CANNIBALISM, DEATH, RUBBER FETISHES...
These are just some of the topics covered on Lindemann’s compelling new record. But from the men who are the main brains behind Rammstein and Hypocrisy, you shouldn't be surprised.
meant to be. We were very disappointed, because we knew Woodstock was looming, but at the time it was just a rumour that it was going to be that big. Festivals were still quite a new thing. We did a few gigs with Hendrix that were open-air. He was always good to me. He’d always say to Jeff: “Let the bass player have a solo.”
A big part of the Faces’ appeal was that from the outside you looked like a tight-knit gang that everybody wanted to join, a band of brothers. What went wrong? We were a band of brothers, and we did love going on the road. Didn’t like the recording studio much. Everybody was jangling their keys as soon as they walked in, and that was our downfall. We should have spent more time on the creative side. I learned that from the Stones. That’s how they’ve maintained their high standard, all the time spent songwriting and in the studio. As a live rabble the Faces had great camaraderie between us, but we knew it wasn’t going on forever because the management structure favoured Rod’s solo career. Which we can’t blame him for. Rod was always very good to me, taking me with him, giving me the freedom to play the guitars and bass on his solo albums. I had the best of both worlds there. I was enjoying being in the Faces and on the creative side of Rod’s solo albums. But I knew it couldn’t last forever. Tetsu [Yamauchi] was a real wild card after Ronnie Lane left the band, too crazy, and I was bumping into the Stones more and more often.
Was there anything you heard from Mick Jagger or Charlie Watts in Mike Figgis’s Somebody Up There Likes Me documentary that surprised you? It was nice to hear Charlie say that Mick never gave up on me. I thought: “That’s lovely”, and it made me look back, and Mick has supported me through lots of times when I was trying to straighten up. He was very supportive of my rehab stuff.
Admitting you’re an addict is one thing, but cleaning up? It’s a very individual thing. It’s a realisation that: “Oh God, this is going to kill me if I carry on.” It’s basically common sense. Some people didn’t have that cut-off valve, and they just carried on until their body shut down. I wanted to stop before my body shut down. It was purely a selfish decision to save my life. I cleaned up merely to stay alive [laughs].
Is life within the Stones’ bubble akin to living a life in suspended animation, where no one need ever get old? My brain stopped telling me : “You’re getting older” around thirty. I remember my fortieth birthday, my fiftieth, milestones, but even then I was like: “I’m not forty”… Seventy-two? Forget about it!
Your lung cancer diagnosis must have turned your world upside down; you’d only just become a father again, to your twins. The outcome was ultimately positive but it must have been a terrifying period. Yeah, in the few days of not knowing, I thought: “Oh dear. Well, I’ve had a good innings.” When I got the news it could be removed and that there’s no cancer in the rest of my body, I was like: “Somebody up there likes me even more!” After all the years I smoked so heavily, to just get off with cancer in the left lung that they were able to remove was just fantastic, a blessing.
“As a live rabble the Faces had great camaraderie, but we knew it
wasn’t going on forever.”
You’ve given up the fags now, but quitting any addiction is especially hard if you don’t find new challenges to fill the void.
Yeah, I’ve got twin headaches now. I need eyes in the back of my head looking after Alice and Gracie. They’re three and a half, which shows you just how quickly time flies. So apart from the renewed vigour and zest for life the kids give me, the music and the art are still blossoming and spiralling up. As a new challenge I’ve been revisiting childhood influences like Chuck Berry. Playing it live. I’ve found Ben Waters, who’s like Chuck’s piano player Johnnie Johnson. It’s so great to play with him, because he just inspires me.
Will we ever see another Faces live performance? Me, Kenney [Jones] and Rod just did a show at Wentworth for Prostate Cancer, and we got on so well. Everyone loved it, and the vibe afterwards… Rod was blown away, Kenney was lovely. I know we’ll do some more, yeah.
Watching the Stones most recent live performances I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the band are playing better than ever. We are better than ever.
