Till_Lindemann

Till Lindemann

Till Lindemann (born January 4, 1963) is a German musician and poet who is most notable as being the frontman and lead-vocalist for the German tanz-metall ("dance metal") band Rammstein.

Personal characteristics

Lindemann has a powerful on stage presence and a resonant bass voice. One of his signature mannerisms is to partially squat and pound his fist onto his thigh to the beat of the riff. Also, his vocals are easily recognizable due to his tendency to roll his Rs, and growl his achs. Lindemann is also a qualified pyrotechnician. After an accident at the Treptow arena in Berlin on September 27, 1996, where a burning stage prop fell into the audience, Rammstein began employing a professional pyrotechnical crew and Lindemann has learned from and also trained with them. Each band member is specially instructed on the pieces of pyrotechnical equipment they use on stage. Of Lindemann, band mate Christoph Schneider says, “Till gets burned all the time, but he likes the pain.” He has also engaged in other masochistic acts on stage, such as whipping himself and bludgeoning his head with a microphone until it bleeds, both of which can be seen on the "Live Aus Berlin" DVD.

Personal background

Lindemann was born in Leipzig, but he grew up in the village of Wendisch-Rambow in Schwerin (East Germany). His father, Werner Lindemann, was a poet, and his mother, Brigitte "Gitta" Lindemann, is an artist and writer who has co-written at least one book with her husband. Lindemann has one sister, six years younger than himself. At age 11 he went to a sports school at the Rostock Sport Club, and from 1977 to 1980 attended a boarding school.While at the sports school, his parents divorced in 1975, when he was age 12.

In the year 1978 Lindemann was a participant in the European Junior Swimming Championships in Florence. But in 1979 he had had enough. According to Lindemann, "I never liked the sport school actually, it was very intense. But as a child you don't object". He was thrown off he team when he went to compete in the Junior European Championships in Florence, Italy. He got caught sneaking out to the city's sex shops and buying pornographic magazines. Till says "We climbed down the fire escape in the middle of the night to look for these sex shops to find porno magazines." "As an East German boy that was a dream, to see some porno magazines because they were prohibited. The coaches weren't at all happy about that."

Till's children

In 1985, when Lindemann was 22, his first daughter, Nele, was born. Lindemann and Nele's mother married after she was born, but they separated and he has raised Nele alone. Lindemann says, "I used to play drums in a punk band and we had our studio in the house where I lived. Seven years I had been a father raising his daughter, but nowadays I'm sharing the upbringing with her mother, because I'm gone for six months of the year with the band". He has another daughter (Marie Louise).

Musical career

For general information about Rammstein, see the article on Rammstein.

Lindemann started to play drums for First Arsch: a play on words perhaps meant to distract the authorities. It was a Schwerin-based punk band. They made one album titled Saddle Up.

Till Lindemann also played one song with a German punkband called Feeling B. A song called Lied von der unruhevollen Jugend ("Song of the restless youth") is credited on the album called Hea Hoa Hoa Hea Hea Hoa (1990) saying Till, Paul H. Landers and Christian "Flake" Lorenz all played on the song Lied von der unruhevollen Jugend. Feeling B was the former band of Paul H. Landers and Christian "Flake" Lorenz.

Later in the 1990s, Lindemann began to write lyrics, possibly based on phrases and words from poems that he was beginning to write. He says he "used to drum in a punk band that consisted of bass and drums. We used to work with guest-guitarists, usually Paul and Richard. We did a short tour where I changed instruments with the bassist in the encore, that was such a success, that Richard insisted on starting a project in which I would sing. Other people joined the band but only when I left Schwerin for Berlin did it take serious form".

In 1994, they entered and won a contest in Berlin that allowed them to record a four track demo professionally. Lindemann moved to Berlin. Paul H. Landers formally joined the band, followed by the last member to join, Christian "Flake" Lorenz.

Subsequently, in November 2002 Lindemann's own project, the poetry book Messer, was published. It consists of 54 poems compiled by Gert Hof, who is author of the book Rammstein and has been the band's pyrodesigner for the last seven years. This book was due to be re-printed in 2005 due to a campaign by a fansite.

As guest artist

Lindemann appears on the track Helden (a cover of Bowie's Heroes) on the Apocalyptica album Worlds Collide.
Ayreon frontman Arjen Anthony Lucassen has stated on his website that he would love to have Lindemann appear on a future Ayreon album, but he'd "have to write the parts in German" or create an "evil character".
Lindemann also sings on "Wut Will Nicht Sterben" by Die Puhdys.
Till Lindemann & Richard Kruspe covered the Aria song Shtil and released it as Schtiel.

Movie appearances

In 2003, Till made an appearance as a villain, in a made for television movie for children titled Amundsen, der Pinguin. His character tries to steal a penguin who knows the location of treasure.
Till plays an animal rights activist in a movie called Vinzent.
Till made brief appearances in the movies xXx as himself along with the rest of Rammstein (2002) and Pola X (1999).

He has appeared on many soundtracks such as: xXx, Resident Evil, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Lost Highway, The Matrix, Lilya 4-ever, Hellboy 2.

Quotes

Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness - you're drinking another glass of wine and you're feeling even worse. Art doesn't work without pain; art also exists for compensating pain.

When I was an adolescent, I was obsessed with having many commercial things, cars, clothes, stupid things. Now that I have all that, I include/understand that the superfluous things can turn to you into a very stupid idiot-type. In East Germany there were very few things, but there was also a feeling of solidarity that no longer exists. Now we are up to the neck in consumption, the ego, the individualism. Now before friendship, it is merchandise.

The rolling R's didn't arise deliberately. It originated from itself because in that deep pitch you automatically sing that way. I'm no musician in the actual meaning. I don't know anything about instruments. But I'm supporting our music with my voice and lyrics well. It's a question of illustration, timbre and phonetics. We don't want to - for Heaven's sake - create a fascist-like style.

Love is like a flower; even the most beautiful kind dies.

You've got a kind of inner store. When things aren't going well, you just go inside and get a glass of travel preserves for your soul, open it and fill up on it.

To explain the lyrics would be to take away the whole attraction and afterwards perhaps the fans would even be disappointed. I would rather leave things in this area untouched so that everyone can bring their own interpretation and their own feeling to it.