Burning Up
How one man took his obsession with fire to some of the biggest stages in the world
WHILE REHEARSING for its 2013 Las Vegas residency, Mötley Crüe instructed Nicolai Sabottka, its new pyrotechnics specialist, to set the venue on fire — walls, ceiling, floor, everything. But when flames exploded behind Tommy Lee’s head, the drummer, believing he was on fire, freaked out and ran off. Everyone laughed. Lee returned and demanded of Sabottka: “What the fuck is going on here?” To which an unfazed Sabottka replied: “We tried to warn you.”
Sabottka, CEO of Berlin-based FFP Spezialeffekte und Veranstaltungslogistik (which translates to “Special Effects and Event Logistics”), has spent the past 26 years mastering the art of blowing stuff up at concerts while ensuring everybody remains safe. Although he earned a degree in pyrotechnics
at a Dresden school specializing in explosives technology, his true studies came from working with Rammstein, the electro-metal band known for towering flames and violent explosions.
He joined Rammstein’s crew in 1997 as a tour manager, monitoring rhythm guitarist Paul Landers. “He would just put gasoline onstage and set it on fire,” Sabottka recalls. “We thought, ‘That’s not a good idea.’ ” Over time, Sabottka learned to be safer and more intentional, innovating flamethrowers attached to guitars and face masks, as well as an exploding backpack for frontman Till Lindemann. One of his proudest inventions was to shoot flames up the delay towers used to spread audio through a stadium.
“I can text him and go, ‘I have this idea to have a wrecking ball, and it hits a car and the car explodes,’ ” says Robert Long, Mötley Crüe’s production manager. “And 10 minutes later, I’ll get a video of him experimenting with something.” A favorite tool is lycopodium, a yellowish powder that creates giant flames that are relatively easy to control.
Adds Landers: “The small, student-looking guy
[is] now a serious, professional deadly weapon.
He’s a big, big part of our show.” For Rammstein’s upcoming European stadium tour, Sabottka is most excited to make the pyro even “more impressive.”
His obsession began when he was a kid, hunting mice with friends in an open field near his home in Germany where he “managed to set the entire area on fire,” he says. Now 57, Sabottka and FFP have expanded beyond the Rammstein universe, working with reliably pyro-friendly hard-rock bands like Mötley Crüe and KISS, as well as pop stars such as Lady Gaga on her Chromatica Ball Tour and Taylor Swift and Sam Smith at the BRIT Awards (in 2013 and this February, respectively). Today, FFP has 70 employees worldwide across the company’s offices in Berlin, Los Angeles and London. Using artists’ own ideas as a guide, Sabottka and his staff are constantly tinkering.
“They know how to take things right up to the limit,” says LeRoy Bennett, production designer for the Chromatica Ball Tour. “They’re super safety-conscious, but they’ll do things that are pretty intense.”
As Sabottka says: “I just like to set things on fire. It’s surprising I’m still alive.”