Today’s Stones seem to be making every performance count. After Mick’s heart scare and your cancer scare, it’s maybe as if everybody involved is beginning to see the Stones as a finite entity; not simply carrying on as if it’s an endless party, but treating every performance as something to be truly appreciated. Yeah. It’s brilliant. There’s a great feeling within the band and with the crowd nowadays, I think we’ve definitely got the bug again, we just wanna keep touring. “Let’s go and do some more gigs.” Even Charlie, who was always like: “I don’t know if I wanna go on the road any more.” He’s like: “I’m up for it, whenever you want, let’s go.” Which is great.
And you can absolutely see it in the performances. Keith’s firing on all cylinders as well. That’s what he does.
There was a point in time where there’d be occasional stumbles, but now you can see he’s fully on top of his game, back to being the best Keith he can possibly be. That’s it, another step up to the bar. I’m playing the best I’ve ever played, for some magic reason, and I love it, and I think we’re all raising the bar every time we play now. Not that we didn’t before, but now we’re, like you say, more conscious of… surviving, how lucky we are. With my recent scare and Mick’s scare, Charlie not so long ago, Keith not so long ago, there was a lot of shit going down.
Watching Mick’s first gig after heart surgery, he wasn’t exactly taking it easy. In the hospital they said they’d never done that kind of surgery on a seventy-five-year old. There’s no precedent. And nobody goes back to the office when they’re that old, they normally just go back to gardening. They don’t go back to running ten miles around a stage.
The Rolling Stones is a very healthy place to be these days. Not only is the level of fitness high due to all of your bounding about the stage, but every time you go tour you need to pass medicals. Which are getting harder and harder to pass now [laughs]. Poor Joyce [Smyth], our manager, is like “Oh, no! More insurance for the next tour”.
“I'm playing the best I've ever played, for some
magic reason, and I love it.”
You’re very fortunate to have that safety net, because things could have been missed in the normal run of things, so it must be reassuring to be able to go for the full MOT every year or so? Yeah, it is. And without these MOTs a lot of these things wouldn’t have been found. We would have been carrying on merrily while ploughing into a wall, basically.
Where are we as regards a new Stones album? That’s ongoing. We are very happy with the way studio work’s coming on, but, as you know, the Stones never make an album overnight. But aside from our busy schedule touring, we’re just fitting little studio visits in and it’s shaping up nicely.
It won’t be another [Stones’ 2016 covers album] Blue & Lonesome? Oh no, a proper new studio album.
Of course, [title track of the 1973 Faces album] Ooh La La tells us that a man has to make his own mistakes. But if you could go back, what advice would you give your younger self? I’d say [sings] ‘Please don’t ever change a thing’. Life’s full of curves and swerves, and ups and downs. You just have to go with it. Follow your heart.
Looking back, I suppose your darkest time would have been on the pipe, free-basing cocaine. Yeah. It’s a terrible millstone around your neck because it just grabs you and it’s a hard one to kick.
Harder than the fags? Good old Champix, little tablets that cut off the part of the brain that craves cigarettes. One day you wake up and go: “I’m not doing that any more.” And that’s it. It’s like I never smoked. When I see somebody smoking I think: “Are you sure?”
Ronnie Wood’s album Mad Lad: A Live Tribute To Chuck Berry is out now via BMG.
On December 4, 2018, Rammstein’s Till Lindemann strode into a Moscow book signing accompanied by a gimp on a leash. As he sat down to sign copies of his poetry collection, Messer, his companion knelt dutifully on the floor beside him.
It takes him a little while to recall the incident when we bring it up. “Ah, the bondage woman!” he finally remembers. “Book signings are so boring. It takes forever, standing in the cold and rain… so we brought something to entertain the people.”
Bringing a gimp to a bookshop is actually one of the meeker stunts Lindemann has pulled over the years. As a trained pyrotechnician, his flame-throwing antics with German metal behemoths Rammstein have made him one of rock’s most controversial characters. So on deciding that Russia was a long way to go just to sign some books, he used it as an opportunity to take Lindemann – Till and his bandmate, multiinstrumentalist, producer and Hypocrisy and Pain frontman Peter Tägtgren – an equally provocative, pumping amalgamation of Eurosynth and industrial crunch, on the road for the first time.
“It was a new start, an experiment,” he tells us today. “We needed to find out if it worked, if we had the right chemistry on stage. It was very crazy, small clubs, small venues.”
