Why Neu! is the Rosetta Stone of alternative music

Warning: everything in this post contains hyperbole, exaggeration and unverifiable opinion, but is nonetheless all, in a mysterious and even mystical way, true.

Everything of value in modern, alternative music was invented by two guys in Germany called Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger between 1972 and 1975 (see disclaimer above). Recording as NEU! (New!), they made three albums that effectively defined the direction of modern music for at least the next two decades. Although everything they did has its parallels in what other bands were doing at the time, only Neu! did it all. Neu! is the Rosetta Stone of modern music.

Click on the little widget on the right to hear the evidence: Rother and Dinger mapped the origins of:

• Trance
• Techno
• Electronica
• Trip-hop
• Ambient
• New age
• Industrial
• Punk

What's more:

• They invented a rhythm that has its own name in the annals of music history ("motorik").
• Their covers took pop-art simplicity and turned it into social commentary, aping and mocking consumerism in a way that wouldn't become fashionable till the end of the decade. 
• They also invented the remix. 

Eno and Bowie came to Germany to meet them and learn their secrets, while John Lydon did a distance-learning course in How To Sing Like Klaus Dinger. The punks, the electronic bands, the new-wavers, the ravers, the Madchesters and the alt-rock-hipsters copied them like mad, while the likes of Primal Scream, Stereolab, Radiohead and even Kasabian leave offerings at their altar. And they had a slogan, articulated in the sleeve notes of their first album:

"After having practised music for a long time, we now make NEU! music for mind and pants"

New music for mind and pants, or "half-digested Pink Floyd pastoral, atrociously aped" as the reviewer for International Times grumbled when the first album came out. Julian Cope heard it differently. In his book Krautrocksampler, he recalled how he heard Hallogallo on John Peel's show in 1972 "and had my attitude to ALL music changed".

Klaus Dinger: the most energetic man ever to play in Kraftwerk

Neukraft: a great lost band
The Neu! story actually starts in Kraftwerk - a band that should need no introduction. Kraftwerk came together in 1970, when electro pioneers Ralf Hütter (organ, synthesisers) and Florian Schneider (flute, synthesisers) abandoned a group called Organisation. Halfway through recording the first Kraftwerk album, they sacked their drummer and brought in Klaus Dinger. The album completed, Hütter took a six-month sabbatical to finish his studies while Schneider, instead of recruiting another keyboard player, accepted Dinger's suggestion of a guitarist he knew called Michael Rother.

For six months in early 1971, Schneider, Dinger and Rother toured West Germany with new tunes that were never recorded in the studio but exist in a bootlegged radio show and a few preserved recordings from the legendary TV show Beat Club (a German halfway house between Top Of The Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test).


The band seen here playing Köln II looks and sounds nothing like the familiar static automatons standing in a line performing Autobahn and The Model. Dinger plays with an energy that would rival Bonzo or Keith Moon: his glasses fly off after about 30 seconds and he later knocks one of his cymbals over. God knows what Ralf thought when he saw what Florian had done to his band. Combine this with a couple more Beat Club appearances, Kakteen, Wüste, Sonne (a sort of Kraftwerk meets Fairport Convention) and a Bremen radio show (Kraftwerk meets Black Sabbath) and there's enough Neukraft material to make a proper CD that sounds nothing like Kraftwerk and only a little like Neu!.

Hütter returned in the summer of ’71 just as Dinger and Rother decided to go it alone; their legacy the motorik beat that Kraftwerk would soon use in their conquest of the world. In November 1971, the pair decamped to a studio with legendary producer Conny Plank to record a world-changing musical statement. It took them all of four days.

Four Neu! genres in four days

Like someone defaced 'The White Album'…

Dinger had been living in a commune with some advertising types and had even set up his own advertising agency that "existed entirely on paper", so the band name and the album cover came naturally. In the economic miracle of West Germany, everything was shiny and NEW! What better way to subvert consumer obsessions than by adopting their language?

Nothing looked anything like it in 1972. Cover art was usually four unshaven, denim-clad musicians trying to look hard, or fantasy science fiction bullshit of mystical worlds where virginal maidens were enslaved by evil necromancers. Neu! were firmly earthbound, but they were already on a different planet. Apart from the simple, three-letter name and a propensity to go on playing for ten minutes or more, Neu! couldn't have been more different from Yes. It's a nice coincidence that one of Dinger's early bands was called No.

During their 90s feud, Dinger sneered that Rother was "very conventional" and that all Neu!'s radical ideas were his. There's a bit of truth in that, but Rother had a punk, Year Zero attitude of his own. He even used the German term stunde null (hour zero) and claimed to have stopped listening to other guitarists in order to concentrate on creating his own sound. By producing an album sleeve that looked like The Beatles' White Album defaced with the underlined word NEW!, both Dinger and Rother were drawing a line under everything from Hitler to Pink Floyd.

