Tokio Hotel WW163 (Access, Canada)

There’s an irony to interviewing Tokio Hotel in a Toronto hotel suite on a snowy February. The band, originally called Devilish, re-named itself after what they thought their first home would look like. “We love big cities, modern cities, energetic cities,” says singer Bill Kaulitz, 18, speaking in German through a translator. “We imagined ourselves, if we could make it, (a Tokio Hotel) would be one of our first homes.” (“Tokyo” in German is spelled “Tokio.”)
Despite the fact that the members of Tokio Hotel, like many teens, could not agree on musical influences, they agreed on their vision of the band and stuck to it. “We were all so different. We couldn’t agree on a favorite band but we could agree on Tokio Hotel. We knew how we wanted to sound,” says Kaulitz, “and out music came from there.”
The band formed when the twins Bill and Tom Kaulitz met Georg Listing and Gustav Schafer in their early teens. “Gustav and I knew each other from music school and we decided to help them out. We decided to look for a drum player and bass player and we decided to take them. We decided to take the best guys from our town, out of Magdeburg, and that was them,” says Kaulitz, joking that since the town was so small, they really didn’t have much choice. The twins were only 13 when they made their first record, Schrei. They are the highest-placing German band ever in the French charts, and their second album, Zimmer 483 (about a house in Spain where their second album was recorded), went gold in its first week.
The band signed with Universal in May 2005 and has since sold over three million albums and DVDs in Germany alone. The guys insist that their English debut, Schrei, be a one-to-one translation so the lyrics would retain their meanings across languages. Says Bill: “We wanted everyone to understand our lyrics, to understand the emotions in our songs. We didn’t want to lose anything from the German original, from the emotion, from the base.”
They have become teen heart-throbs of late, particularly in Europe, however they insist their looks are not modeled on anyone. Bill sports tight-fitting jeans, teased hair, and makeup that makes Pamela Anderson look understated. His brother Tom, with his dreadlocks and baggy pants and shirts, looks like he would be at home in a hip hop club, while Georg and Gustav look like the typical teen metalheads.
The touching ballad “Sacred” is an album standout, where Kaulitz tells someone who if obviously very special to him “to me, you’ll be forever sacred.” While he stay mum on who is the subject of the song, Bill says, “For this song we looked for a word that’s bigger than love. You can fall in love so many times, but some people have this standing forever. You wanted to show how big this relationship is.”
Kim Edwards