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Kerrang - January 2006

Man of Steel

Till Lindemann is metal's most enigmatic star. Speaking with unprecedented candour, the RAMMSTEIN frontman opens up about porn, punk rock and his subversive past...

Till Lindemann never gives much of himself away in interviews But judging by his band's penchant for storming, industrially-tinged rock'n'roll, you'd assume the hulking, inscrutable voice of Rammstein was just as scary as the music he makes.
Guess again. Right now he's sat within the plush executive suite of London's ultra-swish Sanderson Hotel. A German to English translator sits next to him. Very quietly.
"Oh, hello," says Lindemann, rising to extend a bear-trap handshake. "Have a seat. Would you like some coffee?" Sure. You would probably use some yourself - you've got a busy press day ahead.
"Oh, but we don't mind," he says in baritone English, cracking a faint smile. "We're a German band so how we've had any success is still a mystery to us."

BUT WHAT'S 'GERMAN'? YOU GREW UP IN EAST GERMANY _ A SOCIALIST COUNTRY.
"(Through the translator) It's true. Life before the German reunification (in 1990) was a major influence on us. Our world got much bigger when the wall came down."

DID YOU GROW UP JEALOUS OF THE WEST?
"Oh, yeah, it was all about blue jeans and Matchbox cars, but that wasn't the worst of our deprivation. Sometimes we could pick up radio stations from the West, but we felt so cut off because it was forbidden. We'd secretly tape the radio but what we were doing was very illegal. There was a black market for albums from non-socialist countries but they'd cost an entire month's salary."

WHAT GROUPS DID YOU COVET?
"Kiss was a big one, and one of the most exciting moments of my life was when Rammstein supported them. Growing up they were such a totally forbidden group with all that blood, and then they made the '55' in there name look like the 'SS' that Nazi officers would wear - a huge taboo. People would secretly carry little pictures of them, which was a huge no-no (laughs)."

SO THEY WERE AN INFLUENCE? "(Suddenly speaking in fluent English) Of course. That's because of what they meant in East Germany. (Switching back to German) In the States the average American has absolutely no clue about history so they don't understand how provocative 'SS' or Nazi helmets can be. It's their total inability to know anything about history, to have any idea what that's really saying. For them it's just a prop."

SO RAMMSTEIN IS ABOUT PROVOCATION?
(Shaking his head) "It's not so much provocation. It's breaking taboos in order to have an impact. That's punk rock. Banging a spoon on a table is provocative in a country where that's prohibited. Punk rock's about risk and it's all relative to where you are."

SO YOU HAD TO AVOID THE AUTHORITIES GROWING UP?
"It was very bizarre in those days. If you were in a band you'd have to appear before a state commitee abd play you entire set for approval, after which you'd get a licence to play exactly that and nothing else, no improvisation or else you'd get into a big trouble. Even what you'd say between songs needed approval, so speaking politics was out of the question. You could chatter with the audience, but anything else was untouchable."

BUT YOU PLAYED IN A PUNK BAND, FIRST ARSCH, BEFORE THE WALL CAME DOWN...
"Yes, and it was incredibly fun but it smacked of danger. We'd find abandoned buildings outside the city or empty factories and set our equipment up on a trailer so if we got discovered we could get out in a hurry. There'd be word-of-mouth news of the day that there was going to be a gig wherever. You'd set up spies and lookouts for police and remember, we didn't have mobiles in those days so it wasn't easy. (Smiling nostalgically) We'd give ourselves 90 minutes to set up, play and then fuck off in all directories."

YOU MUST FIND PLAYING ROCK BORING NOW THAT IT'S LEGAL.
"No, but it's all very different today. A lot gets bounced around about provocation, but that sense of excitement and tension doesn't really happen in a culture that accepts what you're doing. Green Day are a really good band, but that crackle just isn't there. (In English)"The true spirit of punk is gone. It died with the Sex Pistols and now it just doesn't have a soul because there's no resistance to it."

WERE YOU EVER ARRESTED? "No, but we were very smart about it. We'd go to the Cultural Department saying we wanted to do a big big artistic event with movies and paintings and some music to camouflage it as a multicultural event. They were like, 'Oh, culture, good'. And then we just got a bunch of bands together and let them play three songs. That subversiveness had a big effect on what I do now."

BUT YOUR FATHER WAS A POET AND YOUR MOTHER A WRITER - SURELY THAT WAS ALSO A FACTOR... "Yes, but at a much earlier age. My original plan was deep sea fishing, so my dad very gently told me, 'Do you want to think about this? Maybe do some studying, look at art...'. He was really pissed with me. His power of observation, the fact that he'd leave notebooks all over the house or he'd dissapear into the wodds for inspiration - I wasn't interested in it at the time. But it stayed with me. I told him I could always go back and be an author. In a way I did."

YOU WERE A CHAMPION SWIMMER BUT GOT THROWN OFF THE TEAM. SOME SAY IT WAS A TORN MUSCLE, OTHERS SOMETHING MORE SINISTER...
"We were at the Junior European Championships in Florence and we climbed down the fire escape in the middle of the night to look for these little sex shops to find porno magazines. For an East German boy that was a dream, to see some porno magazines because they were prohibited (laughs). The coaches weren't at all happy about that."

DID YOU LOCATE THE PORN? "No, which was a huge disappointment. In the village I grew up in there was this kid who had the one and only porno picture. It looked like the map from 'Treasure Island' (he rips a page out of our translator's notebook and crumples it up). This bit of paper that had been folded over, touched, felt, and fingered by countless boys. It was so faded you had to hold it up to the light to get anything and it was kept in this little plastic folder. And he was always like, 'You want to look? Okay, buy me a lemonade. That's too long, now give it back'."

© 2006 Sue Lindemann