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Watch the skies – Metal Hammer Christmas issue

Rammstein awaits Armageddon – Cover Feature
Metal Hammer – Christmas Issue 2001

I’m in America again. Where metal continues its auto-erotic spunk-binge unto death. Where I've just seen New White Hopes No One and American Head Charge reconfigure nu-rawk's bindingly obvious blueprint into ever-more tedious shapes, and mop up a whole new set of fans in Chicago's All-State Arena. I've seen a lot of shows in big windy hangars-with-seats in the US in recent months and there's nothing here in any way distinguishable from anything else I've seen all year.

This is my first trip here since September 11 and the patriotism is overwhelming: flags everywhere, gigantic billboards unironically blasting 'IN GOD WE TRUST’ into the night-sky like some dystopian nightmare and news coverage that cuts from children on hospital beds in Kabul to tips on anthrax hygiene without pausing for breath. The paucity of invention, the smug satisfaction of the crowd and the sheer dullness of the sound and vision is making me fiercely proud of being a European. And then the lights dim. Five men, seemingly clad in the kind of Baco-foil cod-futuristic chic Fritz Lang would be proud of, stalk, no, march onto the stage.

They locate their positions. The one dressed as some kind of mad-lab assistant occasionally performs a deranged Frankenstein hot-she shuffle like he’s possessed by some sort of off-kilter form of physical Tourette’s. They start playing a song called ‘Sonne’ and all hell breaks loose. The music is incredible, a colossal grind of incisive riffs backdropped by gorgeous welters of synth, the words in a tongue you can hardly decipher, but clearly animated by longings deeper and more desperate than any of the pasteurised rage that’s bored you to death so far. Oh yeah, and the lead singer is on fire. They don’t let up for the following half hour, a quite staggeringly execute combination of theatrics, comedy, real poignancy, heart-stopping emotion and sheer blistering pyrotechnics quite unlike anything you’ve ever seen on stage before. And you haven’t felt this way in a long time, since maybe the first time you saw Marilyn Manson; they’re that big a rupture in your day, that dizzying a conflagration and immolation of their sources, that suggestive a detonation of all your ideas of what rock’n’roll contain. They’re Rammstein and I’m starting to think they’re the most intriguing, fascinating band on the planet.

In a sense, talking to Rammstein seems superfluous: there’s a white hot conviction, a head-splitting sense of confusion to the best moments of their set that tells you all you need to know, or perpetuates the fabulous paradoxes they chew up and spit out, depending on where you stand.

Nonetheless, when you meet them, you’re surprised to see just how far from the truth every depiction of them as uncooperative oddballs is. Because they’re utterly charming to a man. Definitely way more thoughtful than any other band on today’s bill, yet not so po-faced about what they do to not be disarmingly honest about their own inherent absurdities.

"Of course given recent events we were doubtful if we could continue the show over here" admits guitarist Paul Landers. "We weren’t sure if it was entirely safe for us to set fire to things and play songs about death and destruction so soon after America had it in their front room. But I think what September 11 has proved is just how ridiculous much of this music is: it puts all the aggression and talk of carnage and slaughter that exists in metal into context really. Contrast that reality with the slightly childish depiction of metal and I think every band on this bill has to realise the irony. We just feel slightly irrelevant at the moment, slightly behind reality when we see footage every night of long-distance terror. Yeah, we want to get home and return to sanity."

We talk on the Rammstein tourbus, parked in the middle of Illinois. Do they feel isolated on this all-American bill? "Isolation is a way of life for us," says drummer Christoph Schneider. "With the Family Values tour, nobody knew how to deal with us, they had this kind of innate curiosity about us that we played on completely. On this tour we feel more isolated musically because I really don’t think there’s a lot of similarity between what we do and what Slipknot do. We’re for romantics, grown-ups. They’re more for, how can I say, for kids? Younger people. And I think the young despise us. Because we’re not all about telling the world to fuck off. We grew out of that about a decade ago." Indeed what strikes you straight off is how totally unlike any other band I’ve interviewed in metal Rammstein really are: the uniqueness goes from the ground up. In deed, intent and sound Rammstein are utterly divorced from the rest of the metal and rock planet.

"We never fitted in where we were from. Really we’re dimly aware of what’s going on in the rest of music. When we left all the bands we were in and joined Rammstein we gave up a normal life. Everything has to be surrendered to this project, to make this vision a reality." Explains keyboard player Flake.

"I don’t know how to act offstage, once the persona I adopt is jettisoned and I have to return to reality I feel strange, adrift. We’re like actors, every night becoming these characters who are so much more confident and sure than any of us are as people. But because it gives us the opportunity to do so much, suck up all our history as people and spit it back out, parody it, take it all to extremes and let it explode: we’re addicted to it. Whether other people get every nuance is their problem. We know what Rammstein means to us."

