Like an angel tired with his lot in the afterlife, Rammstein front man Till Lindemann cuts an imposing figures as he wearily sits down on the stage and stares out at the deserted arena before him. The steel wings that fan out from behind his heavily defined shoulders stretch out six or seven feet in both directions. Despite possessing the physique of a professional wrestler, the vocalist has recently lost weight - about four stone, actually - and the metal contraption parked upon his back appears heavy and uncomfortable. He looks down at his fingers like a model inspecting her nails; only instead of polish his hands are covered by four steel hooks.
"These are butcher's hooks," he says, with what seems to be grim satisfaction. "Usually, there is half a pig hanging from each one of these."
Kerrang! Once described Rammstein's live show as a thing "able to challenge Bonfire Night in Finsbury Park". In their earliest incarnations, concerts would begin with some of the band's members running through the crowd pouring petrol on the floor, which would then be set on fire, occasionally injuring concert-goers and musicians alike. In the intervening years the outfit's predilection for pyromania has been such that fans have coined the phrase "Other bands play, Rammstein burns" to describe the live experience provided by this Berlin sextet. As if to prove that many a true work is spoken in jest, each performance on the band's winter European arena tour will be subject to a two hour examination by fire marshals before a safety certificate can be issued and the show allowed to proceed.
"There are flamethrowers onstage that come within one metre of your head," says drummer Christoph Schneider in answer to the question of just how hot does it get on Rammstein's stage. "If you're in front of them for too long it really is unbearable. You come offstage almost with sunburn. Your skin is actually red."
When people come and see you live, do you want them to leave awestruck?
"Yes," he answers. "We want to go further than even people would expect us to go. People would be satisfied with less - the music is strong enough and the band are good enough to succeed with less theatrics - but we as a band would not be satisfied with that. We're always looking for more."
At 2:45PM Rammstein find themselves in Cologne, onstage in the vast empty space of the Lanxess Arena, The previous night the band - whose line-up is completed by guitarists Richard Z. Kruspe and Paul Landers, keyboard player Christian 'Flake' Lorenz and bassist Oliver Riedel - performed here to 20,000 people, and tonight they will do the same.
Beneath their feet is a stage constructed from sheet steel, moulded into grilles, like the walkways of a foundry. This platform cost 1.1 million euros (approximately 1 million GBP) to construct. Above and behind them is the lighting rig which, too, cost around 1.1 million euros to manufacture and alone weighs 36 tons. Parts of the stage are scorched black by the flames that come flaring through the grilles. Pyrotechnics and fuses are embedded into the metal, one every few steps. It is, almost literally, a minefield.
Richard comes wandering over. Around his waist hang two bullet belts; two smaller belts are strapped around one of his thighs. In his hand he holds a lit cigarette.
K! wonders if it's wise to be smoking with all these fireworks about...
The guitarist looks around the place, raises his eyebrows as if such a notion had never before occurred to him. He looks at the fuses poking like candlewicks from the grilles in the stage connected to the explosives embedded within. He looks at the giant canisters of CO2 behind him and to his side, and at the mixture of flour and water that will later help propel the flames into the air and out into the audience.
Richard shrugs. "There're so many pyrotechnics around here, what difference is one little cigarette going to make?"
A little while later, after another cigarette, Richard reflects on Rammstein's incredible live shows. Talked about in equal measures as the band's music itself, he is conscious of perceptions. "Sometimes our stage show, it feels like a curse," he explains. "There is no way that you can go back, no way to make things smaller. You always have to go forward, and to make things bigger. That's the problem we have. I've made my peace with that because at the beginning I was always worried that the show would become more important than the music. But right now I've realised that they are probably a lot of people who are coming [to see Rammstein] who probably don't even really like the music but who want to be entertained by the show. [I realise that's] the reality of how things are. But as a musician I do sometimes feel a little lost. “Today it isn't difficult to see Richard's point, isn't hard to forget that somewhere amid this caravan of chaos are six men who simply write and perform songs. The tour to support Rammstein's "difficult" new album Liebe Ist Fur Alle Da (an album that almost saw the band split during it's making), released in October, engulfs all of that, and makes everything seem insignificant by comparison.
Costing as much as 200,000 GBP per day to keep on the road, the production is ferried from city to city in no fewer than 20 trucks, with the band and crew transported on eight buses. One hundred and 10 people earn their living on this tour.
The working day begins at 5:30am and sometimes does not end until 22 hours later. Crew members grab power naps wherever they can and suck down coffee from a well-stocked catering room. Pyrotechnics are delivered each day to each venue, as well as 330 kilogram’s of the stuff (the legal limit) carried by truck from city to city.
Wherever the tour plays in Europe, it is a big deal. 10,000 people in Lisbon, 12,000 people in London. 40,000 people in Cologne. 48,000 people in Berlin.
"Actually, we were unsure as to whether we should go on tour again," says Oliver, through an interpreter - Christoph and Richard are the only two interviewees who speak English; for the most part Till refuses to speak any language at all to the press. "We weren't even sure whether we should really play live again..."
Why?
"Because it's hard to believe that people are still interested in the music. When you take a break you forget that the audience is out there, and when you come back you wonder if they're still there. I am of course very happy that all these people are coming to see us, but it doesn't seem normal."
Mind you, not that anything about Rammstein does seem normal. But out them in a room and Rammstein are great; they smoke, they laugh, they make fun of themselves, the walk around the dressing room half naked, or dressed in gear that suggests they're off out to get their arses slapped by women wearing 11-inch stilettos.
"I suppose what we do is rather original," muses Paul. "I suppose not everyone does what we do. But that's good; I think the world needs a band like ours."
