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Sounds - July 1997

Two years ago they were only a controversial newcomer band from the new states of Germany. Then David Lynch choose one song of Rammstein as one of the highlights for his psycho-epic "Lost Highway" and the well reflected debut album went right into the German Top Ten. In spite of - or exactly because of - favorite topics like sexual murder, inbreeding and anguish which are subjects of the songs of the new album "Sehnsucht" Nevertheless, ME/Sounds met some really nice, completely normal guys.

Interviewer: When journalists are writing stories about Rammstein there are always using adjectives like "controversial, fascist-like, violence-glorifying." Can you live with that?
Richard : We only figure violence in our shows and use it in our lyrics. We are strictly against real violence or the propagation of it. Every kind of music responds to one cliché in the head of a journalist. Rammstein's got this hardness, those metal-guitars. Immediately, these clichés come to one's mind: long hair, short pants, American metal. And then there's a band, that's not like this, that has a completely different, very original kind of appearance - and therefore they are in need of a new cliché. And that's probably something like "controversial."

Interviewer: That's what every artist is telling me in the interview - nobody wants to fulfil a cliché. Your music isn't so much revolutionary.
Richard : But different from similar bands like Krupps or Front 242. Rammstein's original. There's no other band that sounds like Rammstein.
Till : If you listen to neighboring studios, on the left side it sounds like Pearl Jam, on the right side like somebody else you already know. Everybody's trying to do it the easiest way. Richard: Maybe they've never had the chance to learn it because they've always wanted to produce for one market. Even more in West Germany than in our part of Germany. There was no market you had to produce for.
Till : After the wall had been opened, I drove to West Germany and bought gummy bears and yogurt for my salutation money. But there wasn't anything else. Similar with the music: there were so many bands that I wanted to listen to, but one recognized soon that it isn't so much different We used to look forward to a concert for weeks, but now we can go to 30 - 40 concerts every night in Berlin.

Interviewer: The German media's always got problems with hard, somehow German sounding music. Audience and CD-buyers don't seem to have any kind of problem with you.
Till : The problem of the media has also something to do with the lack of a musical tradition and history - and God knows that we don't wanna have to do anything with the German history. After the war, Americans and British made Rock known and besides the German Schlager, there hasn't been anything that had its roots in Germany.

Interviewer: That's also a question of phonetics. Till rolls the "R" deeply and in a swearing way and immediately everybody thinks of the speeches of Göbbels.
Till : The rolling "R" didn't arise deliberately. It originated from itself because in that deep pitch you automatically sing that way. I'm no musician in the actual meaning. I don't know anything about instruments. But I'm supporting our music with my voice and lyrics well. It's a question of illustration, timbre and phonetics. We don't want to - for heaven's sake - create a fascist-like style. Only when already some time had passed we had to deal with that when asked in an interview.

Interviewer: But you don't support David Lynch's movie accidentally with your music and not Walt Disney. His movies were never anything else than Rammstein-subjects put together in a movie, because of his preference for the small bridge between "reason and urge" (from the Rammstein-song "Du riechst so gut") - only his job is movies and not music and that's why he's more likely to be accepted as an "artist".
Richard : Above all he's American. It's not possible that there is a man like Lynch in our country. The only one that comes to my mind is Werner Herzog - in this connection I can imagine Rammstein -pictures.
Till : The Germans have only problems with things in Germany. As soon as something's appreciated international, it will be accepted here as well. We recognized that with David Lynch's movie: German cars, German soccer, German tennis, Formula 1 - there aren't any problems with that stuff. But as long as it is exclusively a thing of this country, there are problems.

Interviewer: The magazine Bravo apparently hasn't any problems with you - they called you "Heavy band with a fire devil as singer."
Till : I love that. My daughter's only 12 years-old and she never understood why I'm often on the road. Now she's able to read the reason for that in her magazine.

Interviewer: Does your daughter listen to Rammstein or rather to boy-groups?
Till : No, she's listening to something else. She doesn't like boy-groups very much, she likes electronic music with melody - Dune and that stuff.

Interviewer: How do you manage being an upbringing father and singer at the same time?
Till : I used to play drums in a punk band and we had our studio in the house where I lived. Seven years I had been an upbringing father, but nowadays I'm sharing the upbringing with her mother, because I'm gone for 6 months of the year with the band.

Interviewer: How does your daughter respond to the lyrics of Rammstein?
Till : She's always giggling. She doesn't understand the extreme things yet.

Interviewer: Children are watching movies and news with similar topics every day without understanding them. It must be similar with your lyrics and your younger fans.
Till : It wasn't our intention to create music for 13 and 14 year-olds. This development got started with Bravo and Viva. But when I think about what is shown on TV in the afternoon, what's written in the newspapers - that's what they have to deal with. Through their idols "Tic, Tac, Toe" they have to deal with prostitution, with drugs. Or with tampon commercials at dinner in which there are little, hidden gestures - why are we supposed to create consternated children?

