Till Lindemann

He was born on January 4, 1963, in Leipzig, son of the poet Werner Lindemann and the journalist Gitta Lindemann. He grew up in Wendisch-Rambow, and at eleven he entered the sports school at SC Empor Rostock: before he sang, he swam competitively. At the 1978 European Junior Championships in Florence he finished seventh in the 400 m freestyle and eleventh in the 1500 m. He was shortlisted for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, but an injury took him out of the running.

What followed was a long list of jobs — apprentice carpenter, gallery technician, peat cutter, basket weaver — until music reached him from the least expected angle: as a drummer. From 1986 he played in First Arsch, an experimental band from Schwerin that released Saddle Up in 1992, and in 1989 he sang backing vocals for Feeling B, where Paul Landers and Christian Lorenz already were (Christoph Schneider joined in 1990).

In Rammstein he is the voice and the lyricist: the rolled R, the exaggerated diction and the uncomfortable imagery are his. He is also a certified pyrotechnician, a detail that explains why the fire on stage isn’t merely a contracted effect.

Outside the band he works on two fronts. One is musical: the duo Lindemann with Sweden’s Peter Tägtgren, with Skills in Pills (2015) and F & M (2019), and since 2020 his work under his own name. The other is on paper: he published the poetry collections Messer (2002), In stillen Nächten (2013) and 100 Gedichte (2020).