Udo Dirkschneider is Accept's classic voice and one of the most recognisable in European heavy metal. Born in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1952, he fronted the band from 1976 to 1987 and again between 1992 and 1996. His voice is a successful anomaly. Dirkschneider does not sing in a high register and has no operatic range — his delivery is a rough, almost torn snarl that sounds permanently on the edge of maximum effort. There is nothing beautiful about it by any conventional standard, and that is exactly what makes it effective: in the choruses of "Balls to the Wall" and "Fast as a Shark", the aggression comes from the timbre before it comes from the words. It became the most imitated voice in German metal. His image followed the same logic of refusal. Short, stocky and dressed in camouflage fatigues, he was the exact opposite of the rock star figure that dominated the 1980s — a deliberate choice that reinforced the band's working-class, anti-glamour identity. He left Accept in 1987 and founded U.D.O., which he has led ever since and whose discography is by now larger than the original band's. He returned briefly in the 1990s, and since 2005 the two careers have run separately.
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