Interviewer: But in commercials, the menstruation liquid is shown through a friendly light blue liquid. The blood you're using is still blood - deeply red.
Till : First of all, we're doing music for ourselves. And the images which come to peoples' minds are very different ones. Some people don't understand the lyrics, but they might like the music and just let it flow. On the other hand, one girl just recently told me that she played the role of that hooker in our song Seeman at a performance - that hooker that stands at the lamp.

Interviewer: And you're, of course, never talking about her in the lyrics...
Till : Do you want me to explain to her that the song's not about a hooker, but about this and that? It's her image, her story to that song.

Interviewer: When you're singing about sadist-masochistic phenomenon in songs on your new album like "Bück Dich" or "Bestrafe mich," the images are already created.
Richard : Yesterday we were at friends and had a discussion about Rammstein. There also was a young pastor who was terribly upset about Rammstein and above all about the lyrics of Bück Dich. He complained that every day more people in his youth community are listening to Rammstein and therefore would walk onto the wrong path. It got later and later, they drunk more and more and then it became clear that the pastor was the only one that's practicing that Bück Dich kind of sex and that he's the only doing that with a different woman every night.

Interviewer: The church, above all the Catholic Church, has got its own institutions which deal intensively with Rammstein-topics: inbreeding, sin and punishment, the devil. In contrast to that, those anti-authoritarian education models of the post-68-movement, of the Lutheran discussion groups, seem to have failed, because of the denying of the existence of the evil. How do you educate your own children?
Till : There's a difference between both things. I try to separate Rammstein from my private life as well as I can. It's the same with those fire effects on stage. I'm no pyro-maniac. In private life, I never start fires. Like Richard buys the latest music equipment, it's my job to care about those pyro-effects at the show. We're a band that does its job. Who knows us in private life can't believe that we're so nice. We're completely normal, we're doing our job like fishing men that go out of their cabins in the morning, give their children a kiss, go out on the sea, catch some fish with their nets and come home in the evening. Their children go out with them on the sea sometimes and our children join us to concerts sometimes. But if they're watching their father killing some fish, they soon will recognize: that's my father's job. If they're growing up with that, they can live very well with that, because they are able to separate things.

Interviewer: That's better than to hide before the child, that the meat on his plate was once a living pig that has been killed.
Richard : Just like the child of a porn actress may one day watch his mother on TV performing a sex-scene and may ask himself where his father is. He will learn to handle that as well.

Interviewer: If every artist lived his insanity in his private life as well, there would only be insane people in the Top 100. But: do your lyrics at least help you with fighting against your own hidden demons?
Till : That happens. Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness - you're drinking another glass of wine and you're feeling even worse. Art doesn't work without pain, art also exists for compensating pain.

Interviewer: Being one of the most successful metal bands of Germany, you're going to suffer too little to nourish your art.
Till : Above all, we don't have the time to suffer.

Interviewer: Except the hours after the concert.
Till : Then you're feeling really fucked up. You're doing a concert in front of 16,000 people in Berlin, then you're driving home from the studio with your bicycle, because those after show-parties aren't much fun, then you're sitting alone at home and you have to calm down. That's like a hang over.

Interviewer: At those moments, your self-help group for upbringing fathers seems to fail?
Richard : Those times are over. If you're every second together for 2 years, you know all this whining by heart.

Interviewer: Hartmut Engler from the band "Pur" states that he, even playing the 67th concert, tries to put all his emotions in his singing.
Till : Sure, he's always crying then. Nonsense! That's what all people are saying! Maybe at the beginning, at the first 2 concerts. Then it's only routine. When Seemann was new, I often felt a kind of shiver. But then you care more about the intonation.

Interviewer: Many songs of you remind me of old Italian cowboy movies. Who is the Enrico Morricone fan of Rammstein?
Richard : That's me.
Till : He likes this old cowboy-music and the movies.

Interviewer: In that sense, Rammstein's like Karl May - you don't have to murder, ravish and dishonor on your own, to create lyrics about mangling, abusing children and inbreeding?
Till : That's exactly the point: you're talking about mangling, abusing children and inbreeding. I wish people would talk about such topics in a much more sensitive way. My daughter's in an age in which something like that could happen to her in reality - maybe already tomorrow. And that's why I dare to imagine how this would be like. Would my daughter be a victim, I'd cut one of the balls of the perpetrator off or shoot him or something like that. On the other hand, I can sit down in the dark somewhere in a corner of the room and think about what made him do that. And about what made me imagine and maybe understand his urge. These are the two sides: on the one side is the reason, the moral, my perfectly normal life - that's out of question for myself. But then I'm sitting down, I'm closing my eyes and I'm thinking about - for example - that moment the day before yesterday when I felt a particular desire for that adult woman - why shouldn't a person feel such a desire as well, somebody who can't be blamed for because he had been abused in his childhood as well. And he might not be able to judge on what it means to feel that kind of desire for a child. In which way are you going to valuate on that?

