and talks about it in a bookmark interview with Radio Steiermark

READING LABEL

Life with a global hit

Opus' "Live is Life" has been played up and down since the mid-1980s. Now Ewald Pfleger, author and composer of the global hit, is celebrating his 70th birthday. His autobiography has now been published to mark the occasion.

"'Not so loud, Ewald' is what Grandma in Ollersdorf in Burgenland always said when the boy wanted to listen to the Beatles on the radio." This is how the autobiography "Live is Life. My life with a global hit", which Ewald Pfleger wrote together with music expert Andy Zahradnik.

The two have known each other since the late 1970s, and there were a few surprises in store for those familiar with the Austrian music scene: for example, Ewald Pfleger spent a few years in a children's village - a chance for children from less well-off families to attend grammar school in the late 1960s.

"I didn't know this story about the children's village, and that he also had a band called Smiling and that they were even featured in Die Zeit im Bild back then. And when you know how important Zeit im Bild was back then - it really was the news program where the whole of Austria sat down in front of the TV screen and paid attention to what was going on - then it's actually madness by today's standards," says Zahradnik.

Opus in Carinthian?

Smiling was followed by the founding of Opus after graduating from high school in 1973, and the first gig was in Knittelfeld. And even if Ewald Pfleger remembers the beginnings of Austropop like this:
"'Da Hofa', that was pop music in our language. In our dialect. That was our music, which only we boys understood" - the hits by Opus are available in English: "They even tried it once with Herwig (Rüdisser, note). But that also had to do with the fact that it didn't really work, because Herwig is Carinthian and the soft consonants of Carinthian sound different, and the dialect doesn't come across in the same way as in Vienna, for example, as with Wolfgang Ambros or Georg Danzer."

"A laid-on penalty"

The song that gives the book its title, "Live is Life", naturally takes up a large part of the book. Ewald Pfleger wrote this hit while on vacation in Ibiza - and Andy Zahradnik still remembers exactly when he first heard the song: "I was at the record company at the time, and when I heard it for the first time, I thought to myself that I would have liked to have had it under contract. It was a hit, it was a hit, that was clear. The stomping, the 'Nananana', the chorus - and it's still a hit today, it's more than just a lottery song."

A great piece of music history

In any case, the rest is music history: the most streamed version of the song currently has over 266 million hits on Spotify, the most popular "Live is Life" videos are played up to three million times a day on YouTube, and an average of 700 radio plays per day are recorded worldwide.

This contribution accompanies the program "Guten Morgen, Steiermark", 23.3.2025

Here is the bookmark interview with Andy Zahradnikpfleger