The anger and energy just fit…
In the backstage area in the arena on a beautiful Wednesday afternoon, I was sitting at the interview with Sascha and Nico from the punk rock heroes MADSEN and asked questions about what they looked like with their nervousness before the show and questions like QUEEN or NIRVANA Other astonishing details about the troop came to light.
Everything has become a little more positive, a little more life-affirming
Hello Sascha, Hello Nico!
Sascha and Niko: Hello, hello,
I’m glad you took the time to talk to us. It is my pleasure and also an honor.
You’ve been a very successful band for a long time and yet you don’t take your success for granted. Over the years, do you have a ritual before you go on stage?
Sasha: We tried the ritual, but we always felt so stupid that we stopped doing it.
Niko: Butt clap, haha!
Sasha: Stand in a circle and shout something, but we hug each other first, we don’t do anything else.
Niko: Even though every festival is a little different, on the one hand you have a routine now and of course you could be totally excited, but we don’t care about it, somehow there’s no excitement anymore, but of course every concert and festival is different and you’re always a little excited and that’s part of it too. That’s why you do it.
So the adrenaline rush is still there?
Niko: Yes, and that’s fun too. Without this excitement it probably wouldn’t be any fun when you’re on stage looking totally fucked up.
And you also have your own unique approach to it, in the sense of redefining your rock star image.
Sasha: It’s a bit about putting an end to a cliché. A rock star who doesn’t make any effort, takes drugs, goes on stage without rest, comes late and, best of all, is misogynistic somewhere and, in the worst case, does things with women who even want it that way. You have to get away from romanticizing this inhumane shit. It’s all about this.
And a concert is something great and beautiful and we want to show what we can do and to do that you have to make an effort to be well rested, not too hungover and to have rehearsed a little more than once or twice a year.
Niko: And we have the advantage that we all have a lot of fun doing it. I hope you notice that too.
In any case!
You are also known for being a very good live band. You always keep the fun going, you always try new things. Your last album was a punk album, which I personally celebrated very much. Great from start to finish, even with the comments in between…
Sasha: We also had a lot of fun.
And you can hear that not only live, but also on Spotify. Did you take some insights from the punk album with you for your current album “Hollywood”?
Sasha: Yes definitely. Just the spontaneity with which we worked. It was Corona, it was lockdown and the album that we actually wanted to record in the studio couldn’t be recorded with producers and all the trimmings. And then Sebastian just started doing punk, one or two songs and I was sitting in Vienna and had to buy a special Covid test at the time. Back then it cost 130€ or something like that…
You were in Vienna back then?
Sasha: I live in Vienna.
Oh, cool, I didn’t even know…
Sasha: And in any case, it took a long time until the results were there and when I got the negative result, I immediately got in the car and drove off and then we finished writing and recording every song together. A song every day, so to speak. We’ve also gotten away from that a bit…don’t overthink every word, check it again, not everything has to be perfect. We definitely took that with us. Things that come out of you spontaneously can be beautiful, and you can leave them as they are. Because if you keep thinking about it for yourself, you will always find something that might not be good enough.
Niko: Music doesn’t have to be perfect. Music also thrives on little things, gimmicks, so we have now recorded almost the entire album without clicking…
“Hollywood”? Seriously?
Sasha: For the most part. Live in the studio, the four of us stood in the room and recorded without clicking on the tape machine. And there’s this thing again: allowing mistakes. When you record on the computer you have endless time. When you record on tape, you have three takes, and that should actually be included in the three. Then you play completely differently, you have a completely different concentration.
And energy!
Sasha: Energy too, of course, because you know one of the three takes has to be good, and that’s awesome! There is a tension in the room that is palpable.
Niko: This live energy comes together again and without clicking, on tape, you can reproduce the live feeling again in the studio.
No Pro Tools included either?
Sasha: We then played it from the tape machine into Pro Tools because we then recorded all the additional guitars and vocals in our home studio in Berlin. In addition, pianos, keyboards, everything that we have available in the large, expensive studios.
Grenzgenial!
Sasha: It was important to us that the four of us recorded our band sound, that it had this compact, analogue, warmer sound.
Absolute madness, if I ask another famous band that is as big as you, they probably won’t tell me that they record without clicking…
Sasha: Yes, that is very rare.
You can’t get any more punk than that. Congratulations again on both albums!
You’ve also experimented with many different genres; Sebastian also moved towards soul solo. Which genre still makes you laugh so much?
