Rammstein’s Till Lindemann once set Tool’s stage on fire

Everybody knows Rammstein love pyro. Their live shows are the thing of legend, a seemingly never-ending procession of explosions and eye-popping set pieces that have made them one of the world’s most formidable live acts. 

Tool on the other hand have built their reputation on psychedelia-drenched kaleidoscopes, their live shows feeling more like slipping through a dimensional gate to prog metal perfection. 

Put the two together and what do you get? A lot of combustible material, naturally. The two seminal bands joined forces in 2011 when they played Australia’s Big Day Out festival – though things turned out to be a little too incendiary during Tool‘s performance in Adelaide. 

Rammstein drummer Christoph Schneider had been invited on-stage to battle it out with Tool‘s Danny Carey during a performance of “Lateralus”, but was interrupted when a glowing-mouthed Till Lindemann marched onto the stage. With a flamethrower, naturally. 

A few gouts of flame later and Schneider’s kit was aflame, though this clearly didn’t phase the drummer at all as he just kept bashing away. He is Rammstein‘s drummer, after all. 

Only, playing with fire turns out to be a really dumb idea and the flames soon spread to the stage. Luckily, Till is on hand to beat the fire to death (again, totally normal for Rammstein) before the crew could rush on with fire extinguishers and put the fire out properly. 

Where was Maynard throughout all of this? Lurking like the shadow-spectre he is, naturally. He does get a good one-liner in though, announcing “I’m gonna turn these photos in to my lawyer.”

Though the bands haven’t toured together since (we can but dream), there were clearly no hard feelings about the incident as Cristoph posted a backstage photo in 2019 where Danny had travelled out to see Rammstein play. 

Don’t play with flamethrowers, kids.