Before the business of promotion begins, it’s party time in Lindemann’s hotel room. Greeted at first by Tägtgren, who appears to be in the middle of getting dressed, I’m faced with a slew of contradictions. He slips a pair of suspenders over his shoulders and rolls up his tailored sleeves. Then, when reaching out to shake my hand, I catch sight of his fluffy slippers. Meanwhile, from the neck up, he’s every bit the gothic rock auteur.
He ushers me to my seat and, with Lindemann yet to appear, he starts to relate the story of how the two first met. “He was going to get his arse kicked in this biker bar in Sweden,” Tägtgren says. “He was making a move on some biker’s girlfriend and those guys were going to kill him for real.” Being a well-connected and respected local, Tägtgren stepped in to defuse the situation, and made a friend for life in Lindemann. “We hung out a lot before we ever attempted writing…” he pauses as the door opens, revealing Lindemann’s hulking frame.
“You want a drink?” Lindemann asks. I’m sat with a half-full glass of cranberry juice bought from the bar downstairs, and before I can reply, vodka is poured into my juice. “We don’t go hard anymore,” Lindemann says, in his instantly recognisable, accented voice. “This is all we will drink today”. Tägtgren corrects him, “This and the four beers we had before you came.” They share a smile before Lindemann positions himself to face the door, which is how he remains for the entire interview.
Over the course of Rammstein’s 20-year career, Lindemann has been among the most heavily criticised artists in metal. He has been accused of being a neo-Nazi, blamed for triggering school shootings and labelled a general menace to society. It’s almost a given that Skills In Pills will face the same sort of scrutiny. In this case though, Lindemann is more exposed than ever before. In a first, he’s sung an entire album in English. “I needed Peter to be able to know what I was singing,” he says. “He can’t speak German and I can’t speak Swedish.”
“I remember last year I got this call from Till,” Tägtgren says. “We had kind of talked about doing something together, but he was like ‘Hey I’m in Canada. I’m in a canoe on this river and it’s beautiful. I just wrote a lyric I had to tell you.’ I took the lyric and I straight away started writing some music for it and that became the song Yukon.”
Yukon – named after the river that played an unlikely role in Lindemann’s future musical direction – however isn’t reflective of the album’s core themes. For the most part, the record’s subject matter isn’t too far removed from Rammstein’s output: sex (Fat, Fish On, Golden Shower), black comedy (Praise Abort), and pondering life’s big questions.
“The sex songs are on the table for people to take or leave,” Lindemann says, “but I think there are much more provocative lyrics in Children of the Sun.” In this track, Lindemann contemplates how fleeting life is over an epic Tägtgren arrangement.
This project itself is likely to be a fleeting thing as Rammstein are planning to start work on a new album later this year. But for now, Lindemann is enjoying the break from his day job. “Rammstein is a very strict six-headed machine going into battle and it can be exhausting,” he says. “Writing with Peter was a chance for me to prove I could do music another way, in English and get out of the little comfort zone I have in Rammstein.”
BY LEIGH SALTER