Sasha: We don’t think about it beforehand, that’s the nice thing about us. We’ve already found our style and we just like the energy and a song like “Hollywood” has its own energy and it’s something different live than the album version. And we don’t plan that. It happens as it happens.
Niko: And with “Na Gut Dann Nicht”, that was during the pandemic, we were angry, he was angry, he screamed all day and it just fit, the anger, the energy. And that’s perhaps why things have become a little more positive, a little more life-affirming with “Hollywood”. The pandemic was over.
Sasha: Hope came back.
Niko: Yes, and yet so much shit happens in the world and now something positive needs to happen again. It has developed like this and where the journey will take us is still up in the air.
Cool, stay exciting.
You are also a very emotional band, your lyrics, your melodies, and you address serious and beautiful serious topics, such as friendship. The song “Willi” particularly caught my attention. You’re a band with three brothers, meaning you’ve had a friend for life since birth, but was there a special occasion, situation or person for the song?
Niko: Yes, Willi really exists. He went to school with us, was in class with me and is a great friend of Sebastian’s and then it was just time to dedicate a song to him.
Sasha: And he’s such a loyal soul too. He always got in touch, he sometimes lived in Cologne, sometimes in Frankfurt, then Berlin and the contact was always there and he was always an incredibly important person for Sebastian. Then the idea just came, I like him so much, I want to write a song for him. And we all loved it from the start.
Wow, that’s a total commitment to Willi.
Sasha: I totally
Niko: Yes, and those things are all true. Great guy!
Shout out to Willi!
Sasha: In any case.
Niko: Willi, if you hear that!
Back to your punk DNA. When I was doing my research on your story, I noticed that you are known for a lot of things. Among other things, you also like to play at demos.
Sasha: Yes, often.
Especially after the punk album, do you feel like it again? Unfortunately, there are enough reasons to demonstrate.
Sasha: Clearly, privately and with the band. I recently went to the Fridays for Future demo with my children here in Vienna. Absolutely excellent, very good energy and it’s really important to show our colors. And with MADSEN we played at the “Jamel Rock Festival”. This is a place in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a village where almost only Nazis live and there is an artist couple and they hold the flag high. They’ve received death threats, their barn has been torched, and they still say we’re staying here. And they ensure that the village is made colorful once a year. And we’re there straight away and playing.
Reminds me of a story by a band called 100 KILO HERZ.
Sasha: Yes, we know. And they played a warm up show in Zitttau and said it was total grassroots work. That was probably a place in the far right corner, and they played in a small club with a maximum of 100 people, and the audience really thanked the band for holding the flag up here.
Sasha: Very good, very important.
After twenty years of band history, are there still bands that you still keep an eye on?
Sasha: Of course, yes, of course. We can’t sit down and say we’re so good, we don’t need to learn anything more, that would be absurd. Musically there are always new things to discover. So TEAM SCHEIßE is a band that we think is really cool, or BILDERBUCH that constantly reinvents itself and where there is no standstill, and they could be much more comfortable. And then there are the giants like Dave Grohl from the FOO FIGHTERS, the guy just does everything right, you can only watch and learn.
Anyway, apart from his side projects, he has the BEE GEES covered, recorded a metal album…
Sasha: DAMN CROOKED VULTURES, and he used to have a little project called NIRVANA hahaha.
I have the right question for you: At the end of an interview, we always give the bands the chance to ask the next band a question. The question for you comes from 100 KILO HERZ – if you had the choice, which concert would you rather go to, NIRVANA with the original line-up or Queen?
Sasha: Wow, that’s really hard…but I have to say NIRVANA.
Niko: Yes, I think we agree on that, but actually both, you would always mourn the other. But we are committed to NIRVANA. Yes, they never played at the big festivals, only on the small stages and that would be really cool to see them in the Chelsea, for example, or in the Arena. I’d pretty much give up seeing that again.
And now you have the chance to ask the next band a question, a band that I think you know well – ITCHY. There was a challenge, right?!
Niko and Sascha: Hahahaha
Niko: Yes, 2005 or 2006. MTV Band Challenge, you had to travel through Europe as a band, with no money, just equipment and doing tasks… it went like that, haha.
We can ask them: “Where does our money actually go” haha!
I would like to take the question with me. That’s it again, thank you very much.
Band-Links:
Band biography (source Wikipedia)MADSEN is an indie rock band from Prießeck, a district of Clenze in Wendland. Three of the five founding members are brothers, so their family name became the name of their band: Madsen. Their music consists of elements of rock, punk and pop. The texts are written by Sebastian Madsen almost exclusively in German. More on: Wikipedia
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