Biography

His mother was a well-known concert-singer, thus Thilo-Martinho's concert and stage life started even months before his birth.

At the age of 7 he started playing piano; when he was 14 he added bass and; later on, drums. When he was 19 years old, a friend gave him a guitar.

Three years later he gave his first concerts as a guitarist. And shortly thereafter Thilo was on his way in the German and European Club-scene; he also had his first gigs at folk festivals and performed about 80 to 100 concerts a year. The music he played at that time with acoustic steel-string guitars could be classified as instrumental folk-rock.

In spite of growing success with that kind of music one thing left him increasingly unsatisfied: the limited possibility to "form tone" and to "make strings sing" with steel-string guitars.

In 1985 a Paco de Lucia concert brought a long awaited revelation. Thilo changed to nylon-string guitars and entered the world of classic and flamenco guitar as a relative beginner. Shortly after that he moved to Spain, to Andalusia, and lived for years as a flamenco guitarist in Sevilla and Cadiz.

In the year 1995 came an intense decisive point in Thilo's life that changed everything:
After a genetically caused brain-bleeding and the resulting operation he was hospitalised for a long time and ended up sitting in a wheelchair with hemiplegia. His doctors told him that he might not be able to walk again. He was given no hope of resuming guitar playing, the motor activity of the right half of his body was lost. During the following years, a time he would not like to miss, he learned an invaluable lot, he even learned to heal himself.
And: He started to sing! And in the shadow of his voice step by step the guitar came (and is still coming ) back.

The Spanish world and Latino world and its mentality, life style and expression not only left traces in Thilo Martinho, they still are an inner home, and truth for him.
That's why a big part of his repertoire is of Spanish and Spanish speaking Musica Latina.
Another big part of his program is Brasilian Bossa Nova in Portugese . But of utmost importance for him are his own songs, songs in English and more and more in German (!) language. These songs fit well in a multi-lingual picture, since he doesn't just run through his program, he always works to make his listeners feel the essence of "the music of the south".
And the main reason is: the music even of his German songs is LATIN.