“Tokio Hotel Rocks Frankfurt’s Batschkapp: A Review of their Concert and Evolution into Pop Superstars”

Tokio Hotel in Frankfurt’s Batschkapp.

The Tokio Hotel concert has already been rescheduled twice, so now it’s sold out, of course, in the Batschkapp. The sound is powerful from the first second, the female voices are loud, the jubilation is perhaps a reminder that Tokio Hotel was once a spectacular teen band with hyperventilating girls and young women in particular, with stalking and the band fleeing to the USA, because it was unbearable in Germany with the obsessed fans – Tokio Hotel are also the band with this one hit from 2005 that they will play. Late, but not at the very end.

Now blonde and flowing

There are certainly 80 percent women, average age maybe 26, the hair of the men is often dyed. Dazzling colours. Shirts and heads and sneakers. Bill Kaulitz wears sequins and fringes, his hair is blond and flowing. Douglas Coupland writes: “Hair is important”. It glows purple and blue. Drummer Gustav is enthroned in the background. The bassist Georg stands a little apart. Georg and Tom Kaulitz play bass and guitar, but also keyboards from time to time – in keeping with the path away from the rock band to more electronic, danceable pop over the past 15 years.

That already ten, fifteen years ago it was okay in critic circles to like the band and their music. Tokio Hotel got bigger, the music more diverse. And an ’80s-inspired tune like “We Found Us,” built on a driving synth line, is rock-solid pop music.

Some bands from Germany eventually became internationally successful: Modern Talking, the Scorpions, Lou Bega. But this music and these artists have always remained unglamorous in a slightly embarrassing sense. Tokio Hotel on the other hand, yes, that’s travesty and over the top and charmingly longing. Diedrich Diederichsen writes that pop is characterized by the fact that you want to know what kind of guy is making this music. With Bill Kaulitz you could think for a while about what he has to do with you and whether you could want to be him. Confident enough for all that color and iridescence. And part of the band’s appeal might be that the bandmates are so much more ordinary in comparison. Jeans, black shirt. Bass in hand. A wave to the audience. Very loud female voices in response.

That sounds all the better, the more Tokio Hotel go the synthetic way. The contrast can be experienced at maximum in the quiet “Schwarz” from the debut album with a lot of teenage fear and the subsequent “Run, Run, Run”. In the text, in the stage design. First, acoustic guitar, yellow, Tom on the stool, Bill Kaulitz in silver, like an alien. After that strobo and synths and the banging of a night.

The band leaves the stage after 75 minutes, it’s the first concert of this tour in Germany. They haven’t played Through the Monsoon yet, so of course they’ll come again. They play the song, almost twenty years old, in an updated version, it sounds fuller, Bill’s voice doesn’t have much in common with the broken voice of back then, but still: he hasn’t aged that badly. But the fact that they don’t just go with it, but with the smooth grooving “Runaway” is to be understood as a statement: We don’t live in the past. “Behind the world. To the end of time.”