Rammstein - Behind The Scenes of the World Stadium Tour 2019-2024

Shoes off, chairs ready, here we go. Let's have a show. When we come in, we literally take over an entire city. I thought I was going to retire and not come back to this industry. When they called me to come on Ramstein, I could not resist. Our standard is around 120 people, but that's just universal crew. We have a lot of Canadians, Germans, Portuguese. Team Mirka, team Mirka. Inevitably, not everybody is going to get on with everybody, but in the most part gets on really well, which is quite unusual with a touring party this big. Because of this mission we have to put this show on, we do have to work together. And we are kind of a very dysfunctional family. I don't even have to ask people, can you help him or can you help her? It's one big machine and just everybody works together. And if one of those parts isn't working properly, the whole thing can break down. There's so many moving parts and all of them are so vastly different. You have to be an absolute character to do this job. More confetti, more pyro, which is the Ramstein way. But I like it, so bring it on. No show in the world had what we did here before. We set this place on fire. People who come to a concert and see everything here, if you were to come back at the same time tomorrow, it would be as if we were never here. Are you ready for this show? I'm Nikolaj Zabotka. I've been with Ramstein for almost 30 years. I'm a production director, which means I supervise and coordinate the production. The special thing was that we were in a stadium for the first time. I didn't sleep for months, because if you've never done this before in a stadium, it's intimidating at first. There's more space that you have to fill. The production part is also much, much bigger. I hadn't worked with two style teams yet. It's a big step towards the Arena Tour. That means that what I hadn't done yet, I was looking for people who could do it. Nikolaj came in 2018 with the first designs and said, I have a project here, a stadium show, and would you like to join? We went to all the venues with the site coordinator and the stage manager before. We looked at them, took pictures, filmed them, asked questions. How big will it be? How much truck space do I need? We can go in there, we can go here. How big is the stage? What's the ratio? You have to lay the foundation in order to be able to build and dismantle at all, in this scale, to recognize the difficulties of the individual venues. You usually don't get it under control overnight, but only with a corresponding pre-planning. The special thing was that this stage has no roof. It's a conscious decision, because that's the only way you get this tower look. That means we've exposed ourselves to wind and weather, and that's a very big risk. The stage is taken down to wind strength 8. If it goes beyond wind strength 8, the stage has to be evacuated. Because this year we weren't so much at the stadiums, but also a lot at the so-called Greenfields. And if there's a thunderstorm with storm strength, then you're completely exposed to it. Weather is a huge issue, and that's an incredible effort. Every cable, every connection has to be watertight. The last, last decision we make is abseiling. It's a fight until the last moment. And only when it really doesn't work anymore, then you'd say, okay, it doesn't work. If I were to choose, I would always go to a stadium, because there you have a lot more protection against weather. It took a while to get it on the right track, and every weekend there were three trucks added. That we used to travel with 25 trucks before, and now with 100. It grew and grew and grew. We don't need this as an emergency exit, because all the people... Yeah, that's right. We do not need it. We can use it immediately. Yes. My job is called site coordinator, and is basically the communication interface between the production and the local event organizer who rents out the stadium. How can you implement all the requirements that exist for large events with the stage design? The site coordinator team is always the team that has been there four or five days in advance. They start with the style layout, they prepare the logistics. That when the production arrives and wants to set up, everything is presented as we discussed in advance. The style is the basic framework of the stage. There are two versions. So that you can play more concerts in a short time. We need at least six days in a city for one concert. And if you only have one stage, then you could play one concert per week. We drive ahead with 21 trucks per stage. The stadiums must first be laid out with stadium panels. Then the style comes on top, then the subdeck comes on top. Cables must be laid out in advance. When we start building here, then the team that builds the stage is completely independent. And I take care of the preparation of the next city. You always start with a build that can take 36 hours. That's what you aim for. That's how you organize yourself. There's places where there's a big level difference, which takes a lot of time to adjust. That's usually the biggest problem we have. It's a poor access or a field that's not level. So the scaffolding comes first, and the face is built on the day of production. And it's fine-tuned on the day of the show. You always go to a city where the style is already there, while it's being rebuilt in the next city. These are our customs papers for the border crossing. Open it up. I'm not a film star. That would have changed my style completely. These are the customs papers for all the materials. We take care of the LKW logistics, so that this young man has the right car at the right place at the right time. The stage manager team only takes care of trucks. How do they drive, how many do they drive, where do they drive to, why do they drive there, who sits in there, what is loaded in there, what is unloaded there. 