Hallogallo is the first track and takes ten minutes to go precisely nowhere. It's the first time you hear the simple 4/4 rhythm that Dinger called lange gerade, endlose gerade (long or endless straight) or Apache-beat, but that music historians call motorik. The Düsseldorf bands were entranced by Germany's long roads (Kraftwerk's 1974 breakthrough album was called Autobahn), but there's something seductively liquid about Hallogallo. Who hasn't sat by a river and been entranced by its flow? Dinger's rhythm is the current: unending and unstoppable; while Rother's guitar is the swirling eddy: held by the current yet independent of it. Iggy Pop marvelled at what Dinger was doing:

"The guy had somehow managed to free himself of the tyranny of stupid blues-rock; of all conventions I had ever heard."

Blues and blues/rock grab you by the heart and balls and slam you into the wall if necessary. But motorik lifts you to a higher plane where you see the world laid out before you. The krautrockers were children of Nazis who lived in a country run by ex- (and not so ex-) Nazis: their music reflected a rejection of structure as a way of breaking away from the past. If the music was endless, that was deliberate: the future has no end. Blues – like disco, rock and every other Anglo-American genre – is constrained by structure. Blues is slavery. Motorik is liberation.

Sonderangebot and Im Glück are frightening, formless exercises in quiet chaos, the latter of which Rush plundered almost wholesale for the opening to Xanadu; Weissensee is gently ambient but motorik returns with a vengeance on Negativland, as a pneumatic drill ushers in a punishing bassline overlaid by screeching guitar that speeds to a frenzy before a sudden halt. In the ensuing silence, you can just hear Steve Albini and the members of PiL, New Order and every industrial band ever whispering, "We must continue to make this noise."

Four days in the studio and four musical genres invented. What could Klaus and Michael invent next?

Neu! Wave

1977, four years early

Punk rock, as it happens, not to mention sampling (albeit self-sampling) and the remix. There was even something punky about the cover of Neu!2, with the artwork of the first album greyed out and an enormous 2 crudely sprayed over it in lurid pink. Having defaced the White Album, they were now defacing themselves.

At first, Neu!2 followed the template of its predecessor, with the lengthy motorik groove of Für Immer echoing Hallogallo but with a harder guitar and varying intensity, topped by the big, echoey drums of Spitzenqualitat as a coda instead of the cymbal symphony of Sonderangebot that had followed Hallogallo. But Lila Engel has a definite punk feel about it: heavy drums and a single, repeated guitar chord under a shouted, wordless vocal.

Then Neu! ran out of cash.

With the record company refusing to add to its advance, Dinger and Rother took two tracks they had recorded for a single and ripped them apart, speeding them up, slowing them down and resampling them to make short, bizarre mutations of themselves. They topped it all off with Super, which sounds like the template for every punk record from the summer of hate four years later, while the frankly scary Super 16, a slowed-down variation of Super, found its way onto the Kill Bill soundtrack (both tracks had been used in Master of the Flying Guillotine).

Their few fans were naturally horrified. Rother too seemed bruised and a little shocked – the discordant howl of Super, Lila Engel and Hallo Excentrico! sounded like reflections of Dinger's increasingly confrontational personality – so he fled to a remote country house with electronic noodlers Cluster to record what became a pioneering album in the ambient and electronic genres: Musik von Harmonia. Brian Eno, fresh from leaving Roxy Music, declared Harmonia "the most important band in the world", before leaping on a plane to Germany to learn what he could from the makers of these beautiful sounds. But before he got there Rother and Dinger had some unfinished business.

Dinger had recruited his brother Thomas and Neu!2 engineer Hans Lampe as percussionists in a project soon to be known as La Düsseldorf. This freed him to play guitar and sing, opening the possibility of Neu! as a live band when he and Rother got back together. The live concept never really got going, but the quartet did manage to record a third album at the end of 1974.

Shock of the Neu!

A future-shaping moment of righteous vision

Neu!75 distilled everything Neu! had been doing in the previous three years into six tracks, each of which sounds like the template for a new genre. Julian Cope wrote that Neu!75 was "not a great album, like the Harmonia, Cluster or even the other Neu! albums were, but a classic. A future-shaping moment of righteous vision. Punk as eating the snot off your mate's face, spiritual as dawn on any clear day."

Side 1 is mostly Rother's ideas, with the motorik beat on Isi underpinning a synthesiser groove that foreshadows The Human League when they were still hip. Leb' Wohl and Seeland are chilled, almost frozen mood pieces.

Then Dinger lets rip on Side 2, at last adding words to his vocals on Hero, eerily foreshadowing Johnny Rotten as he sneers,

"Your only crime is music … Fuck the press, Fuck your progress, Fuck the company; Your only friend is money"

The song is driven by the double-rhythm of Thomas and Hans that must have sent a young Adam Ant into raptures. The key might change but the rhythm never lets up. E-Musik follows in a remorseless techno groove, while After Eight is post-punk before punk, albeit with a backwards nod to Roxy Music. Cope again: "You hear Hero and After Eight and suddenly British punk makes sense." Given the way it anticipates so many different styles of the next decade while still sounding unmistakably Neu!, Neu!75 is one of the more remarkable albums of a remarkable decade.

