King Khan on welfare…

I interviewed King Khan last week for Blurt – and it went pretty well, and I wrote my little story which I’ll probably link later. But I had a word count to fit, and there was some stuff left over, including a little side discussion we had about the song “Welfare Bread”…and how welfare (in Germany) had given King Khan the breathing space to get his music career going, but also enough negativity to push him to do well enough to get off of it.

Here’s the excerpt from the interview:

JK: No, he went into acting instead. He’s doing a lot of that. Anyway, this song “Welfare Bread,” It’s very sweet. It’s a love song to your wife, isn’t it?

KK: Yes, it is.

JK: You guys had some rough economic patches, I guess. Want to talk about that?

KK: We had our first kid when I was 22. It was in Germany, and so we went on welfare for a few years, and actually that helped out. I was able to do my musical stuff. I didn’t have to worry. I needed a kick in the butt and try to make that happen.

JK: Is it better to be on welfare in Germany than in some other places?

KK: Yeah, they’re pretty fair. But they’ve changed everything now. At first, we were living in a small town. When we moved to Berlin five years ago, we went to the welfare office there, and it was like out of a Kafka movie. It was in a huge gymnasium. There was an endless snake of a line. And people were in the line waiting with five children. And all of them crying and screaming, and my wife started to cry. It was really emotional. I knew from that time on, we had to get off of this thing. And it worked. Thank god, for the last five year’s it’s been really good.

And here’s the man himself, singing this kind of touching love song for his wife: