DIE KRUPPS

 How much input did you have into the song selection on the Rings Of Steel release? 

Well, we had The Final Option out a year and a half ago and then we had those remixes done by friends of ours, all those fellow musicians who did remixes. Cleopatra really liked that and asked us if we would give them that album and we said, well, I would like to actually have some of the original versions on the album, too. So we decided to make it sort of a compilation of the last one and a half to two years, put together the most important songs that we think should be on that album. 

How closely did you work with the artists doing the remixes? Was it pretty much left up to them?

 Yes, we left it all up to them, because we involved musicians that we were friends with or knew pretty well and had respect for their work, so we just left it completely up to them. To be honest, I was very pleased with the results. I think all the bands really brought in a lot of their own identity, and made it sounds like a crossover between the band that did the remix and Die Krupps, which is very pleasing to me. 

Was there anyone that you wanted to do a remix that wasn't able to?

 There was a couple of people that we approached but couldn't do it because of timing problems. For example, with Prong, we played at a festival together, and J.B. the keyboarder and Raven wanted to do a remix, but they were still on tour when we put out The Final Remixes album here in Europe. Same thing with Dave Lombardo. He was in Germany with Voodoo Cult, he was touring with them. What happened was he was very interested, he heard the stuff and said, I like the band form a while ago and I'm really interested in doing it. After the tour, he was supposed to fly back to the States to start recording with Grip, Inc., and he wanted to change his flight but he couldn't, so it didn't work out. 

Have you done any remixes for other bands? 

Yes, actually I've done quite a lot here. I've done remixes for Pop Will Eat Itself, and I've done one for Juster, for Christian Death, Clawfinger, several others, I can't remember. Since the end of last year, I've done probably 20 remixes for other bands, so I've been pretty busy. 

So, you like doing studio work then? 

Yeah, actually I like doing remixes because it's quite interesting to work on songs that you haven't written yourself. When you have a song and you're really involved with it, it's hard to take a step back and see what's good and what's not. When you get a song from other bands, I know pretty much right away what I don't like about it and what I'd do different. It's always challenging to come up with something that really matches with the original music but makes it sound different enough to be a good remix. 

I got a copy of The Final Option that was the double-CD package and I was wondering why you decided to package the demo versions with the final ones. 

That was the idea of our record company. They wanted to do something that was a limited edition and they asked us if we had any additional songs they could release. All that we had at that time was basically the whole album, mixed by ourselves in five hours. (laughs) The demo versions were actually supposed to be a reference for us when we went to do the final mixes in New York, and then Rough Trade just used that as a limited edition. 

Will any of the older albums become available in the U.S. on CD?

 I don't know, it really depends on Cleopatra. I think if they would be interested in putting out some of the older stuff, it would be okay. They were thinking of releasing a compilation of the older stuff. We had a compilation out in '91 called Past Forward '91-'81 that covered the first ten years of Die Krupps music. It was out on Mute/Elektra, but I think it's been deleted, so Cleopatra wanted to release a compilation that covered the whole background from '81 to '92. 

Have you ever played live in the U.S.? 

Yeah, we played a couple of shows in New York and one in Boston, but we always wanted to play a whole tour. We just got offered a tour with Grip, Inc. and Morbid Angel, but we're not going to do that because of what I've been told about Morbid Angel. 

Good. I've heard very bad things, too. 

The guys from Biohazard, for example, played a show with Morbid Angel and Evan, the singer who I'm friends with, he told me that the singer of Morbid Angel was making comments about ethnic cleansing and that kind of shit, so he got in a fight with him and beat him up. I've just heard a lot of bad stuff about them and I don't want to be touring with a fascist band, because we're totally against that. 

The Rings of Steel logo: who came up with that and what does it symbolize?

 The Rings of Steel logo is basically a development of the old Krupps logo. We used to use the old Krupps factory logo, which was three rings, and because of legal reasons, we decided to alter it a little bit and put the triangle around it. Krupps is one of the biggest steel factories here in Europe and it's a German company and they used to build weapons for the second world war. They have a lot of bad history and we chose that name to kind of show the people how Germany is seen in the rest of the world. When you come up with the name Germany or Krupps, it's kind of the same, you have a lot of bad, negative feelings when you hear it. Germany has always been a progressive country but at the same time we have a lot of negative feelings toward it. And I think that's important, because I don't want to forget about our bad past and about things that are happening, so to me it's very important to show people what's going on. So, we used that name Krupps, because it's like Mercedes-Benz, one of the biggest symbols or companies here. Besides that, when we started out as an industrial band, we were making experimental industrial music and the first songs was called "Steel Mill Symphony" and we tried capture the atmosphere of a steel mill from the inside. I was bashing metal at that time and we were making a lot of noise and that we associated with the steel factory Krupps. 

The lyrics to the song "Inside Out" really moved me and I was wondering what was going through your mind when you wrote that one? 

I was going through a very interesting part of my life, it's a very personal song. It might be that the lyrics are little bit over-exaggerated, but I came to the point where all this made sense to me and I wrote it in a very short amount of time. It just flew, I had the feeling I had to get rid of it. (pause) And it's hard to explain lyrics that are very personal, you probably understand that.