If you’re about to turn 52, you’re more than likely going to celebrate with a quiet family lunch (and maybe a few afternoon beers if you’re looking to go all out). This likelihood shifts, however, when it concerns a 52-year-old who has spent the last 20 years and change terrifying the masses at the head of one of Europe’s biggest metal exports, Rammstein. And so it was: on Till Lindemann’s 52nd birthday he announced that a new project was in the works, to be known succinctly as Lindemann. In order to begin the project, he turned to an old friend with whom he had once cloud-talked fancifully about making music together.
“It must have been in ’99 or maybe 2000 when I started seeing the Rammstein guys around all the time,” says Peter Tägtgren, the instrumental half of the project. “We’d play a lot of the same shows, go to a lot of the same bars… it was pretty much that situation where it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s that guy!’ Naturally, these encounters led to a lot of typical drunken musician talk and what we thought were empty promises of, ‘Yeah, man! Let’s do something together sometime.’ It took 13 years after those conversations, but it finally happened – so never say never.”
Tägtgren is a force to be reckoned with in his own right – he has been at the helm of notable acts such as Hypocrisy and Pain, as well as the owner of The Abyss, a recording studio in the south of Sweden. His involvement with the Lindemann project came to fruition when both he and Till found themselves with some time away from the bands they are best known for.
“We always stayed in contact,” he says. “We were always checking up when we were in one another’s countries – I mean, I’m three hours out of Stockholm, but if he called me up and said he was in Stockholm then I’d come all the way out just so I could hang with him and the guys. He invited me and my family out to one of the last Rammstein shows before they took a break, out at this big festival. Before the show, he pulled me aside and said that Rammstein were taking some time off – I don’t think it had been announced at that point – and said that we should get together and make the collaboration happen after all this time. He just left me with, ‘Just call me when you’re ready.’ We were on the phone again within a couple of weeks.”
The resulting album, Skills In Pills, marks some dramatic changes as far as both men are concerned. For Lindemann himself, it was the first album he had ever recorded predominantly in English after spending the majority of his career singing in his native German. For Tägtgren, it was a notable stylistic shift away from the melodic death metal with which he made his name, and into a world of gothic-tinged industrial metal. In spite of there being some very clear differences between the two musicians, Tägtgren insists it’s these differences that have made Skills In Pills all the stronger a record.
“We were throwing ideas back and forth like you wouldn’t believe. It was interesting – I mean, I come primarily from a background of heavier metal, your death and your black metal, and Till is very much into the more gothic side of things. All these worlds came together, and I really wasn’t sure how we’d go when it was starting out. Once we got past the first song, which was the song ‘Ladyboy’, we both looked at each other and were like ‘…Well, that was easy!’
“It came so much quicker then – Till was emailing me all these lyrics, sending me all these voice memos of vocal ideas, and I was writing all of this new stuff. It developed way better than either of us could have expected. It definitely wasn’t a common approach to songwriting, but it was great for the long-distance way that we work.”
It’s early days for Lindemann yet, but the topic of the two doing live shows is one of interest. After all, Rammstein are notorious for being one of the wildest and most exuberant live acts out there, genre regardless. It’s not something that is lost on Tägtgren at all – as a matter of fact, playing live is often a primary concern for him from a songwriting standpoint.
“I’m always thinking about live stuff,” he says. “Whenever I’m writing stuff, I’m always thinking how it’s going to come across when we do it live. Till, interestingly enough, has never really been like that. He’s always been more focused on the then and there – if he’s writing lyrics or working on an arrangement of a song, it’s within that moment only. He’s not considering anything beyond that. He doesn’t really step out of the moment. We were just enjoying ourselves, making this record – we only realised after we got in touch with the label and management that we’d opened a can of worms. There’s so much more when an album is concerned!”
There may be no Lindemann live show yet, but Tägtgren exudes confidence that his counterpart will be up for the job. “If he was a woman, I would marry him in a heartbeat!” he laughs.
Lindemann’s album Skills In Pills is out now through Warner.