70 trucks per city, 21 trucks per stage, plus 50 trucks of production. The biggest area is the assembly and the logistics, so that the whole company and the entire production comes from A to B, from one venue to the next. Only a few other productions have this scale globally, as far as I know. Then the first loads come in, the first wave, roughly 10 to 12 loads, only for 600 tons of material that was moved, so only the production material in tons. We then make our plans from that and hope that the others stick to it. We have meetings for this, where we discuss the special features of the process for the venue. For me, in my position, the most important colleagues are the Head of Departments. We only have a certain time window where the trucks come in. The personnel has to be ordered, they have shift times. Where you have just worked with 250 people, you come up to 400. The logistics involves all the equipment and the personnel we work with. On the one hand, our traveling crew and externals, who we require, i.e. the local staff. The Rammstein stage has the special feature that it represents an incredible amount of volume. The sheer amount of material. More than 50 trucks are on the road. A quarter of those trucks are mine. I'm Nick Barton and I'm the Lighting Crew Chief. Lighting-wise, we have 13 trucks. I come in at 8 o'clock in the morning on the loading day. We get 42 local stagehands to help us. And then I distribute those guys to the various different areas. So they use the local help to do all the manual work. We really rely on them, but we need that help. Yes, for sure we could do it, but it would take three days. We don't necessarily need experts. We just need people who are willing to work, who are willing to listen to what we tell them. I suppose the rigging department is the department that we would deal closest with. We need the motors and all the points to be there, otherwise we can't lift anything up. So without those, we couldn't really do anything. My name is Emily Lalonde. I'm from Canada. I am one of four tour riggers on Ramstein. I've worked in the industry since 1998. I'm Flo and I work in the rigging department. We start in the morning and create the basics so that things can fly in the air. I'm still trying to learn German after four years. This show is a little bit different because it takes a couple of days to set up. After the steel is built, after the stage is built, I'm the first one that comes in and hangs all the motor points. Once I get all the motors hung where they're supposed to be, then all the other disciplines come in, the departments come in, and they can hang off of my motor point. We coordinate everything that has to do with motors and everything that has to do with lifting. I work really closely with the pyro people, the lighting people and automation. We work with local riggers who take over the actual climbing part and the building part for us under our supervision. There are safety checks that we do ourselves by climbing. We train that occasionally on the tour. Our job is one of the most dangerous jobs, so you have to be on your game at all times and you have to be super aware of what's going on at all times. Somebody could die or somebody could get seriously injured, but it's not for the faint of heart exactly when you're climbing, of course, especially 30 meters in the air. I try to tell people back home all the time what this world is like, but I don't even know if they can comprehend the fact that we have so many people backstage. There are so many different jobs, they don't even have a clue that there are so many other aspects that travel with us. If we do this interview, we should really do it in my show position. We have to go to Underworld. Okay, come on. I build the stage right section. I'm a carpenter. My name is Eric Gambucci. There are three guys that we build stage right and three guys that we build stage left. We live by routine, putting things in the same place, and numbers go to numbers for us. That's just how it was numbered in 2019, and we put it together like a large Lego cube. We're going to start stage left. Those are the next ones, and then it's those thin ones again right there. It's basically a big circle and maze and everybody is participating. Everybody works and everybody does little things just to kind of make it go like a chain, and that's how it is on something this big. Once the show starts, I run the lift and operate the lift. This is my view for the show. The band, they go up and down a lot, and then I can see things. More fog, Eric, more fog. See, more fog, more fog. Yeah, we get yelled at for more fog because we have a little tiny baby fog machine. This would be a Klein. Klein, yes? And it just kind of, and when the wind is blowing, sometimes this is no go. I'm Arno. I'm head electrician on the Rammstein Tour. Together with a team of six people, everything is running from the generators. Because in the stadiums you have no electricity enough. It's way too low. This year we have eight generators. Last year it was six. Because they add lights and ventilators, we need to add two extra generators on the system. Seven generators can do the show, and we have one spare generator. Normally nobody will have any notices if we have a generator broken, because the other one they're taking over, and they share the load. You can power up a small village with this kind of power. In every container we have two generators. And then we link them with these big cables. We link all the generators together. And this is all the outgoings inside the stadium. This one is Falcons. Then we have lights, two times lights. In total we are on the loading day with 19 people to place all the cables. We start at 8 o'clock in the morning. This is quite difficult, all the corners, over, up and over. The stadium tells us how we need to run the cables. So this is for the stage left part. We're entering on this distribution panel, and then they distribute it by themselves. It's 65 cables every day. Let us take an average yesterday of 130 meters from the generators still here. Then we're ending up almost 8.5 kilometers of cable if you put them all next to each other. I think we are one of the biggest on the road at the moment with this kind of power. The locals were like, oh, this is the biggest thing we ever saw. We are proud of that one. The most energy is for sure the Falcon lights. That are the killers. And you feel it on the jennies when they start flashing it. You see the current going up and everything. It's really powerful. We are actually on the T-shirts, if you look closely. These are actually our lamps. I am Thorsten Lachmann, nickname is Totti, head of department of the Falcons. We are building these 7,000 watt old school lamps. Old school, because this is not yet a laser or LED. This is still an old Xenon light. The band just likes this style, this debris of lamps standing there. The lamp is about 1.70m high. 250kg, 260kg with dolly. I think it's heavy. And of course, it's a little caravan man. Not suitable for club shows. In the sun, it's really on for the first time. It looks fat from the front. We have a total of 48 rims in use. That's impressive. We work here with lamps that cannot be easily replaced. The lamp is then repaired again. Classic, like in a car workshop. That means we have two people on the floor, we have two people on top of the back wall, who disassemble a lamp to repair it. And if something is stuck, if something is jammed, to then possibly go under the stage and reset the lamp. Here is the underworld. This is the most unpopular job, because the stage is unfortunately a few centimeters too low. That really fits here at about 1cm. If the lamp just moves a little, then it doesn't work anymore. There are big expectations from them, in terms of the result. It is a big loud thumping rock show. It's not a pop show. We now have a little interruption and waiting breaks. For example, until these big round pots are up, everything has to be worked out first. And then we can pull up the PA before that. On every tour you do, you have to find out the order of things. There's always some stumbling points, there's always points where you clash with other departments. You find out that you can't do something at that time, because they're doing something. So you all get to a point where everybody knows what happens first and what happens in what order. And once you get to that point, it's easy. Most of the big stadiums we play in tend to be football stadiums. And football stadiums are designed so that the crowd in a football match is heard on pitch. For instance, in this stadium, the roof is all curved plastic. This is the concept for Frankfurt. I have a 3D drawing of the stadium. I use it to calculate the individual angles in the PA. Each box has a single angle to another. I look at where it shines. Then I draw my lines and they show me where in the stadium my PA has to shine. I check that once when we set up. Then my colleagues get a list from me with all the parameters they need. And that's how it's built. Well, the challenges with stadium sound are always different. Here in Frankfurt, we have additional 8 PA hangers in the roof for the upper ranks. Instead of shooting into the roof, we shoot away from it. Hopefully, it's also a better sound experience for the people in the upper ranks. The cost of all the production that you set up in one and a half days is a real statement for the equipment and the people. It's like a well-choreographed playground. And that's amazing. The people are really great. We do the automation. We make things move. In this case, the star lift and the center video screen. The lift is a fun thing. It has a fun effect in the show. I check that all the pins are in place and everything looks good to make sure everything looks the same as it does. Yes. Ready, ready, ready. All right. That's it, Dolly. Enjoy. Go out that way, up the stairs. It's on the first level. The most important thing of the day. Where's catering? The real artists are standing there, there, there and there. But that's not me. Terttaubert is just as good as Sentin. It's usually lunch at 2.50 and dinner at 2.50. Winter. We're like the living room here as catering. Where everything is always in order. We have the same style everywhere, of course, different colors and sizes. And then they always say it's like coming home. And to be able to do that, to be able to take a quick breath, to be able to get food and still taste good, that's nice. At my production office, there's a production coordinator and a production assistant. So you don't have the burden on your shoulders anymore. So that I have the capacity to monitor, to see if everything is