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A day in the life... Christian ‘Flake’ Lorenz – Kerrang! Magazine

The German metallers' eccentric keyboard player can still remember the days when the band toured in a bus and couldn't afford hotel rooms. Let him take you for a stroll through Rammstein's history books...
“The Day I’d like to tell you about happened three years ago, but is quite similar to the life the band still leads today. I met for breakfast with the rest of the group for a meal of minced meat, which is all we ever eat. By that I mean raw minced meat. It's like a steak tartar, a typical Berlin dish that is a mixture of beef and pork with egg. That's the Rammstein meal of the day.

“Using the bus we drove off - we could all fit together in one bus with our instruments in those days - to a Gasthof (big German pub) in the east of Germany, which is open all day and would be full regardless of which band happened to be playing there. So when we got there the audience was already drunk. We'd be fed a typical meal of meat and potatoes - brawn food. We'd have a little walk to digest it all and then we'd do the concert. But it was so hot and so humid that my keyboards just wouldn't operate, because the conditions were so damp and humid. I remember the guy who set the show up had to get a hairdryer from his flat to dry off the keyboards while we were playing.
"There's no curfew at these types of places and no backstage area, so we had a drink and had a big party type of thing going on. Then we took the bus up to the mountains to go to another party, but unfortunately that was already over by the time we got there. So instead we set up our party in the middle of the road. We had candles on the bus, turned up the radio up and had a great time on our own.

"What was unusual about those days was that we'd tend to stay the night with people who had come to the concert, rather than in hotels, as we do now. These people had told us to go to this street and they'd simply said, 'Well, you'll be staying at the house with the grey fence'. But when we got there it was all locked up, which seemed odd. So we climbed over the fence and the door was also locked. By this time we're thinking, 'What peculiar hosts these are!'. So I took off my shoes and climbed up the wall at the side of the house; climbed up to the window, through the window, down the staircase and I simply unlocked the door from the inside of the house and let everyone in.
"So then we went up to our rooms. Thing was, the rooms weren't very nice - there were no beds, nothing had been prepared - and the whole thing was just really odd. I remember thinking,’ How cheeky! These people invite us to stay at their house and disappear!'. So we laid down as best we could, but all of a sudden there was this great big noise and these nine young people came barging in and starting yelling how they were going to kill us and murder us and how we were in their house and what the hell did we think we were doing there?
"Well, of course, we didn't know what to do. So we were rushing around trying to get out as fast as we could, all panicked and everything, not knowing what was going on. What was going on, of course, was that there were two houses with grey fences and we'd gone in the wrong house! We'd gone into the one where people had no idea who we were and what we were doing there. It's no wonder they were so annoyed with us.
'The only problem was that we left in such a hurry that I left my shoes behind. Fortunately, on the way home we visited a petrol station that had shoes for sale. Unfortunately, we had no money to buy the shoes. So we stole them. "I don't want you to think that we stole them at random. I did try a pair on first to make sure they fitted me okay and looked okay, and then we took them outside and Till (Lindemann, Rammstein vocalist) tucked them under his coat and simply stole them.
"That, 1 have to say, was quite a typical day for our band back then. Still is.'


Sound Tracks
Five Records which make Flake’s day...
Johnny Cash ’Solitary Man’ (Columbia, 2000)
Linton Kwesi Johnson ‘More Time’ (LKJ 1998)
MC 900ft Jesus - anything (Sony)
Coldplay ‘Parachutes’ (Parlophone, 2000)
The Sex Pistols ‘Never mind the Bollocks’ (Virgin, 1977)
Kerrang!Issue of 25 August 2001

© 2005 Sue Lindemann