Guildo Horn

An odd bird, for sure, Guildo Horn is a German singer/entertainer whose shtick includes eccentric behavior, an outrageous appearance, and thoroughly ironic schlager songs. In some ways, he's like a German equivalent of Weird Al Yankovic. In terms of fame, he's notable for finishing seventh in the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest with his song "Guildo Hat Euch Lieb!" Born Horst Köhler on February 15, 1963, in Trier, Horn began his music career as a schlagersänger at age 29, when he got a job as an entertainer in Cologne at the Luxor performance venue. His debut album, Rückkehr Nach Mendocino (1992), was recorded live there. In 1994 Horn made his debut on the ZDF-Hitparade, a popular and well-known music contest show on ZDF (i.e., Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), a public television station based in Mainz, and finished in third place, demonstrating his knack for such performance contests, given his novel act. His celebrity now kick-started, he took his act on the road: Guildo Horn & die Orthopädischen Strümpfe, the latter a five-man backing group. It wasn't long before a major label came knocking, namely Electrola, a division of EMI, and Sternstunden der Zärtlichkeit was issued in November 1995. The album includes humorous parodies like "Ich Find' Schlager Toll" (a send-up of Joan Jett's "I Love Rock N' Roll") and "Ich Mag Steffi Graf" (the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love") -- both of which were released as singles, the former charting in the Top 100 -- in addition to original material. Horn's recording career was now off to a promising start, and he went about recording another album, Danke! (1997), which peaked, rather amazingly, at number three and spent a long 35 weeks on the album chart. Such success set the stage for his Eurovision Song Contest run in 1998 with "Guildo...