Freddy - Biography

Freddy Quinn was born In Austria on September 27th, 1931 as Franz Eugen Helmut Manfred Nidl (name later changed changed to Nidl-Petz). His father was an Irish salesman named Johann Quinn and his mother was an Austrian journalist named Edith Henriette Nidl. He went with his father to the USA, where they lived in West Virginia. Later on he went back to his mother in Vienna where he continued school. As a youth he got in contact with circus artists. He loved the circus flair and became a circus artist, and visited many countries in Europe and North Africa. He made some life experience which provided for the topics of his songs. At the beginning of the 1950s he sang American C&W songs to the G.I.s in the pubs of Nuremberg and Fürth. In 1954 Freddy came to Hamburg where he was discovered in the Washington Bar near the Reeperbahn, the legendary red light district of Hamburg, by some Polydor A&R men. He was offered a contract, and in 1956 he made his first record for Polydor in Hamburg. He chose covers of Sixteen Tons (by Tennessee Ernie Ford) and Memories Are Made Of This (by Dean Martin) in German language. The single with these sides became the most popular German single ever. He had 10 number 1 songs on the German Hitparade from 1956 and 1966, 23 songs reached the German Top Ten. He sold more than 60 million records. Freddy was very versatile, because he sang in different languages, mostly in German, English, French, Spanish. He sold records in South Africa, Brazil, Norway, Denmark, Japan, and in the USA. He also worked as an actor during the 1960s and made some adventure movies.

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