Ricky Shayne will be 80 years old on June 4, 2024. To mark the occasion, we are showing the film SHAYNE by Stephan Geene, which was completed in 2019 with him, Ricky Shayne, his sons Tarek and Imran, Kerstin Cmelka, Claudia Basrawi, Justus Köhncke and others for a month on arsenal 3. Director Stephan Geene himself appears in SHAYNE, as it is also his confrontation with the idol that upset him so much at the age of 11.
Ricky Shayne was born in Egypt in 1944 and later grew up in Lebanon before he became an unruly young star who first unsettled Rome and then the then Federal Republic of Germany. His career began in Germany with the film 17 Jahr, blondes Haar, which fictionalized his then still young life as a musician between Liverpool, Paris and Rome (and in which Udo Jürgens sang the title song), but in 1971 it was Mamy Blue, whose version made him famous throughout Europe, and just on his way to becoming a world star, he brought everything crashing down in a short time with his stubbornness and desire to leave the hit behind him.
The film shows Ricky Shayne's wild recklessness at the time of his success, but also the contradictions of his personality and his social roles. SHAYNE premiered at the 69th Berlinale 2019 at the Delphi as part of Forum Expanded and was subsequently shown at many festivals.
Silvia Szymanski about SHAYNE, on critic.de
"A movie about and with Ricky Shayne. And Shayne is also coming to the Berlinale. The thought still makes me nervous. Ricky Shayne blew up the format of the ZDF hit parade from 1967 to 1972 with his raspy blues voice, his striking male beauty, musical credibility and genuine glamor. Nothing against hit songs that embody the opposite. But Shayne was different. More dimensions. More rebellion. And also more darkness. You could tell he came from somewhere completely different, and I don't mean his mAlthough he performed hits in Germany, in his mind he had this small pack of howling and egging beat guitars around him, dancing, contorting and making the audience slide. Shayne was born in Cairo, grew up in Beirut and became a star in Rome during the beat wave. In 1966, he played the leading role, a mod, in Franco Montemurro's beautiful film Seventeen Years, Blond Hair, alongside the also still very young and joyfully lively Udo Jürgens. Shayne was only a pop star in appearance. You could tell he was a real person more than his colleagues. You could feel that a lot of things could only be half expressed, but were rumbling inside him.
Filmmaker and Ricky Shayne fan Stephan Geene was 10 years old at the time. Now, more than forty years later, he has made a serial portrait of Shayne. Thoughtful, experimental, 6 parts, 120 minutes. I saw the first part: You see Shayne's sons Tarek and Imran (both now the same age as Shayne was then) as they try to recreate their father, using old photos and film footage. And in doing so, they become more and more like him, to the point of confusion. We see them in their father's costume - black velvet jacket with arabesque gold embroidery, wide open at the top, chest hair - lost in the modernist architecture of the "House of World Cultures". And feels what it's like to be a man of the heady seventies and its beautiful illusions and visions, walking around here for more than forty years with a cold turkey (according to Kerstin Cmelka, commentator in Geene's film).
Ricky Shayne looks very different and no less exciting today than he did back then. He has a troubled, serious face; the info on Geene's film speaks of his "abortions and ambiguities". The first part of the series ends with Shayne's great album version of the touching hit by the Hollies: "He ain't heavy, he's my brother" (1972) and with a long look Ricky Shayne gives the camera, in which there is such pain that it bites deep into your heart.
