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Album Review
by SaschaS
21-7-2004
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| Neu!: the pioneers of Krautrock 'skool' |
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Neu!: 'Neu!', 'Neu! 2', 'Neu! 75'
(Grönland)
The brave Neu! world
Summertime and the living is easy… Well, yeah - if you happen to work for a Euro record company with very few releases while people are busy schlepping F-30 on their addiction [TV-couch-drinks-drugs-sex-texting] abused bodies at some Med McResort’s beach. There are several reasons we shun this week’s crop of The Hives, The Polyphonic Spree, Mull Historical Society and Shaznay Lewis‘s discs but the truth is that they all are - as exciting as discovering that soap-on-a-rope is back in fash!
The other two, more important reasons, are the death of the New York Dolls’ bassist Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane that made us think of the unsung, unrecognised and far-from-feted artists that influenced music beyond the past decades… Then, due to a devious way - ahem, we actually asked the good people at the record company politely - we re-acquired the Neu!’s three albums, re-released in 2001 on Grönland label. [And, the first time on CD - disgrace!]
‘Neu!’, ‘Neu! 2’ and ‘Neu! 75’ are all classics, milestones, the pioneering work that has influenced everyone from Bowie to the Sex Pistols, from DAF to Einsturzende Neubauten‘s earliest work… Can took Stockhausen’s theory to its leftish conclusion [ironically whilst Damo Suzuki was fronting the band] and Kraftwerk dragged it into mainstream but there is hardly any doubt who are the true ‘Fathers of Krautrock’, the force that never sold its soul for some lesser ideals… Mainly because there was no time for a f**k up, unlike musicians who hang around long enough to become caricatures of themselves.
Alas, the story behind the creation of these three albums is bizarre, fascinating and torrid. A German tragedy of über-quality, in essence.
The way the band came together is as strange as the music they left us with as their legacy. Its birthplace was a German TV studio in August 1971 when they blasted 11-minute performance under the banner of - Kraftwerk. Well, the electro-leaders at the time, Kraftwerk, temporarily down to the core two members, asked Michael Rother [pronounced Rota] and Klaus Dinger to help out for the ‘Beatclub’ show. Even the prime avant-gardists at the time felt threatened by the revolutionary ideas of these two that Ralf Hutter quit the outfit for real.
The storming performance ended up known as 'Kraftwerk-sans-Ralf' although it should be 'Neu!-with-Florian'. Following that landmark debut, Rother and Dinger, produced by another legend, Conrad ‘Conny’ Plank, recorded debut album over four nights. The result simply outshone whatever was around at the time and we know it was a mean experimental epoch. It could be argued that 'Neu!' is one the debut album of Rock era.
The avant-journey of ‘Neu!’ is a strange mixture of pretty-pop music usurped by experimental noises and sonic details that simpy turn repetitious into bliss-itious! There are tracks on it, from 10-minute opening piece ‘Hallogallo’ - a radio-hit back in 1972; my, my, how times have changed?! - that is a stoner about a qaurter of a century before Kyuss. ‘Jahresuebersicht’ sounds like a track Einsturzende Naubauten may have used as a blueprint for the initial part of their career.
‘Negativland’ leads one to suspect that Björk listened to the Düsseldorf mavericks, at least during her Sugarcubes' days. Even their artwork was in such a stark contrast to overblown prog-dimensions of Roger Dean with the graphic simplicity of the debut 'over-sprayed' for ‘Zwei’, while the third cover is simply a negative of the maiden disc. The success of ‘Neu!’ that truly toyed with the global mental imbalance - was probably recorded too soon and under very tragic circumstances.
As they completed the 11-minute mantra ‘Fur Immer’ and almost finished Side 1 [we are talking vinyl here], Neu! were told that their recording budget was all screwed up and there was no money to wrap up the project. Freak-out situation was resolved by an artistic surgery: one of them [probably Dinger] suggested making Side 2 a pop-art cut-up using their single tracks [cut between these albums], ‘Neuschnee’ and ‘Super’ as basis. The problem was that the songs combined duration was merely 7 minutes only so they recorded ‘Neuschnee’ at 78 rpm [revolutions per minute for you iPod kids], ‘Super’ at 78 rpm as well as at 16 rpm; they even recorded the first song with Klaus putting his finger on the machine to slow it down.
Naturally, with such hurdles the album sounded below its predecessor's ingenuity but still far better than many of its f**ked-up contemporaries. Alas, Rother got completely phased out by this experience and left the group. Four months later he was cutting ‘Musik Von Harmonia’, co-written and co-produced by Cluster. Cluster were another duo [also on the same German label, Brain, and produced by C. Plank] of D. Moebius and J. Roedelius and this trio, named Harmonia, were the one-and-only Krautrock supergroup!
While Rother was busy with this project, Dinger was shaping up his proto-punk outfit La Düsseldorf but a chance meeting with his former partner led to a recording session toward the end of 1974 that resulted in ‘Neu! 75’. The album was split between the two, Rother taking care of the first, with Dinger blasting it on the second side. ‘75’ is another classic that redefined what ‘pop’ was in those days. But that was the lot…
Rother made one more Harmonia LP, ‘Deluxe’ [after having produced Cluster’s ‘Zuckerzeit’] before going solo [Can‘s Jaki Liebezeit drummed on ‘Sterntaler, Flammende Herzen’] with Dinger presiding over three La Düsseldorf’s albums between 1976 and '81. The eponymous debut is the best of the three - although ‘Viva’ and ‘Individuellos’ are not far behind - that pushed David Bowie in the ‘Low’ direction with the Englishman’s ‘A New Career In a New Town’ closely related to Klaus’s ‘Silver Cloud’.
The Sex Pistols’ main-mouthpiece, John Lydon [a.k.a. Johnny Rotten], admitted in his autobiography that ‘Hero’ and ‘After Eight’ [from '75] were directly inspirational for the band’s singles. [By the by, today is the day The Sex Pistols made their debut on Top of the Pops in 1977.]
Neu! sounded like they could start a revolution... of sound, of soul, of imagination… This is what the genuine Rock’n’Roll Hall Of Fame contenders are made of!
SaschaS
10-12-2002
All three Neu! albums, ‘Neu!’, ‘Neu! 2’ and ‘Neu! 75’, reissued in 2001, are available from Grönland
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