Interviewer: In the last years, child abuse has become a subject for the media - and one's frightened by how many people had been abused in their childhood. On the other hand, you still will be confronted with reproaches that state that your lyrics deal less with mental disorder and moral, than with the problem how to deal with the inner strife between reason and urge.
Till : No, no. Insane is insane. There's no need for discussion. And if it wasn't insane, we wouldn't need psychiatric hospitals. But more important is the question why and how something like this happens. Otherwise, only the lawyers are interested in that - who dig in their clients' past to plead insanity. I've lived at the countryside for many years and one day a horse ravisher had nearly been lynched on the street - I felt really sorry for him.

Interviewer: The line between normal life and madness isn't clear, there are really bad things happening every day behind every 5th window.
Till : If it is every 5th. Probably behind every 3rd. And that's why it makes me sad that lyrics about things that are happening every day, cause so much trouble. For example, on Malta we had a listening session with Petra Husemann and Tim Renner of our record company. And at the line "mit dem eigen Fleisch und Blut sich paaren" from the song "Tier", Renner immediately told us that we couldn't use that - this would be a case for the censor lists, like everything in Germany will be, which deals with sex with animals, inbreeding and so on. I don't understand it - you can regularly read statistics about that even in the Bild. And in spite of that, people are pretending such things wouldn't exist.

Interviewer: And then you've changed the lyrics?
Till : Nope. We make it their object.

Interviewer: I'd never been interested in Rammstein, until my wife started to play your CD again and again. On the other hand, feminists reproach you for sexism at its worst.
Richard : We've heard that many times that women are the ones who made their husbands interested in Rammstein. Petra Husemann, the wife of Tim Renner (Rammstein's records' boss), the girlfriend of our manager Emu, many wives and girlfriends of journalists. Men are more likely to have a problem with us than women.

Interviewer: Maybe that's because you look better and have more muscles than most men in the media.... Richard: That's because Rammstein scares many men, because they recognize many traits or character features in our lyrics which they have in themselves, but which they've displaced.

Interviewer: You mean, you confront those men with the beast inside of them?
Richard : The beast, yeah, sure. Many things. One kind of being like a macho when we're singing about "Wildern im Revier."
Till : The sexism that we are reproached with, is more a taking care of the woman for us.

Interviewer: I don't understand.
Till : We want to understand the feeling of the woman and want to show them in that extreme way, how they're really existing. Yesterday, a journalist asked us why we don't write love songs. Love is only that short moment. But afterwards, the actual working part starts. The continuing misery: to find one another, to fall in love, to stand each other for a certain amount of time, then to hold out, and then everything's starting again.

Interviewer: Do you know more about women than about men?
Till : No, not at all.

Interviewer: Maybe that's the reason that you can't imagine woman and man living together happily forever?
Till : I don't know any relationship that works. Maybe 1 or 2, but there the circumstances aren't normal - they don't meet each other often. I'm talking about this: leaving the house in the morning and bringing the children into their beds in the evening. Are they still going to the theater, is someone still giving flowers as a present? This being in love, giving flowers to your spouse, there's a day when you stop doing this.

Interviewer: Therefore the consequent "Nein" to the female marriage wish on your new single "Du hast"?
Till : "Willst du bis der Tod euch scheidet...." - that's just as unnatural as a tattoo on your arm. This will stay for the rest of your life. One day my grandchild will sit on my lap and will ask me what for a silly thing I got there on my arm.

Interviewer: Rammstein seems not to want to live completely without women. You created a hymn on the female primary sexual organ. How do you call that when you want to play that in the studio?
Till : Sometimes we're saying: "Let's play the cunt!" That's what you wanted to hear, huh?

Interviewer: The title of this song "Küß mich, Fellfrosch" sounds more tender.
Till : Let alone the word Fellfrosch is an homage to this body part. That's a beautiful, childish point of view: Fell stands for small, furry animals, hamsters, guinea-pigs and so on. And Frosch oder Schnecke cares about the 2nd part. Fascination and disgust, both things are playing a role in it.

Interviewer: Maybe the disgust to that bitter taste is only a problem of the lacking hygiene of your girlfriends?
Richard : Taste changes within the years. Many things that we judged to taste bitter in our childhood, taste well in our opinion nowadays. In contrast to this, the bonbons from then, taste too sweet for us today. Every Fellfrosch tastes differently. It's a matter of taste. There's no rating in those lyrics. We don't say that it stinks.

Interviewer: Feminists won't think about it the way you do. This will cause trouble.
Till : I hope so! That's again the same topic like before: it's a matter that's completely self-evident, that everybody knows. That's the most normal thing on earth. Exaggerated feminism is stupid. And if they get upset, it'll be only a proof for their lack of humor. Recently, someone told me a joke about a 40-cm-dick. It was a woman.

© 2005 Sue Lindemann