Tokio Hotel, the new european idols

In 2001, German twins called Bill and Tom Kaulitz meet Gustav Schäfer and Georg Listing during a concert : there were respectively 12, 13 and 14 years-old. They founded together Devilish which will become later Tokio Hotel (their name reflects a dynamic big city and what, for them, is a symbol of a group which succeeds and thus goes, going from city in city and from hotel to hotel). In2004, they begins to work with a team of producers and lyric writers of Hamburg : Peter Hoffmann, Pat Benzner, Dave Roth, and David Jost, who composed and produced numerous artists (Falco, The Corrs, Sarah Brightman) or remixed of the others (The Doors, Faith Hill).

 In 2005, Tokio Hotel obtains a contract with Universal Music. If in the rock environment Tokio Hotel received a mitigated reception, for certain teenagers in particular the girls, their charm, look, the imaging of the group and the tackled issues being at the origin of a true phenomenon.
It is one year later, in 2006, that the group is discovered in France, activating a real media tidal wave: the young teenagers are in emotion, parents worry about the sudden pseudo-gothic fashion of their offsprings, and concert halls perform until the collective hysteria. France and Germany are conquered by their first two albums in German " Schrei " and " Zimmer 483 ", Japan begins to concern to the subject, and the group starts to invade England and the United States by bringing out in 2007 a best-of of their better songs translated in English : " Room 483 ".

The european success of the group with their young public woke a new craze in the German language : registrations in first or second language in favour of German multiplied and terminated the decline of the choice of this language with the French schoolchildren. The reasons of their success are situated at two levels: first of all the terms approached on their songs - besides often written by the brothers Kaulitz: the divorce, the life after the death, the loving disappointment, the solitude, the suicide... So there is a stake in opposition between their striking texts and their still childish appearance. Then, their look : the group is very heterogeneous, Gustav preferring the discretion, Georg the skin-tight T-shirts, Tom the baggy style and especially Bill the androgynous look. It is him who carries the group: his look of a character of manga (cup of bristly hair and black make-up eyes) seduces the girls and some boys. Rumours run on sound his homosexuality because of its effeminate attitudes, but in front of his fans for the greater part feminine, he fast had to deny this affirmation.

In front of the morbid exaggeration of Marylin Manson or the diversion towards Brian Molko's paternity (from Placebo) on the place of his eyeliner, Bill Kaulitz understood that the mysterious androgynous side collects the crowds and he wants to propose a more "kind" alternative of the rock to the European teenagers.

This is the videoclip from "Spring nicht" (="Don't jump") :

(499 words)