RAMMSTEIN COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED IN THE WEST

I think it all started when Olli left the Inchtebokatables. And that was only because Richard hinted at the possibility of "having a band together". That was half a year before Rammstein started. The Inchtebokatables were pretty successful in the East, at least three to four thousand people turned up for each gig. Everyone was shaking their heads, saying "how stupid are you"? Olli didn't know what was lying ahead of him, no-one did, really. At the time, Till was still living in the countryside, weaving baskets and singing along to it. Flake and me were driving down on weekends to see him and relax. We always heard him singing but never really thought: Till can sing. Richard then though – let's just try it out. Which, years later, turned out to be a good idea. Schneider, Flake and me had just returned from America from a few small club gigs as "Feeling B". Somehow our stay in the States had set something in motion, at least we started to experiment with electronic loops/ Flake bought himself an AKAI sampler with an internal sequencer and we practised playing along to the electronics. It felt good to play with a machine. Independently, Schneider started playing with Richard, Olli and Till in Berlin.

The first few times they practised in English – Modern American metal. With this line-up they recorded four tracks and won the senate's competition. You get a week's worth of studio time and the chance to record your songs properly. By that time I had already joined, although Schneider wasn't very happy about that. Because I'm not an easy guy to get along with. I can be pretty annoying, but without a fight, without the heat. Anyway. The lyrics were all in English. Then Flake said: "I'll only be part of this if we do it in German." Flake completed our circle and all of a sudden we switched over to German lyrics. We were all united by the urge to cause trouble. Music that creates a commotion and rubs people up the wrong way. At the same time we wanted it to be danceable and stomping. The trouble element didn't really have anything to do with our heritage. All of us had been in bands before where everything was perfect and ran smoothly. But that's just boring. And then there was the West to think of. Our punk bands came across as more ridiculous than dangerous over there. At that time punk meant very little in the West anymore and we didn't cause confrontations as we did in the East. Schneider, Flake and me wanted to get back to that, to cause trouble again. Which we managed to do quite successfully with Rammstein later on. In the beginning we just practised and created a huge racket for hours. Real noise. Simply letting off steam. As loud and deep as possible. From this sprang the first text syntheses. "White Flash", for example, turned into "Weisses Fleisch". The name Rammstein was down to Schneider, Flake and me. We just thought we should have a band called "Rammstein-Flugschau" (flight display).

In our overall cocky euphoria, the name as mentioned a few times and somehow stuck, although some in the band thought it was stupid. Which now they obviously don't remember. Anyway, the name stuck like a nickname. "Flugschau" was a little to long, but we liked Rammstein and it suited the music, too. During our first live show, again, some said "Well, maybe we should wait awhile, practise some more and then play Berlin in front of a thousand people." Others thought "Let's drive to the next village and play there." Funnily enough it was Flake's brother (who played in a comedy band) we ended up asking if we could come along and then spontaneously drove to Leipzig with. There we played in front of 12 people, 10 of which were in the band that we had travelled up with. Till was wearing two pairs of sunglasses on top of each other and we just stood there – we weren't afraid but had no clue if the vocals were loud enough, if they could be heard in the venue at all. We only noticed: Till's voice is deep. But somehow they liked just that. The soundman was extr emely enthusiastic, he said "God, I've never heard anything like it". I felt a bit funny about that because I'd never had another band's soundman come up to me before, saying something like that. It was a reaction I wasn't used to. That was our first concert. At that time we still wore a workers outfit, like Metallica in their most recent phase – white shirts, black pants, DAF-style, just like workers really, which I though was pretty cool. All our relationships with women fell apart and all of a sudden we were single again.

On your own, you have time to make music. There was space and scope to really get started. We sat around and had breakfast together every morning. One of us would go off to buy mincemeat, another would get bread rolls and we always had a mince breakfast and then went on to make some music. I will never forget the first concerts. Somehow we were destined to attract attention, and not just for attention's sake. But we were driven by something else. I would call it the Rammstein force. And this is what happened: now, there were maybe 100 people milling around in the venues, but with capacities of up to 1000 there's still a lot of space left over. So we cranked up the dry ice, turned down the lights, I donned a hooded shirt and picked up a petrol canister that we'd bought at a service station. Then, disguised by the fog, I'd run around between people, carefully tipping out the petrol. Once I was finished, I signed to the stage and they started the first song. Till had a small firework at hand and, during the first bar, shot it into the audience to ignite the fuel. To start things going. That was pretty standard for us and got people into a good mood. Somehow everyone, no matter if it's a record company idiot or your average person, yearns for a good band. Everyone's excited when they see an interesting band and everyone loves a good surprise. In the same way, everyone's glad to survive an accident. It's a great feeling. Human beings yearn for action and a little craziness and that's what we gave people with that show. Afterwards we did a sales tour. Basically these shows were not open to the public but closed affairs only attended by record distributors and dealers from that area. The dealers told us "Stop doing that petrol thing". Which set off a mechanism – now we simply had to do it. No idea why. Anyway, the next day we did it again and unfortunately a woman from a record shop in Munich caught on fire. She was wearing a nylon dress. It singed away and burned her legs and she had to go to hospital.

