We all stood there in the dark Grand Arena concert hall waiting and watching the black curtain in anticipation and preparing for something our jaded midweek thoughts could maybe handle. Amongst the crowd were aging rockers with their business suit appropriate hairstyles, Goths with their Mordor appropriate hairstyles and German Namibians, lots of German Namibians. Being one of the few women there, I decided to mask my fears and vulnerability by becoming one of the boys tonight. While I continued to look around at the crowd who were now staring zombie-like at the black curtain, a deep church-choir singing of ‘those who wait get rewarded’ in German came from behind it which faded into a heavy industrial metal thrashing and we were suddenly hit with a wall of horizontal black, red and yellow. The black curtain had fallen to reveal the German flag which sparked a deafening roar from the crowd which was accompanied by a heart-stopping bang, and we were now facing Till Lindemann and his men and chanting along with our fists in the air to the opening song ‘Rammlied’, Rammstein’s tribute to themselves. The intensity of the fireworks, the eardrum bursting loudness of the sound and Rammstein’s powerful performance managed to propel the pulsating crowd into a frenzy, yet, still an organised non-chaotic state. People were too captivated by what was happening on stage to want to fling their bodies into one another in order to create a mindless moshpit.
We saw Rammstein blowing fire from their faces high into the air, over the crowd, close enough that you thought your face was going to melt off. Lindemann ignited a petrol pump and directed the flame from it towards the crowd during ‘Benzin’, and to fuel the onstage insanity we witnessed some random guy covered in flames running from the stage crew who blasted him with a fire extinguisher after he fell to the ground. This left us momentarily unsure of whether this was part of the show or not. During ‘Waidmann’s Heil’, Lindemann was carrying an enormous machine gun, resembling a monstrous soldier of death. After witnessing enough mind-blowing antics from them, we realised they weren’t stopping there,
in fact they were intending to reduce us to nothing but sloppy vegetable mush needing to be mopped up off the floor at the end of the show. A two minute pause in their performance left us in a dark silence, our minds going crazy, then relief when we heard the eerie opening to ‘Mein Teil’ which they prolonged in order to bring out a giant pot on stage of which the keyboard player appeared out of, and Lindemann was now covered in blood reinforcing the song’s theme of cannibalism. The stage was ablaze with fire during the popular ‘Feuer Frei’, and ‘Haifisch’ had the keyboard player rowing in a zodiac over the wave-like sea of stomping, shouting, stupefied fans.
Through the dense smoke from the stage I could see that all around me, in this non-smoking venue, sweat-drenched people were lighting up cigarettes like they’d just come down from the best orgasm of their life. Struggling to breathe and hear properly, after Rammstein had finished slaying us with their three song encore and Lindemann spoke for the first time by simply uttering ‘Thank you very much’, we waddled out of the hall carrying our heavy hearts as we realised it is all over. For the die-hard fans, ‘post-Rammstein blues’ would now be setting in.
The light at the end of this now seemingly dark tunnel was the sign ‘Official Rammstein Merchandise’. We mobbed the merch stall buying t-shirts in the same fashion as ordering drinks at a busy bar, glaring at the debit card holding cretins who were standing in our way of getting the shirt we want before it’s gone.
Images courtesy of Nicole Fourie
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