When Tokio Hotel start their 32 shows heavy first part of their “Welcome to Humanoid City” tour, their concerts take place in places like the Olympia Stadium in Moscow, in Barcelona, Paris, Madrid, Rome and (for now) only two German dates in Oberhausen and Hamburg (on the 26. and 28. February). One sign that the school friends from Magdeburg with their melancholical-metallic glam rock have long since become world stars.
The 20 year old twins Bill (singer) and Tom Kaulitz (guitarist) tell us after a spectacular GQ photoshoot in Hamburg how Tokio Hotel find their way as style-wise individualistic, as well as creative and ready to fight young artists in a world that has yet to learn to respect them.
Q: Bill and Tom Kaulitz. We’re meeting you without your two band mates Georg Listing and Gustav Schäfer. Are they insulted?
Tom: Not at all. They thank us and pull up a chair.
Bill: If it were up to Gustav and Georg, they’d just play bass and drums in Tokio Hotel and keep out of everything else.
Q: Is the band divided?
Bill: Not at all. That difference has been obvious pretty much from the beginning: they’d rather leave the whole stuff with pictures, interviews and red carpets to us. Six or seven years ago, only small town papers wanted to talk to us, but even then it was mostly Tom and me who represented the band.
Q: Your two band members still live in Magdeburg, but you have moved to Hamburg five years ago.
Bill: Gustav and Georg did live, here, too, during our first recording sessions, but they moved back, really quickly. To be honest, I can’t quite understand that. But maybe Tom and I were special cases. Our childhood was really rough. Going to school in a village near Magdeburg felt horrible. We were so glad to get out of there.
Q: A lot of images from those years can be found on the internet. Is an embarrassing childhood not private? How did those pictures get there?
Bill: A lot of those have been published by former class mates. Others we gave to the press ourselves: baby- and childhood pictures of us, as well as impressions of former gigs, when Tokio Hotel was still Devilish.
Q: You don’t need a photo album, anymore – you can just Google your memories.
Bill: Recently, we made the resolution to take more pictures. We travel into so many beautiful cities, we get to do and see so many thing, that is something that should be captured… Then we realized: we don’t have to! We always have a camera team with us. We’ve given up on privately taking pictures.
Q: With a lot of other German teenager pop-bands the hype ended after one season. Tokio Hotel on the other hand are a world hit with an MTV award, sold-out concerts in Europe and chart positions in the US. To keep up with the demands: is it necessary to decide to live your life completely in public?
Bill: Tom and I have made that decision, yes. Including all of the negative aspects – but we have learned to live with it. It only gets bad when people get pulled into that who don’t want it: parents, family, friends. We’re doing everything we can to protect them from the public’s curious eye. But it’s become difficult to lead a normal life to whoever carries the name Kaulitz, nowadays.
Q: Being a popstar, even if you have to sacrifice a normal life almost completely – when exactly did you make that decision?
Bill: At 15. That was when our fist single “Durch den Monsun” was released. It was amazing when that went through the roof. Then the first headlines appeared…
Tom: … and we got the full program, right away!
Bill: The first stories in the tabloids had been there, before. And when our song was played on the radio and the demands grew, we did ask ourselves: what’s happening, here? What are we getting into? For example, I left a glass lying around somewhere, and you could buy that on ebay the next day. But experiences like that are educational. We started early and started to learn early, accordingly. Tokio Hotel is not a job, it’s our life. Outside of that, there’s hardly anything left, no more than the family. For that one year in which we produced our new album we had planned on not ending up in the press. That hasn’t worked, at all.
Tom: There’s no switch to turn. No end of the day.
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