Udo Dirkschneider has pushed ACCEPT's origin story considerably further back than the version most fans carry around.
Talking to Sakis Fragos of Rock Hard Greece, the former ACCEPT frontman said the band's name predates its famous lineup by the better part of a decade. "The ACCEPT name came at the end of '69 already," he said. "And I was on tour already — not on tour, but we did nearly every weekend some shows in Holland, Belgium, stuff like that, a lot in the south of Germany and also around our hometown, Solingen, Wuppertal."
By that arithmetic, the singer had been fronting a band called ACCEPT for close to eight years before the members most people picture arrived. "Before the ACCEPT, let's say the original one everybody thinks, like Wolf Hoffmann, Peter Baltes, Stefan Kaufmann and Jörg Fischer, they came in '76. So that means I was already with ACCEPT in a way nearly eight years, doing some shows."
The claim lands on a familiar sore spot, and Dirkschneider went precisely as far as he wanted to. "And still now with [my current project] DIRKSCHNEIDER, I play ACCEPT songs again. The name is just now [owned by] Wolf Hoffmann for some reason, but I don't wanna go deeper."
He has been less restrained in the past. In June 2022 he expressed open regret at never having secured rights to the name, and he has made no secret of his dissatisfaction with the Mark Tornillo-fronted ACCEPT, which carries only one member from the classic era in Hoffmann.
There is a wrinkle in his own position that he has long since stopped apologising for. Eleven years ago Dirkschneider announced he was retiring ACCEPT material from his live shows for good, launching a farewell run built entirely around it. The songs never left. He continues to perform them both with U.D.O. and with DIRKSCHNEIDER, the project that exists specifically to play them.
Dirkschneider sang on every ACCEPT album from the 1979 debut through the end of his first run in 1986, returned for the 1993–1996 and 2004–2005 reunions, and remains the voice on "Balls To The Wall", "Fast As A Shark" and "Restless And Wild" — records that helped define German heavy metal and left a mark on nearly every thrash band that followed.
Source: blabbermouth.net