Rammstein Concert: Cakes & Fish Thrown at Fans 18+

The 62-year-old singer of the German band Rammstein performed this Thursday in Prague’s O2 arena with his decadent solo project. It’s a bit of a circus from the opening track called Fat. On the projection screen, a kind of naked creature, resembling a human crossed with a pig, is patting its giant navel. In detailed slow motion, she shows it off, caresses it.

In a song with a baroque feel, the German provocative musician melts over plump bodies and rejects everything thin. In the same way, in Prague he rejects a show or sound. The sound engineer works wonders behind the counter. In the roar of the band, Lindemann asserts his voice with startling force. When the vocal first spills over the full hall, it seems to push everyone present a little into the ground.

A drummer and a keyboardist are trapped in the constructions of futuristic weight machines. The other musicians evoke members of some kind of interstellar police at a sadomasochistic party. The nuns soon shed their religious robes to reveal their plump bodies. At first glance, the chaotic scene slowly begins to seem like a celebration of otherness.

Metal can be extreme. It was created at the end of the 1960s and since then it has been bogged down many times in binding conservatism. Lindemann decided to rekindle the genre born in the fading metropolises of the former industrial revolution. Fires are typical for the shows of his parent band Rammstein. On the current tour, the singer does not set a single one on fire, yet he manages to achieve a similar effect.

During the Prague concert, he seemed to embrace the extremes with his massive hands. He emphatically presents the audience with images and words that speak of hobbies, ideas and dreams that people usually leave at home behind the door or deep inside themselves.

Lindemann’s current tour is for adults only. Only people over the age of 18 were allowed to buy a ticket for the Prague concert, mainly because of the nudity and blatant lasciviousness.

For example, the fifth track Golden Shower is accompanied by a projection of details on vaginas pierced with piercings, later bodies urinate on each other. The sequence culminates with a montage of female genitalia reminiscent of animation in the style of Jan Švankmajer. When the machine metal dies down, instead of an enthusiastic roar, the admiring applause of the partially speechless listeners fills the hall.

During the song Platz Eins, the stage is flooded with iridescent colors and the singer travels through the audience in a giant plastic ball. Like a penis in a condom, he slowly perforates the mass of bodies that look up at him admiringly.

As she returns her ball to the edge of the stage, a retractable pole lifts bassist Kristin Kaminski a good 15 meters above the stage, where she plays a pure funky line using a technique called slapping. Dancers cheer the crowd on the sides. Hard metal fans embrace this dance beat as well.

Especially in the second half of the show, Lindemann torments his devotees. During the song Blut sprinkles the front rows with artificial rain. Most of the water released from the pipes at the ceiling of the hall dissipates before hitting the heads of the audience, but the showers are repeated, they feel heavy and it is around one degree Celsius outside at the time.

The song Allesfresser fades into an intermezzo in the form of an electronic beat, and a monster enters the scene: A bit of a pole dancer, a bit of a clown, it moves like a robot. She pulls tampons out of her vagina and throws them to the excited audience. Immediately, the band and the dancers take the whole cakes laid out on the table and one by one throw them from the stage directly into the audience. Trying to hit faces.

When the dancers throw fish into the audience in the Fish On encore, the joke is a bit repetitive. The “pond” is too big for the few small fish, even a small catapult will not help, which will send a dozen pieces straight into the crowd. It’s like throwing a few pebbles into Lipno. In addition, Lindemann already performed all these tricks in Prague two years ago.

American singer GG Allin did something similar when he threw his own feces and blood into the audience during concerts in the late 80s. It was done in small punk clubs, whereas Lindemann offers something similar in a sterile hall as part of a spectacular, aesthetically tuned experience.

Before the start of the concert, the giant stage was covered by a white tarp with the black inscription Kill Till in Cyrillic. Perhaps it referred to the horrified reactions of some of the public to obscene texts or scenes, perhaps to recent accusations of sexual harassment, which have not been confirmed. The Berlin prosecutor’s office closed the investigation in 2023 due to a lack of evidence.

Lindemann started his solo career in 2015, on the first recordings he worked in a duo with the Swedish musician and composer Peter Tägtgren. He has been going it alone for the past five years. His compositions do not have the same dynamics as Rammstein’s music, rather they flow noisily. Some tunes sound catchy, but you can’t talk about hits like Du Hast, Sonne or Ich Will, and the overall impression is in some places close to the drastic performative art that Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch became famous for.

However, it is still an extremely successful side project. Lindemann was already the star of the Vizovice Masters of Rock festival with him in the summer. Although the largest Czech covered hall was not sold out this Thursday, it was solidly filled.

Only prepared clips were played on the rear projection, the cameras did not transmit the scenes on the stage, and the whole spectacle took place in a kind of visual fog. All the elaborate costumes and scenes could only be read, as well as Lindemann’s troubled face. And it was often difficult to see through the images burned into the retina by a powerful light apparatus. But perhaps the performance of Meine Welt is not built on details and the viewer is supposed to leave unsure of what he actually saw.