running as it should. So I know how it works. I know the crew pretty well. And so I'm able to kind of just do my own thing and kind of predict of what they want and what they need. If there's anything I can do out here to try to make it a bit better, then I will. Awesome. Thank you so much. I handle the day of stuff. Stuff that the crew needs for to work. Like tarpaulins or buckets for pyro or cleaning supplies or like our video department needs. HDMI cables, radios, and other things. Just making sure that everyone knows what's happening for the next day, that everyone is getting what they need and the information is being put out there and just trying to make it run smoothly. Are there any suitcases dropped here? You can take it directly to your buses. Oh, perfect. Directly to your bus. Thank you. Where are the buses, by the way? Oh, man. Let's go for a walk, Alex. Are you going there now? Do you want to go there now? It's tour. I just think you have to be a certain type of person. It is definitely not for everybody. I would say it's like a circus. It's just we come into a town and we were there for a few days and it just drops everything and then we leave. This is my routine. Giving crew money. There's no spaces. Should I just put it on top? So, I have a little area. Nikolaj obviously has the bigger picture in mind. I translate that to the near future and then we delegate on Detroit to make it happen on the day of the immediate future. Especially Nikolaj and I have been doing this since 2019. So, it's very intuitive. It's not something we need to sit down and decide who does what. And that's not only habit and routine. That's also people caring about their job. So, I'm now working on our crew transfers for the show in Nijmegen in about a month from now. My brain is now a month away. That's because Detroit can handle today, hopefully. If not, then we're in trouble. It is debatable if I'm handling today. Today's going just fine. It's totally okay. Everything's fine. In the beginning, I only did tour and production management. I didn't have much to do with the office. And then it came along. Of course, that's always a good incentive to work with a band you can do things with. Look, someone's putting on a backpack here. It's on fire. It's hot. And then there are guys like Lindemann. My name is Marcin. I work as a producer for special effects here in the production. Flames, fire and special effects. That's our part. It's 12 of us in total. It doesn't happen that often that there's 12 pyrotechnicians on the tour. 2019, when we saw the stage, it was like, really good. Whoa, what the hell is that? That is huge. It is massive. We are using three trucks, which is also pretty much for the aesthetics department. That's actually the biggest I had a chance to be a part of. It's a stadium tour. It's really huge. Tons of things are happening. My role is actually to watch out for all the crew of SFX. We have a special crew responsible for back walls, special crew responsible only for main tower. We have people working only for delay towers, special crew responsible for all the gags happening, like flaming guitars, like the burning sleeves or everything that Till is using. And actually, there are days, especially on the loading day, that some of the crew members don't even see each other, just in the morning in the hotel and then in the evening. This is not a normal show. That's part of it. We have never had so much fire. No show in the world had what we have done here before. There is almost nothing on stage that is completely normal. Everything is customized. By the way, the backpack took ten years until the technology was so advanced that we were able to use it. We had the plan for a long time. For us, the challenge is always the safety, because the show always looks the same, but the venue is not the same. So sometimes we have to deal with different shape of the roof. And we have no wind. If it's very windy tomorrow, then we probably have to reconsider. You know the drill. With the massiveness of the show itself, normally around 10-11 hours we spend on the loading day, just to prepare it, but then we finish the day with flame test. The team spirit is just the basics. I mean, if it's not working, and in the team, even in the private way, then it won't work at work. Where can I find you? Copy, I'm walking on it. On a loading day, now that it's settled down, I mean obviously we've been going for four years, so we should know what we're doing now. In a place like this, where it's fairly straightforward and fairly simple, we're normally done by about four o'clock in the afternoon. But then the programming guys, Farran and Mark, have to stay until it gets dark, so they can focus. When everything is done, the stage is completely set up, all the lights are installed and wired, then Owen is on the left desk and checks for functionality. Everything is playing, everything is running. Mark is the main operator, who basically controls and controls the whole show light, and I actually have the band's internal light, so the pursuer spots, everything that illuminates the band internally. And then we just have to wait for it to get dark. What I'm doing here now is turning all the floor flutes so that the decoration, the PA, and everything else is running accordingly. So the whole structure, the whole stage, everything is taken apart, loaded, reassembled. And of course the positions don't match, because not every lamp is on a millimeter, just like it was the day before. Today I saw that it's about 7-8 centimeters more