Today Lindemann are back in Russia, shooting videos and conducting press for their second album, F&M. We meet them in St Petersburg, in the glass-walled roof restaurant of the plush Kempinski Hotel. Just one block away, the brightly coloured onion domes of the Church Of The Savior On Spilled Blood rise into the air. It’s the perfect place for an interview with two of rock’s most unique characters. As we drink it all in, the duo, tucking into plates of fruit and cold cuts, recall how they met at the MTV Awards ceremony in Stockholm almost 20 years ago.
“You were still fresh in the game. [Rammstein] only had the second album out,” Peter remembers. “You opened Pandora’s Box. You were like: ‘Do you have any schnapps in Sweden?’ Because Germans always have apple Schnapps…”
“For digestion,” Till says seriously, nodding. “I’m like: ‘No, vodka maybe?’” Peter continues. “And he’s like: ‘No, it’s too much. Let’s do a couple of Jägermeister.’ It took a few hours, and then the war was on.”
“We puked, and then the same night we decided: let’s do music together,” Till says with a chuckle.
“We want to prove to ourselves that we can write different kinds of music. It’s important for us to develop.” Peter Tägtgren
Due to Till’s Rammstein commitments and Peter’s numerous band and production committments, it took them 15 years to record their first track together. Once they started recording, though, the project snowballed, leading to smutty debut Skills In Pills in 2015. While Peter handled the music, Till’s perverse, ludicrous tendencies ran amok on tracks with titles like Fat, Ladyboy and Praise Abort. New album F&M is no less outrageous, with multiple songs about oral sex, as well as Gummi, a track about a rubber fetish. Have they received any complaints?
“Of course,” Till shrugs. “The Christian groups, they come of course. But kids these days, they’ve seen everything.”
Dressed all in black and towering over his bandmate, Till has an imposing presence. Yet as he repeatedly, perhaps nervously, removes and replaces his dark sunglasses, he’s a contemplative and quiet interviewee. And while Till procrastinates over our questions, Peter fills in conversational gaps with quick, sharp answers. Despite their differences, though, the pair have an easy rapport that comes from decades of close friendship.
Peter, what was your reaction when Till brought you a track like Gummi? “Normal life at work,” he replies, unfazed. Till starts laughing. “In the beginning, the first song [we recorded] was Ladyboy, and he was: ‘Are you serious? Are you for real?’ He gave up on me a long time ago.”
While six of F&M’s 11 tracks are right out of Till’s mental gutter, it is undoubtedly an album of two halves. In 2016 the duo were approached by the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, who asked them to score the soundtrack for their modern adaption of Hansel And Gretel. The five tracks they wrote and recorded for the production (Blut, Knebel, Allesfresser, Schlaf Ein and Wer weiß Das Schon) add much needed depth to F&M, touching on cannibalism, death and child abandonment – all topics Till has explored with Rammstein.
“My whole history inspires me, good and bad times,” he explains. “I take a lot from television, actually – from news, of course. Take cannibalism [talking about Rammstein track Mein Teil]. People were like: ‘You crazy motherfucker.’ This is not a story, it happened! There was a case in Germany – somebody ate the dick from another guy! You don’t have to be sick and crazy in your mind all the time.”
As fun as it was, at times the sheer silliness of Skills In Pills made Lindemann seem like a novel concept, rather than something to properly plug the gaps between Till and Peter’s day jobs.
“You set a standard with the first album, and then people think: ‘Oh, this is how the rest of the career is going to be,’” Peter, says clearly aware of the questions surrounding Lindemann’s longevity. “We want to prove to ourselves that we can write different kinds of music. It’s important for us to develop.”
Accordingly, F&M feels like a more serious artistic endeavour, a far more varied record than its predecessor – which, bar two ballads, was about as musically subtle as Rammstein’s penis-shaped canon. Ach So Gern is a folky waltz, Peter describes Platz Einz as “Pet Shop Boys on amphetamine”, while Mathematik – written by his son Sebastian, Lindemann’s drummer – features German rapper Haftbefehl. Tapping into the unpredictable personalities of its creators, it feels like Lindemann have progressed beyond tongue-in-cheek laughs to something deeper and darker.
“I think a lot of people might have a hard time accepting it because it doesn’t go the way you think it’s going when you listen to it the first time,” Peter says firmly. “But we don’t write for anybody. We write for ourselves.”
F&M is out now via Universal.