Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis recently joined his bandmate Flea on the latest episode of the podcast ‘This Little Light.’ During the chat, the singer discussed his past relationship with Nina Hagen and expressed his pride for their time together.
Mid-interview, the bassist asked whether the vocalist would like to edit out any mention of Hagen, to which he answered:
“I’m very proud and happy about romancing Nina Hagen at that time.”
Giving more detail about their relationship, Kiedis admitted the German singer’s influence on him by saying:
“She definitely had a big impact on me. I was 20 and 21, and she was 30-31 or something like that. She was a lot smarter, wiser, more experienced, and worldly, and she very much kind of took me under her wing and really tried to just impart life to me at a point where I was in a very untethered from being stable.”
He went on to recall their first meeting:
“First of all, she came to our show at the Café De Grande in a whatever it was like early in our career, and she walked up to you and I, and she was like, ‘You guys are going to be famous around the world.’ We were like, ‘Okay. Sounds good. That’s cool. What’s your name? You’re beautiful.'”
RHCP members also had professional interactions with Hagen. They wrote the song ‘What It Is’ for her 1983 album ‘Fearless’ and even recorded a demo. But that version was not used in the record, according to a tweet Flea posted in 2022.
When a fan asked the bassist whether the bass parts in Nina’s song belonged to him, he wrote:
“No. We recorded it for her, but then producer Keith Forsey took us off it to have her band play it; they were more professional. Anthony and I wrote the thing for her. There is a recording to a cassette of him and I playing it in our apartment the night we wrote it; that is out, no?”
You can check out Anthony Kiedis’ recent interview with Flea in the audio below.
