TANKARD INTERVIEW: Gerre on Andy Gutjahr’s Injury, Rethymno Rocks and What Comes Next

“It’s always better to play than to cancel the show”

Gerre explained that the band had arrived in Crete on Thursday. Later that evening, Andy fell on the way back from dinner. The following medical examination and X-ray confirmed that his shoulder was broken and that playing guitar was completely out of the question.

Tankard did, however, have recordings available from their South American tour earlier in the year. Drummer Gerd Lücking spent the night preparing the material so that Andy’s guitar parts could be used as playback while Gerre, Gerd and bassist Frank Thorwarth performed live.

The emergency setup had worked during soundcheck, but even a few hours before showtime Gerre admitted that nobody really knew how it would feel in front of the audience. What mattered most was giving the fans a Tankard concert rather than a cancellation notice.

Andy would not be hidden backstage either. The plan, Gerre joked, was simple: sit him on stage and let him drink beer. That is exactly where the guitarist could later be seen — arm immobilised, beer in the other hand and very much still part of the show.

Forty years of Zombie Attack — and no intention of stopping

2026 also marks the 40th anniversary of Tankard’s debut album, Zombie Attack. Looking back on the teenage band that created those songs, Gerre pointed out that much of the material had actually been written when they were only 14, 15 and 16 years old.

The early sound still carried obvious punk influences, but four decades later those songs remain part of a catalogue that helped establish Tankard as one of the enduring names of German thrash metal.

There is no grand retirement plan. Gerre simply wants Tankard to remain on stage for as long as physically possible.

Did staying independent help Tankard survive?

One of the more unusual aspects of Tankard’s career is that the band deliberately avoided becoming completely dependent on music for its livelihood. That decision may have restricted the number of shows they could accept, but according to Gerre it also gave the band something extremely valuable: freedom.

Tankard can play roughly 30 to 35 shows in a year and could easily accept many more offers. The downside is obvious. The upside is that there is no financial pressure forcing the band to tour, record or make decisions simply because the bills depend on it.

Gerre believes that independence is also one of the reasons Tankard have managed to keep going for so long. For a band that began as a group of teenagers in Frankfurt in 1982, that freedom may have proven more valuable than following the conventional idea of a professional rock career.

The beer image, serious lyrics and being mistaken for a “joke band”

Tankard’s relationship with their famous beer-soaked image is more complicated than the caricature suggests. Gerre acknowledged that the band themselves did plenty to create it during the 1980s. By the 1990s, however, they were actively trying to escape it — unsuccessfully.

From the second album onward, he says, Tankard deliberately tried to balance humorous material with serious subjects. The fact that the musicians do not take themselves too seriously does not mean that the music or the themes behind it are disposable.

Gerre also agreed that some listeners who only know the beer bottles, cartoon artwork and jokes may have underestimated Tankard as musicians and dismissed them as a novelty band.

Asked to choose one recent song to play to somebody who still thinks of Tankard merely as “the funny beer band”, Gerre eventually settled on one track:

A new Tankard album in 2027?

Pavlov’s Dawgs, released in 2022, gave Tankard the highest German chart position of their career when it entered the album chart at No. 8. Four years later, naturally, the question is what comes next.

There is an important qualification: at the time of our interview, not a single new song was finished. The songwriting process had also just been interrupted by Andy’s accident.

So this is not an album announcement or a confirmed release date. It is, however, a clear indication of where Tankard hope to go next — provided Andy recovers and the songwriting process can resume as planned.

Greece, Cyprus and the fans who kept Tankard going

Tankard’s connection with Greece has developed over repeated visits to the country, and Gerre made it clear that the band are always happy to return. While Athens and Thessaloniki remain the obvious destinations, Rethymno Rocks finally gave them the opportunity to play in Crete for the first time.

There is more to come. During the interview, Gerre said that something is already being planned for next year and also revealed that Tankard expect to play Cyprus for the first time.

He closed the conversation by thanking fans around the world — and specifically the Greek audience — for decades of support.