 The record company tried to make it up to her with a free holiday. Afterwards they told us again – if we repeated it one more time they'd send us home. Strangely enough we did it again. This may sound as if we were just being contrary, but somehow there was no other way, we simply had to do it. Some day there was a memorable sales meeting. Where once a year all the industry people meet and rink till they drop. As a guest it can be really boring to watch the record companies laboriously present their new products. And no-one's interested. We had to attend one of those and play a silly dog stage in a small castle pub, wood panelling and all. Till and Flake quickly took the neon light across the bar and smashed everything to bits. Then everything started burning and that instantly put us in a good mood. All of a sudden everyone was happy, even those fat, sluggish dealers who might just as well have been working in the car industry. We often notice that, unconsciously, we clean out the blocked drains around us. The average Western band is commercially oriented. They want to sell records, just like everyone else. The opportunism ruling these bands can be merciless, 95% just do what they are told, they simply adjust. We're all from the GDR. Over there a totally different reference and value system applies. It's always looking for boundaries. Not for the sake of provocation but confrontation. That, I think, is the truly exciting thing about it. Provocation per se tends to be boring. It exposes itse lf and is too artificial. Two questions are of importance to us: "what are the others up to?" Because there was no need to repeat what's already being done, and secondly "what is it that the others are getting wrong?" This was our starting point, a very simple premise, but hard to put into practice. Before Rammstein we were all fairly normal. Suddenly all the bands that we knew sounded really bad. It was strange. It was as if someone had flipped a switch in your brain. You can only be better than the rest if you regard the acceptable and the average as bad. All of a sudden you hear the inadequacies. I noticed bad chord changes, bad lighting on stage, heard bad sounds, bad choruses. I saw truly bad shows. All of a sudden everything seemed bad and it was the same for all of us. It cranked up the quality benchmark for all of us a lot. Such a quality claim does not just come about, either you have it or you don't. Unlike others, for us success wasn't the most important thing. We wanted to make good music. Music and lyrics that would reach many people, that was all we wanted. Nobody who'd ever lived there liked the GDR very much. That was true for me as well. Then I saw the entire polished surface of the West and thought, "it needs to be destroyed". I think the East ha s turned out more individuals. We had more cowards than courageous people, we didn't have the West's level of mediocrity. The East is more the optimistic system. It's not as cold and dead. The East is more like the drunkard. It's more original and true to its roots, it contains more life. The East is more tangible and communicative, a lot rougher.

Rammstein could not have happened in the West. Here's another small but important point in our life that's very typical for us. We were following two guidelines: first of all there were gigs in the countryside, organised by old friends, secondly we worked with a record company. We were already playing small village gigs while dealing with the record company. One day we arrived at a venue and the promoter was sitting in the bathtub, pissed out of his head. The PA we had ordered was so dire that our pain thresholds just dropped. We thought "no way, we're not going to make complete fools of ourselves with a silly disco hi-fi, we are not going to do it". But the promoter thought: "well, if the band's already here, they're bound to play". A sentiment that probably wasn't too unreasonable. We, too, were divided on the issue: three of us wanted to go home and three of us wanted to stay. It kept going back and forth. Well, in the end we drove off and played the Knaack club in Berlin instead. That night we met our current manager. If we hadn't done it, we might still be playing village halls today. But that's the way our career has always worked out, we've always done stuff that shouldn't be done. For example when we went to MTV London. When we arrived we were treated like then lowest of the low. We set up and straight away got into trouble for our pyrotechnics. First they said, "you can use them", then they changed it to "no fireworks". So we said, "fine, we'll go". Then they cancelled on us. After that there were voices for and against. We agreed to play two songs. One a straight forward, normal song and during the second one we wanted to cause a little trouble. It was going out live. So we started playing one song was fine, but during the second Till put a few blood capsules into his mouth and spit it all out. They cut us off straight away, right in the middle of the song, and switched over to the news. Afterwards we received a full-on ban for MTV London. Now we're back on the channel – this might sound like we're boasting, but if you have the power to go against the grain, you'll be rewarded in the end.

Paul Landers 

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