in the back than it normally is. And then Mark basically takes over the system and then makes complete focus for everyone. And then you really need absolute darkness. And now we're here alone. I'm just doing a remote on the light console and I'm just looking through individual positions to see if they're all straight. These are the ones on the side, they're actually only there to illuminate the tower. Which they do quite well. The actual instruments, the ones the musician plays with afterwards, they only come on the day of the show. The backline technician takes care of the instruments for the artist, also during the show. Or backline, the line behind the musician in short. The main instrument is every show, the not-so-often-played ones, every second show, new strings. And then you also do the service around it. Then you can set up all the stuff here beforehand, a few cables. What's very special about Rammstein is that there's a lot of dirt through this pyrotechnic. There's always a dust that forms everywhere. The instrument also has to run during the show. This is the guitar that shoots the flames at Rammstein, which the artist can release himself in the front. This is also a live-played guitar, not like other artists think that it wouldn't be live-played. I'm Nando Bernal. And from my seat here on the right is the playback station. It mainly affects the click. And it goes to Schneider, so that we have a reference, so to speak, when the song starts and where he jumps in, so to speak. The show is supported by Timecode. Schneider gives here with this little traffic light When the green light says, Nando starts. And when the red light says, Nando stops. With this, you can synchronize the whole show. Light, video, pyrotechnics are connected to their system and are on the same path with us, so to speak, with the ski lift up. But the moment something happens, everyone is on it right away. So that everyone could take over at any time in the show. That usually happens once in ten shows. How are you? These are the new boxes that came from Berlin. These are our three warehouse trucks, where we then equip our sales trucks. And then we park the trucks where they have to go. I'm Dani. I've been working for Rammstein Merch for 20 years now. We are always very far away from everything. Somewhere outside with the booths and the trucks. We do our thing. That's a different story than having it in the shop. Because here the logistics is a much bigger part. So it's not just about selling T-shirts, but coordinating the staff and the trucks. Plus, of course, the goods planning, sorting, quantities, reordering. It's just not enough to start with the three trucks. It has to happen several times. To react when it's too little or too much. Then, of course, everyone else comes and brings something. We fill out a small post function for the production, so to speak. But of course we like to. We have space, we drive anyway. It's nonsense to send couriers for that. Everyone gets a package. This year we sell a lot more hoodies and zippers. Because the weather is not so great all the time. We were in Athens for the first time ever. You don't know how the sales are going. In the end, you build a lot of air locks. Because the numbers, you don't always know everything. And at the end of the tour, you want to bring as little as possible home. The tour T-shirt is just the top salad. You can do whatever you want with it. It's not just like that in America, but also in Germany or Italy, where every district has its own rules, which you have to know and follow. In L.A., we have been preparing this show with the Deputy State Fire Marshal for two years. We invited him, because parts of the show that we did there were not approved in Los Angeles. For example, these line rockets over the audience, you are usually not allowed there. So then it's not you set it up, and then it's there for the whole time. You have to refill everything, refuel everything, set up all the pyro again. So it just takes a really long time. I need to go underneath the platform that's now on height, so I can open up all the bottles, so they are ready for tonight. I make the sound for the people here, for the audience. Sometimes you're lucky and you don't have any roofs, then you don't have so many reflections. It's like a big bathtub. For example, if you are in a train station, you rarely understand exactly what the announcer says. That's why I built it here. It's just holding and trying to get it under control. That's my second job. I take care of the FOH place here, our FOH engineer and the two consoles. I make sure that everything works and is correct. During the show, Ulsen mixes the show on the first desk, and I take care of the backup desk. I make sure that everything is correct, that if we have a worst-case scenario and somehow the main desk fails, that we can ensure that we don't create a showstopper. I do the monitor. That means I mix what the band itself hears. I press the button, Paul, and mix it for him, so to speak, song for song, just the way he likes it. So that he can play well, that he hears himself well and that he also hears what the others are doing. For Paul, other things are more important than for Schneider, for example. That's why everyone gets their own mix. They have these knobs in the ear. The headphones are really tight. They are adapted to the ears, because Till doesn't have headphones. Because of all the water and the fire and so on. I make the mix for Till on stage with speakers. These are only for Till. The speakers below just