Indeed, the relationship between Rammstein and their audience is and interesting key to their aesthetic. In Germany, singing in their native Deutsch, the ambiguity of their songs, the romanticism and tortured sexual dialectic can survive intact. Aren’t they worried about how open they are to misinterpretation overseas?

"I think to American audiences we’re simply a spectacle some of the time," admits Paul. "That’s fine but sometimes it can be a little patronising: ‘oh here come the wacky Europeans with their silly costumes.’ Of course, the costumes and the fireworks are as much fun for us as anyone else but for us they’re also part of the whole performance, they’re designed to increase people’s sense of who we are."

"A lot of the time people just think we’ve been beamed in from a mental asylum: they don’t see the coherency of what we do because so much of it seems so contradictory. We’re just being honest about who we are as East Germans, where we’re going." Says Christoph. "That’s what people miss – we’re just not coming from nowhere, there are roots to what we do there’s a lineage to what we’re celebrating."

"I think we refer back to a lot of German music from the past, it’s just that in Germany, even addressing the history of our country, immediately puts people politically on edge. Maybe in about 10 years what we do wouldn’t cause any problems. The Second World War is just a little bit too close to be able to do anything that aesthetically honest or ambitious in Germany without arousing all kinds of paranoid suspicion," says Paul.

"But yes, we refer back to all kinds of German music. Fundamentally, because Germany has been kind of out of the loop of popular music and also culturally disenfranchised after the war. What’s identified all great German music of the past few years has been the desire to create a new musical vocabulary, one honest to the past bust also looking to the future. Look at Stockhausen, Can, Kraftwerk: they all had to invent new musical language to speak in and that’s what we’ve done. And we sing in German not just to increase the ‘exotic’ sound of our records but because our lyrics are crucially important to what we want to give out and we have to feel them in our belly and our guts and our soul and our minds. If we sang in English it would have all the committal and intent of karaoke."

Absolutely: what’s so surprising about Rammstein is that for a band so renowned for the sheer vertiginous rush of the spectacle they bring to the stage, their real heart and soul, the real exposition of their unique method, can be found in their lyrics. Romantic, passionate, shot through with blinding moments of redemption and giddy passages of sexual ambiguity, they’re the best lyrics in rock right now.

"So much is lost in translation," insists Flake. "There’s an ambivalence to the words that you can’t create in any other language. There’s all sorts of things people miss – we refer to great poets of the past: Rilke, Goethe – we have double meanings going on, snatches of playground songs, snatches of innuendo. Like the music, we’re not just loonies, we have roots and sources and influences on everything we do. It’s just that the way we put them together is totally our own."

"So much of rock music is so uninterested in lyrics," snorts Paul. "In rock music you pretty much get just one attitude and it’s always the same chauvinistic bullshit. It’s either ‘I’m a man and I’m going to fuck you’ or ‘I’m a man and no-one wants to fuck me so I’m miserable’. The deepest things get is like ‘what am I here for?’ or other kinds of adolescent bullshit. We’re more like ‘I might not be a man, do you want to fuck me?’ " You have to keep reminding yourself it’s a metal band you’re interviewing. And you keep wondering how an enterprise that’s so decidedly serious can also be so damn humorous. "Of course!" admits Christoph. "When we take a song from conception to completion through all the travails of songwriting, we are thinking about how we’re going to visualise the song in stage. It’s always in that order, even though we are a very visual band, we always start with the music or lyrics. Quite often we’re deadly serious in the ideas we have. The a few months later we find ourselves in stage with flames shooting out of our faces and we wonder, how the hell did this happen? It’s the only thing that keeps us sane I think!"

Irony is not lost on them, you feel. In a sense, Rammstein only makes sense if you think of them as delivered from the bowels of the earth itself, they’re that primal. A proposition that brutally awe-inspiring. At the same time they’re absolutely of their time and place, loaded with socio-historical import. Formed in East Germany, ’94, Rammstein’s emergence from a system of fiercely controlled youth culture to their own free ability to mock that youth culture in newly reunified Germany is crucial to their development. Ask the band what militated towards Rammstein working when all other musical projects had failed and they’re unerring in their ability to nail their own mad method. "We came from a system which would have demonised everything we wanted to do. When we finally go a chance to express ourselves we realised that the expression had to be total, and honest, and taken as far as we could." Says Flake. "As Germans, we felt we wanted to tell the truth about where we were and really kind of simultaneously parody and reflect the true German character."

Which is always going to be prone to misunderstanding, especially when delivered in such inflammatory fashion on stage...

