Tokio Hotel in Teenage Magazine.

TOKIO DREAMING

Starting out in a small town in Germany, the last thing the boys of TOKIO HOTEL expected was international superstardom. Audrey Kua talks to the band about their experience.

Don’t let the name fool you because Tokio Hotel isn’t from Japan! Made up of identical twins Bill and Tom Kaulitz, Georg Listing and Gustav Schafer, the band named themselves Tokio Hotel because they were looking for a cool city to mirror the band after. Tokyo seemed to fit the bill perfectly for them.

We called ourselves Tokio Hotel because we’ve never been there. This was during a time when we didn’t know what was going to happen next. We wanted to come up with a new name, so we searched for a city which sounded good and that we’ve never been to before,” says 20-year-old lead singer, Bill.

Asia Loving

In fact, their trip to perform at the Audi Fashion Festival, Singapore, was the band’s first time in Asia! “We were very impressed. When we walked out of the airport, it was like ‘Wow!’” says Bill about their first impression of the city. “It has nice weather, nice girls, and nice buildings. It’s really nice here,” adds his brother. “The girls are very beautiful! WE met some fans yesterday and we played a couple of acoustic songs for them. They were so sweet!”

The boys also confirmed while they were only here for a small-scale but exclusive showcase, they would like to return to stage a bigger show/ “we were really excited to be in Asia. WE have been asking the record company if we could perform here. So for us to be here, it’s great. We’re hoping to tour Asia soon. This will include China in July, as well as Japan. But we’ll come back to Singapore for sure!”

History of Tokio

Before Tokio Hotel became popular even in our side of the world, it was just a two man group consisting of Bill and Tom. “At first it was just Tom and I on stage. I had a keyboard,” says Bill, before adding sheepishly.”But I can’t play the keyboard. I just pushed some buttons to get the sound of drums and bass.” The young lead singer recalls how difficult it was to find a new drummer and bassist when they were forming their group. “It’s hard to find someone who was our age because we came from Magdeburg, a small town in Germany.

Eventually, we found Georg and Gustav in a little live club. They were excited to join us after watching out performance. From that day on we’ve been together. It’s been 10 years now!”

Having recorded mostly in German, Tokio Hotel decided to turn their focus on tackling English songs in order to take their music to a wider audience. But the transition was no easy feat! On Humanoid, their second English album, the boys revealed that other than the title, which was spelt the same way in German and English, the rest of the album had to be tweaked because there were no direct translations for many of the words.

For our last record Screamer, it was really hard since I’m a perfectionist in every way. I really wanted to sound natural,” admits Bill. “As you can tell, I’m not a native speaker od English. For Humanoid, it’s not a one-to-one translation so sometimes we had different meanings for the English and German songs. You really have to look at both versions of them.”

When asked which song best describes them, the boys began to answer thoughtfully. “A lot of songs describe us! ‘Alien’ for instance, really describes our feelings about the childhood that Tom and I had. I think ‘ World Behind My Wall’ is also a song which describes our life,” says Bill who is interrupted by his older brother. “I think every song is something out of our life, it’s always a topic that’s on our mind. All our songs are very personal,” says Tom.

Source: Twitter (THANK YOU to @Scqueila & @ngsusan) and transcribed by the team.