Scott Ian remembers exactly where he was when he first heard Rammstein: in a prison cell. In 1996, Anthrax’s guitarist was cast as an extra in David Lynch’s dark thriller Lost Highway, and was on set to film a jail scene (cut from the film’s final edit) featuring fellow musician Henry Rollins and actor Bill Pullman, when a distorted guitar riff from the German band’s debut album, Herzeleid, kicked in through the sound stage’s speakers. “It was unbelievably loud,” Scott recalls. “You know when you hear about how they torture people with loud music so they can’t sleep? It was that loud. I was like, ‘What the fuck is happening here?’”
The following summer, at the With Full Force festival, held on July 5, 1997 at an airfield in Zwickau, Germany, Anthrax’s guitarist would see the band play live, ahead of the release of their second album, Sehnsucht. Rammstein’s incendiary performance on that afternoon still burns brightly in his memory today, not least because, at the time, after a decade touring the world, Scott Ian thought he had seen it all.
“I specifically remember that Till had a flamethrower and was shooting this stream of fire 50 to 60 feet out over the crowd,” he remembers. “I was like, ‘This is insane.’ It was like going to a Broadway show. And they weren’t even headlining!”
Twenty-five years on, Rammstein are no longer an unknown quantity.