give a little more pressure, because otherwise it would be too low. That's it. But it's not as bad as I thought. We already had a lot worse. My name is Sven. I'm the video director here at Leetour. That means I'm responsible for the live images on the screens. Our team consists of four cameramen and four technicians. That means there are eight of us in total. At the beginning, there were a lot of discussions. What comes on the screen, what do we film? When we play videos, we are all 9 to 16. The format comes from the architecture of the stage. That means the framing is relatively narrow and limited. I would say the most important thing is translating what goes on here out there to the fans. Obviously, when you're sitting way back there, everybody looks really small. So our job is to make these images go really big for everybody. My name is Edward Kirschel. I work for EPS doing the barricade on the Rammstein tour. It's me and my colleague. We go around, set up a barricade from place to place. Basically, it's to keep the crowds, the band, the security that are working there safe. We make sure that however it's built in any situation, it's as safe as possible. We go around ourselves, any other cable ramps that move positions. We check it all earlier anyway to make sure gates are still opening as they should. So that's all good. I'm Leo Raatz. I'm the band tour manager. You can think of it like two worlds. On the one hand, there's the production, all the technicians and all the staff that stays in production. Apart from that, there's the band, which travels separately. I make sure that the band is where it's supposed to be. Internally, we call it the band party. That's all the people who are close to the band. In total, we're around 21 people. For the band party, there's the security staff that travels with the band, me and my two colleagues Matthias and Antonia. There's also the backstage staff, the band assistants Tom, Paolo and Pavel, who are here much earlier, who set up everything, clear all the backstage rooms, all the areas. I can't really define the job. I'm a band assistant, which is a lot. I'd say all-rounder. A lot is routine, but it always has to be adapted to the location. That's the main task we have. For example, setting up the band for the concert at home. We need the rooms for the artists, for the mask room, for the tour management, for us, a room. It's always the same. I always do the same thing. But it always looks different. We usually fly to the city on the first show day. We check into the hotel. Then I typically go straight to the stadium or to the venue, depending on where we're playing. I do a local tour, so I know the way. Then we have meetings again and again, what's planned for that day. Then there's a blind tour. I do that together with Paul Landers. We go over the stage with the blinds. So, friends, let's get to work. Olli! Have fun! Are you ready for the show? SFX, are you ready for the show? SFX, ready. Video, including camera. Are you ready for the show? Which video? Sound. Are you ready for the show? Then the show starts. Typically, the production manager, Nikolai, picks us up, picks up the band. I bring the band to the stage. We create the playing field for two and a half hours. Till sings the first song. I go on stage, take off his coat and go back to the backstage and start tidying up here in the backstage. I break down things that I've set up, pack them up, etc. I've never seen a live Rammstein show in my life. But I've been to all of them. I'm the only one who doesn't have a fixed position. I just travel around and look. I often end up at the same place because there are always details that I would like to take a look at. Does it work? Does it not work? One or the other, I'll say now, we have to do by hand because we want to have control when Till holds something in his hand, when something happens, that we can intervene directly. That's why I have a monitor where I see the stages in front of me. I'm the main shooter of the show. That means you control the flames and all the pyrotechnic effects so that they match the song and the time. At this stage, I walk along and lift the boats over the barriers so that they land in front of the audience and just give it the go. We get a timecode from the stage and then the light is programmed to the music. But it's also good to keep a little control because sometimes the machine goes out and then I have to go in with my hand. Otherwise it just stops. After the show, it's usually like this, I always stay there until the last band has also left. The speed of how fast everything from out there will go down is incredible. What you build in one and a half days, you have to dismantle in four and a half hours because you have to go to the next city. It's a dance. Everyone's working at the same time. You know exactly what has to go where, when. And before you know, that stage will be packed up and then that will travel to its next destination, copy and paste. It's a little bit Groundhog Day sometimes, for those who get the reference. The conclusion is, oh, great, now we know how it works. In any case, put another one on top of this. And the shark in the face But it lives in the water So you don't see the tears Keep the pace We keep our word No one is keeping up Monkeys, candles, they're burning The fire keeps you warm And the rice face The shark lives in the water So you don't see the tears In the sea Keep the pace We keep our word No one is keeping up And the shark dies Tears And so the tears Die And so it comes In the sea