Norddeutsch by nature.

"It´s really friggin´ cold in Lüllau this evening. “It´s brass monkeys out there”, smiles Engels. In a remote corner of the northern part of the wintry Lüneburg Heath rests this cosy country inn called Brookhoff, complete with mill pond and all. The comfy inn has one big advantage tonight: It´s nice and warm inside, the chimney fire is crackling. “Hi, Hansi”, Achim Peters the landlord greets and asks “beer ?”. “Big one, please,” Engels responds, parks his old Rickenbacker guitar at the bar and sits on a bar stool.

This village inn is his pub where he meets local friends and chats about everything under the sun. Once a month he and his musician friend Marius Balan perform here, just two singers and their acoustic guitars, unplugged. During the summers, Hans and his rock band “Park Lane” have already performed outside on an open air stage drawing 600 people or more. The 62-year-old doesn´t do pub crawling through the Hamburg bar scene that often anymore like in the old days when he and his music buddies time and again went clubbing all night long, now he likes the countryside better.

Hans Engels´ youth alternates between Germany and England. He grows up bilingually, spends his young days in the Midlands, goes to school in Germany, then back to England, studies economics and English literature in Hamburg and London. In 1972, he finally settles in Hamburg, finishes his studies and  becomes a vocational school teacher. Making music remains a hobby but he has always been working as an audio narrator and translator (among others for CORDIAL) because of his fascination with languages and literature. In his youth he learned to play the clarinet but then, in 1967, after seeing ‘The Who’, Jimi Hendrix and ‘The Spencer Davis Group’ at the London Marquee Club, he knew what he really wanted to be: a rock musician and a songwriter."

"His breakthrough as a musician and author, though, he doesn´t owe so much to his musical achievements but to the muscial ‘Yesterday’. In cooperation with the drummer Hein Altenbroxter and always encouraged by his wife Lydia, he wrote this 60s musical about a character called Harry Hansen, a failed rock musician from Hamburg. “The chance to make some dough with a musical was one in a million”, Engels says today – but to his and everybody´s surprise it worked.

Initially, in 1997, ‘Yesterday’ was planned to be staged for only 3 months in the Holstenwall theatre close to Hamburg´s famous St. Pauli quarter. It ran for 12 months, however, became quite a success and 88% of the 300 seats were sold out every night in, all in all, more than 400 shows. An attempt to establish the show in the Berlin ‘Metropol’ theatre didn´t go down as well but, back in Hamburg, in the ‘Delphi Showpalast’, the musical made a triumphant comeback.

For a long time Engels has been using CORDIAL cables. His long-time music buddy Arthur Koll, a tech wizard known as ”King Arthur” in the music business, drew his attention to CORDIAL products. ”The CORDIAL guys have always had a unique edge on their competitors”, he says and leaves Achim´s Brookhoff Inn for the Lüllau cold to smoke one of his Dunhill pipes."