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Intro text:

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.

Interview:

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 colleagues 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 realised: 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 appered…

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.

… something missing, I think…

Bill: When we come off the stage when something went wrong, we’re all silent. Nobody talks.

Q: Have there ever been problems that weren’t worth all the drama? That the company got the wrong colour for the cover or something?

Tom: (breathes deeply) Now that would be a catastrophe. I’d blow up.

Bill: If something like that were to happen, I couldn’t sleep properly for a year… But I do remember something: some of our songs from Humanoid had been online, illegally, three months before the album was released. I could hardly believe that somebody would steal the art from us that we put so much time and energy into.

Q: A very widely spread problem, nowadays. How did you react?

Bill: We will not hand over music to companies, beforehand, anymore. It gets into the wrong hands, there, sometimes. We were careful, before, but we learned from that.

Tom: Everything needs to stay in the smallest circle possible. On a business level, there are so many involved in Tokio Hotel: the German label, the French one, Interscope in the States, and and and. There is an uncountable amount of people involved you can’t control.

Q: If music is such an emotional topic, doesn’t the band project endanger the love between brothers?

Tom: You could see it that way. Theoretically. We both have the problem that we tend to focus on the negative aspects of things. If there is one bad message, we forget the 20 good ones we got, before. Bad news make you improve the situation. You can just move on from positive things.

Bill: That’s the typical twin thing. When I’m happy, Tom has 10000 things in his mind. And the other way around. That we can sit next to each other on a couch, all relaxed, happens once a year.

Tom: Actually, I don’t think it happened in the last five years.

Q: It’s almost as if one can hear that in your music. Teenager bands usually sound light, less dark and selling things – the Tokio Hotel songs have always been surprisingly dark, serious and lacking a childlike naiveté. How on earth could you two pig-headed boys agree on one musical style?

Bill: Good question. In private, we only ever fight about music. He only listens to hip hop and I listen to all kinds of things. We can’t understand each other in that respect.

Tom: When we started out, it was really easy. We had no choice! We never sat down and talked: let’s sound like this or that band. We were limited. We just did what we were capable of. It’s interesting how that unique style that came of it lasted until today. There is a thread going through all of our works, a clear line.

Q: When one sees you, today – the glamorous, alien-like Bill and the earthed streetstyler Tom – one would never think that you are twins. When was the point at which you developed in different directions?

Bill: That complicated to explain. We just wanted to get out of the other’s shadow at some point. Out of that annoying, public twin existence. Imagine that. At school, it was always: the twins here and the twins there… On the other hand, I think it’s natural that each would develop his on personality that we do everything together. Or maybe not.

Tom: I’d put it this way: Everything that one complete human being has in itself, we distributed among the two of us. Each of us has chosen his part and specialised in his area of expertise. Bill is more the creative type, I’m more on the business side. If you add that up, we’re one person, one human being. Just a very versatile one.

Q: Does that also mean that you’ve never been rivals, in all those years?

Bill: We never thought about who is the favourite son and who’s the black sheep. We were always a team. Like I said, we moved out at 15, earned our own money. We didn’t have time for childish shenanigans – it all happened very early. Sometimes I feel like mine and Tom’s life has moved twice as fast, because each taught the other what he learned. Identical twins grow up faster, because they share everything. Including experience.

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