Stage preparations begin as much as a year before the start of a tour. In the time between the end of the recording of an album and the start of a world tour, the band will meet with set designers - the look of the stage for this tour was overseen by Roy Bennett, who also designed the set for the last Nine Inch Nails production - in order to discuss how the stage will look come opening night. Three months before the tour actually debuts, Rammstein will roll its full operation into Black Box Music, a Berlin rehearsal space of sufficient size to house the band's full stage show. Here the songs and effects will be fine-tuned into purpose. Days before the production is dragged around the world, a dress rehearsal in front of just 150 fans will be staged.
“You can’t just step out [on tour] and do this,” says Christoph. “There are too many people involved in the technical side of the show, too many things that need working out…We also have to figure out what is good and what works as well as what doesn’t work and has to be changed. It helps us work out where the weak points are.”
Can you think of any band whose members are more at risk of physical injury than yours?
Christoph considers this, shrugs his shoulders and says, “No, probably not.”
Rammstein’s road show is, of course, about more than things that go boom in the night. This isn’t just Kiss with a bit of Kraftwerk weirdness thrown in for good measure; it isn’t just fireworks night every night. The point of this is not merely to entertain but also to provoke, even to shock; sex is used in a gratuitous form – at one point Till steers a cock-coloured cement mixer around the stage, from which spurts papier-mâché semen – an violence is presented as humour. On Rammstein’s last tour Flake was “boiled alive” in a giant cooking pot by Till before the singer simulated sodomy on him with a giant prosthetic penis. Being in the firing line is a role the keyboardist sees as being “an honour”. This time out he is forced into a bathtub and then doused in what appears to be white-hot liquid metal.
“A lot of people hate us,” says Christoph, who denies that Rammstein have ever had an idea they are deemed too risqué for public consumption. “They think we’re a stupid band who play around with provocation…[But] we’re artists. We don’t have to explain everything. We couldn’t just make nice music and say nice things – that just isn’t us. You have to have the whole package, and that includes provocation.
“It involves doing weird things, sometimes stupid things, and, yes, sometimes we overdo things.”
There’s a lot of sex in the show, and a lot of sex in the music. And not just good time rock ‘n’ roll sex, but S&M…
“I think that growing up in East Berlin means that something happened with our sexuality,” says Richard. “I think in a way we are really free…[But] I don’t think anyone in the band is heavily involved [in S&M]. Although everyone has tried certain things out, obviously…”
Really, what have you tried out?
“(Laughing) No, that’s private. But I have tried certain things.”
Do you think your show might have inspired some members of your audience to get kinky themselves?
“It’s possible,” he says. “I think people, especially girls, are really sexually attracted [to] the show. I think it turns them on. I think there’s something in there that does get them going.
“There is,” he says, “a lot of sexuality in what we do.”
In every way, Rammstein’s international success in unprecedented. In the past Germany produced rock bands that either mimicked their American counterparts (The Scorpions), aped the sound of New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (Accept) or else thrashed about like Venom or Slayer (Kreator). All of these bands sung in English. But Rammstein are something different entirely, something defiantly foreign and humorously German, and not in the least bit Anglicised. In many ways, the seems like the first band to have the chutzpah to acknowledge the dark shadow that is their country’s recent past and to have fashioned from it something that is art.
Rammstein grew up in the East Side of Berlin, the side that was part of the former Soviet Union. In previous bands the members would have to audition before official committees in order to be granted licenses to perform outside of their home country (Flake’s band, Feeling B, were so bad that a secret police member quietly implied that it might be a good idea for them to defect to The West). Twenty years on and hear they are, the true sound of German liberty. But at last November’s festivities to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – the fault line that for decades ran right through the heart of Europe – it was U3 and not Rammstein that was invited to perform at the famous Brandenburg Gate. In fact, Rammstein were not involved in any way, a sleight that surprises none of the band’s members.
“People in power in Germany have problems with us,” says Richard. “We might actually be too German for Germany. Because of WWII Germany is still ashamed of being German. To say that I’m proud to be a German and that I love making German music is just not possible. But we do that, and some people have problems with that.
“But really,” he says, “there’s nothing wrong with being German. There is nothing to be afraid of.”
But if Deutschland’s powers-that-be remain wary of their country’s most successful musical export, those that make up their audience have no such qualms. Tonight, just as it was last night, this ice hockey arena in Germany’s forth largest city is packed from front to back, just as venues of equal size will be packed all over Europe throughout the tour.
What Rammstein have assembled for their huge audience is truly a sight for wide eyes. No detail has been left to chance. Four point five megawatts of electricity – “enough to power a village, or even a small town,” says Tom, the band’s longest serving tour-hand – powers a band that sounds as if it could itself power a nation. Flake plays while walking on a treadmill, Till sings a song while chopping up plastic dolls, or while wearing his angel wings, or a mask that shoots fire a dozen feet in front of him. There are explosions everywhere, from the side of the stage, from the back, from above; there are jets of fire that rise from six points at the front of the stage, flames thrust from behind the band at their side, and from above their heads. Needless to say, there are no stage divers at a Rammstein show.
But what there is, however, is something authentically German, fabulously original and consistently creative.
“I think the thing about us is that we’re strong enough not to censor ourselves,” concludes Richard. “But you can’t deny that we exist. We are the hidden children of the German Republic…we are the unacceptable face of German music.”
And why is that?
“Because,” he smiles with a glint in his eye, “there’s something dangerous about us. That’s why.”
Thanks for the share, babyduck! You're a duck...funnily enough.
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