark (1988) the ethos of which has now been "brought to a larger audience" (ripped off) by Flo Rida who has practically made a career out of such works. The 4 AM single limped into the German charts at number 96 on the first week of release and is their worst performing single ever aside from their instrumental xylophone heavy debut Vallee des Larmes.

So where do Scooter go from here? It is difficult seeing any future in copying what the market already has an overload of - identikit dance covers looping a couple of lines of something from the Heart Time Tunnel playlist. They'll doubtlessly find a new direction in the near future and i wouldn't rule out them making a dubstep album.

Seriously.