The following interview is one of the first published online with Rammstein for the promotion of Reise Reise, the group's new album. (Due in stores November 16th) Onto the interview...
The video for first single ‘Mein Teil’ was directed by Zoran Bihac, who also worked with you on the ‘Links 2 3 4’ clip; where did the idea for the treatment come from?
Flake: “Well, Paul came up with the concept in the first place, and his idea was that each member of the band should deliver a performance based on their original reaction to the song, their feeling about the music…”
Till: “Zoran had a good idea for the making of the video - he set up a big black box in a huge auditorium, and each member of the band could go into the box and do their own thing…”
Flake: “Zoran also decided to have each band member work on their own video independently of the others - they were all kept very much under wraps; indeed, even today, we still don’t know what the other band member’s videos are like…”
Till: “There’s one collective scene in the video, where most of the band members are on leashes, like dogs, and we’re all taken out for a walk on a big avenue here in Berlin. We’re almost naked, in broad daylight, during rush hour!”
Can you explain a bit about the personas you adopt in the video? Flake?
Flake: “Well, I can only say what I did myself, because I just wasn’t aware of the other concepts. For my part, I did my best to keep an open mind about everything, I did my own thing, and moved in my own way…”
Till: “The compromise we reached with Zoran was that each band member could bring their own ‘toys’ to the shoot, and they were free to play with those ‘toys’, to explore their own ideas, and that worked out well, but I don’t know what the other guys got up to… everybody did it their way…”
Flake: “The interesting thing is that video was all done in one take from beginning to end - there were no cuts & no breaks, so the clip runs through from start to finish with no interruption to the action…”
Till: “It was the recording of the video that was done all in one take, and then later it was edited together into what you see now…”
Is it true that one of the other treatments considered for the ‘Mein Teil’ video had the band playing the part of cannibals?!
Till: “This treatment would have been pretty funny! There would have been a plane crash, leaving the band members stranded on an island, and then the whole cannibal scenario would have kicked in. However, the idea turned out to be quite problematic because of the cost involved, so we had to go for a different option, and the video we have now is what we came up with…”
Flake: “It would have been very funny, though - Till would have been the chief cannibal, so to speak, and I would have been sitting in the big pot as ‘dinner’, while the other band members danced around! That was the plan…”
Was it hard to find a suitable treatment for ‘Mein Teil’ because the subject matter, although true, is just so gruesome & potentially controversial?
Flake: “The story in the song is so clear and it’s put forward in such a straightforward way that we didn’t feel it necessary to tell it again in the video, so we were at liberty to do something different…”
The general reaction to ‘Mein Teil’ as a song has been very positive, and yet it’s probably the heaviest, nastiest track on the new album. Were you surprised when it was chosen as the lead single?
Till: “Coming back after three years, releasing our first song as a single, we could have opted for a ballad, but we didn’t want to do that; we wanted our first new track to be musically tough, so we could arrive back on the scene with a bang!”
Let’s talk briefly about a couple of other new tracks – ‘Amerika’, for example; it’s a very catchy song with a lyric that will definitely raise some smiles, but is there a serious point being made here as well?
Flake: “We conceived ‘Amerika’ as a kind of Trojan horse, and we suspect that it’s going to get a different reaction in the States to the rest of the world…”
‘Amerika’ is the only track on the album containing English words & phrases; did you record a version with all of the lyrics in English? Till?
Till: “When we were writing the song there was a chorus in there that was in English; we didn’t set out to write the whole thing in English, but we liked it when we heard it, so basically we just kept going…”
“However, we also made a German version and then we looked at the two and decided to stick with the German one, because its more to the point; that’s what we wanted, so we simply went with the version that suited our needs the best…”
And ‘Morgenstern’ – what’s the story here?
Flake: “We don’t explain the lyrics to our songs - you hear them, you feel them, and the more we would try to explain them, the more the magic would be sucked out of the music.”
Till: “One of the problems with our music, if you don’t understand German, is that you read the lyrics as a translation, and so for this album I’m going to try very hard to make sure that when the words are translated into English, it’s done not just to a good standard, but by someone who has experience with literature. Also, I’m going to check through the translated lyrics carefully before they go up on the internet; hopefully, this will help people to get a better understanding of the music in general…”