Information
Date: July 6, 2002
City: Frauendfeld, Switzerland
Festival: Ministry of Rock
Author: Tanja
Review
After sleeping for some hours in the afternoon, we walked to the stage at 5.45 pm to see Clawfinger. I managed to get into the first row, but when the concert began the crowd was pushing so hard that I came right into the middle where there was a hole in the fence because of a big tube and so I got kicked out and had to go back in the second row. You can imagine how pissed I was! But Clawfinger was awesome and the Swiss people seemed to love them! When I once looked at the right side of the stage, I suddenly saw Richard standing there watching the concert! He wore sunglasses and a dark red shirt and looked awesome.
After Clawfinger, a band called "Soulfly" started screaming - I just put my hood on, hold my head down (it also had started to rain) and tried to survive in the second row. My friend Denise told me that Richard appeared at the side of the stage again, watched for a moment, shook his head and then left the stage.
Then Bush started playing and I forced myself back into the first row, a bit on the right side from the middle. Although Bush wasn't bad, soon all the songs sounded alike and the singer annoyed me with not being able to say a single sentence without the word "fuck" (how cool!). We thought they would never stop.
Rammstein started to play more than fifteen minutes behind time schedule. First Flake came on stage like usually, then thick fog disguised the stage and Till appeared somewhere from the left and started singing "Mein Herz brennt". The security guys were all "Hell's Angels"-members and they were the worst security I've ever seen. The paid more attention to what was happening on stage than to the audience. So two guys in the third/forth row started beating each other and they just did nothing - fortunately some other guys managed to calm them! They even did not really pay much attention to the crowd surfers. Every time there was an explosion on stage, those "Hell's Angels" twitched.
Back to Rammstein: Christoph was very generous this time with red color around his mouth (he looked a bit like the singer of "The Cure" who had given an awesome three hours-concert the day before!), Till had red and black (which looked a bit like coal) color on his face and on his bald head (so he didn't look really bald anymore). Paul had put those colors on as well. Olli had the usual black color on his body/face, I think, but he was really far away - the stage was in general very far away from the first row and very high built as well. Richard had put much red color on his eye lids; he has grown himself a small beard on his chin which looks very nice. Flake looked like usual - he didn't look thinner in spite of his recent disease. Paul made robot-like movements like usual, one time he bent down so slowly to his guitar that I really thought he would be sick and would start fainting and fall over - he is a real good actor. Another time, when he hadn't to play, he leant against one loudspeaker, watched the stage from the side and was smiling all over (he still IS a human!). At "Bück' dich", me and my friend got soaked by Till's "dildo-fluid". Before the concert I complained about those crazy people who would open their mouths and drink that fluid, but - of course - when I had the chance I did the same and well, the fluid tasted really good :-D ! Till pulled faces all the time and made the audience sing along constantly. At "ich will" he sang "Könnt Ihr mich verstehen?" and then answered himself "na, klar!". I had the impression that he enjoyed very much being in a German-speaking country again. He made some rhymes about Switzerland which, I thought, was really very nice of him: when they first left the stage, he said: "Schöne Uhren, scharfe Messer - in der Schweiz ist alles besser!" (beautiful watches, sharp knives - in Switzerland everything's better). After the encore, he made another rhyme which I cannot remember completely - he alluded to Swiss people living in their country and Germans or people of other nations opening an account there ("machen ein Konto auf"). When "Stripped" started, Till came walking on his knees onto the stage, looking like a duck. He started singing "come with me" in a real deep voice, deeper than usual. When trying to sing the second line ("into the trees"), he had no voice any more and when recognizing this, he started giggling and couldn't stop (so cute!). Olli didn't go into the boat at that festival, as he apparently did the next day at that one in Belfort. But it was a really great concert with relaxed Rammstein-members and much fun.