"Yes, but we really don’t care if things go over people’s heads," says Christoph. "Individually we have no insecurity about where we’re from: we’re honest to the point where other Germans just hide their head and stick their heads in the sand. I think that’s true bigotry, when you let the legacy of our history dictate and oppress you. We’re about to go out on stage in front of people who might not understand out lyrics, might not get the symbolism of some of our stage show. That doesn’t matter. You can’t be an artist if you’re endlessly anxious about the potential for misunderstanding: you’ve just got to be confident that your spirit is right, that your integrity is there, and that people fundamentally will get the point, will respond to it because you’re human beings."

And you’re on fire.

"Who can’t respond to that?" Paul says with a chuckle "You asked earlier if it bothers us that a lot of the ambiguity of our songs is ignored or lost when we’re overseas: the thing is, if we didn’t do Rammstein like Rammstein there’d be nothing there at all. We don’t want to hide. As soon as people hear about the spectacle and the visuals, they see it as a way of keeping their distance, of palming us off as ‘eccentric’ or a ‘gimmick’. Then they experience the show and they realise that it isn’t a gimmick for us, it isn’t just a bit of ham acting. We feel immersed in our roles, in our par of the experience, connected to what we’re doing because we’ve spent so long perfecting it. That’s way more intense and personal than someone standing in front of a mic and telling yet another stadium full of strangers about how lonely they feel. Because you’ve got to give the audience something they’re not sure about but are totally sure about at the same time. Because a ‘show’ should be a show."

And just before you think I’m gonna tell you to get all the above printed on t-shirts NOW, I’m as unsure too. A few doubts do emerge, alongside the evangelical urge of the new concert convert. In conversation, Rammstein do make a curious, but complete, kind of sense. The kind of sense, I’m sure the Branch Davidians or People’s Temple made to their disciples, but sense nonetheless. For their part and entirely as you’d expect, the boys in the band seem to be thoroughly well-adjusted, intelligent and committed artists. Or cynical art punks rendered nutzoid by their own insight. Either way, lovely people you’d be glad to meet.

My problems begin a few hours later. I’m watching the show. The feeling throughout is of contradiction, of double motives and eternal quandaries. Is the fact that I feel uneasy necessarily a bad thing? Absolutely not: it’s not the mind-melting feeling of your head blasted this way and that, your eyes and heart and mind and soul all telling you different things at the same time that’s so crucial to Rammstein’s effectiveness. But knowing that they came from East Germany, knowing that East Germany was, and remains home to the most virulent pockets of Nazi nostalgia, how can I view the goose-stepping band, the Riefenstahl-perfect athleticism, the pagan putsch of the pantomime gestures? Of course, Rammstein are aware of that question, play on it, frequently force you to the point where your only response can be laughter, the manic hilarity of watching your whole world come tumbling down. You wonder if this was Rammstein’s only way of precisely avoiding being the victim of their own gag, their insistence on one-upping your expectations and delivering the sucker-punchline to every trap you set up for them. And more often than not, you wonder just how you’re gonna see another rock’n’roll show in your life without kicking down the box office glass and demanding your ackers back.

Cos fuck me, you get a show. What a show. Where the most pyrotechnics always seem to be created and used so half-heartedly, so supposedly reflective of the crazy sense of danger that animates the artist – yet so cripplingly mindful of the safety of the artist involved – they always die like duds. Whereas Rammstein are the Jackie Chans of the metal. Fearless. Reckless. Possibly suicidal. We’ve all seen flames on stage. We’ve all seen fireworks. Until tonight I’d not seen flames leap from a lead singers mouth fully 20 feet across a stage and singe the coat of a mad doctor pianist who happens to be firing a watercannon from his forehead while what feels like a pipe-bomb goes off under his feet. When the wall of flame blows up for ‘Du Hast’, you’re checking your eyebrows for crispy bits. Combined with Till Lindemann’s blood’n’thunder frontman performance (all operatic gesture and the most perfect silhouette in rock), the robotic intransigence of guitarists Paul and Richard Kruspe, and the sheer bloody tallness of bassist Oliver Riedel, for a while, the Rammstein show gives you too much to look at, too much to take in. When you get your breath back and start trying to actually deal with what you’re seeing, what startles you is how as your doubts emerge they get engulfed by the sheet conviction they carry the whole show with. This works, as drama, as eye-cocaine, as rock’n’roll.

"When we were growing up," mused Flake as we wound up a few hours earlier, "listening to Western music was a definite escape. It came from a totally different culture to the one we experienced day to day but it symbolised a kind of genuine artistic freedom. We feel that the only way to get that back, to get that same excitement, is to try and be as unleashed as the music we’ve loved feels.

"The reason you respond in honesty. We just don’t see why honesty should be meek and mild and unambitious and unromantic and dumb. We think rock and roll can deal with a lot of things the rest of society and the rest of the world tries to ignore. That’s an old belief but still a valid one."

Therein lies their truth. Brave new world. As old as the hills. Exactly where we are. Don’t go anywhere.

Neil Kulkarni.

© 2005 Sue Lindemann