With that, Neu! split for good. The Dinger brothers and Lampe made La Dusseldorf a full-time (and highly successful) project, releasing three albums that sold millions in Germany and were called "the soundtrack of the 80s" by David Bowie. Rother recorded another album with Harmonia (Deluxe, 1975) and made some recordings with Harmonia and Brian Eno (which were eventually released in 1997 as Tracks and Traces), before embarking on a successful solo career.

Rother also discussed working with Bowie, but Bowie's management seemed worried that hanging around with all those decadent Germans would make the Thin White Duke even thinner and whiter. Whatever the reason, they rang Rother and told him Bowie had changed his mind, and then (as Rother discovered years later) rang Bowie to say that Rother had changed his mind. Rother points out that "Heroes" is named after the Neu! song, but more telling is the track Monza from Harmonia's Deluxe, which is almost a blueprint for Lodger and especially Red Sails.

Dinger and Rother did get together again in 1986, but abandoned a prospective fourth album. Dinger later released some of the recordings without Rother's permission as Neu!4, along with a "live" album (actually poorly taped rehearsals for their abortive live shows in 1972), which created a rift between the pair that was never properly healed before Dinger's sudden death in 2008.

With Dinger gone and interest growing in the band's work, Rother found himself the keeper of the flame. He curated all the band's work into a boxed set, with Neu!4 reworked into an official release now called Neu!86. He also does the occasional concert, playing Neu!'s music live for the first time in four decades.

Something old, something Neu!, something borrowed
Under every Neu! track on YouTube, you'll find comments explaining how the teaching of evolution in schools is proof of a Jewish world conspiracy fronted by that fag Bieber to turn America queer. That's YouTube for you. But you'll also find comments from under-40s shocked to find how the radical and progressive bands they loved in the 80s, 90s and 00s were actually plundering Neu! and other krautrockers.

It's not surprising. The punks of 1976-78 were the first generation of pop musicians who didn't remember the beginnings of rock'n'roll. While mainstream, straight society still regarded pop, rock, blues, soul and the rest as subversive and dangerous, to those born in the late 50s it was mainstream and conventional. The more adventurous souls were looking beyond Elvis and the Stones for inspiration, and the only underground genres truly on the boil in 1972 were reggae and krautrock (more politely known as "kosmische musik").

Eno is credited with saying, "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band," and something similar can be said of the krautrock greats Neu!, Faust and Can (and a Velvet Underground influence is clearly audible on Can's first album in 1969). Only Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream ever broke into the Anglo-American mainstream, but when the teenage heads of the early 70s formed their own bands in the late 70s and 80s, the music had the fingerprints of these obscure Germans all over it.

Too many bands are described as "ahead of their time". With Neu!, it might just be true.

Review: Andy Sparrow's Bloodrunners

Bloodrunners by Andy Sparrow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The readers of Bike magazine never took to Bloodrunners as the replacement for Paul Sample's legendary Ogri comic strip. Ogri had been a grimy mechanic riding bikes he'd built himself, and that reflected the self-image of the magazine's readers. Bloodrunners, by contrast, featured fantasy superbikes with impossibly fat tyres and fantasy pneumatic 80s women with impossibly big hair. Ogri was Motörhead*; Bloodrunners was Bon Jovi.

Bloodrunners moved with the times but came up against a readership that was happy where it was. And, it has to be said, Ogri was better than Bloodrunners. Sparrow tried too hard to make the character of Jack Shit iconic (you can't force these things: either it happens or it doesn't), but Bloodrunners did have its charms. At his best, Jack Shit strode across the page like Darth Vader before the fall, taking some of Ogri's hard edge and humour, while the stories exuded a Kings Road hauteur of bikers who never questioned their own superiority. It had glamour, and it was beautifully drawn in a style that complemented the storylines perfectly. And, if it couldn't beat Ogri, it was a damned sight better than Tina Tailpipe.

*Actually Ogri was more Pink Fairies (Keep it Together!: Cosmic Boogie with The Deviants and The Pink Fairies), but maybe that's too obscure a reference.
View all my reviews

Fringe reviews: Edinburgh 2011 (part 2)

Here's the second part of my Fringe reviews from this year's festival. 

The Suitcase Royale in Zombatland (Pleasance Two, Friday 19 August, £10)

One of the revelations of last year, Australia's Suitcase Royale were on form again with their new show. Their form of comic musical theatre is unique, with surreal tales of the outback set to their own brand of junkyard skiffle. If anything, the music was even better this year, although the tale of a failing caravan park overrun by zombie wombats lacked the human touch of last year's doomed love story. As ever, their rapport with the audience kept a thread of humour and warmth throughout the show. 4/5

Devil's Advocate (Buff's Bar, Saturday 20 August, free)

I saw a couple of the Edinburgh Skeptics' shows last year and ended up writing the quiz for one instalment of this year's Devil's Advocate panel show. Unfortunately, the Skeptics had found themselves in the upstairs bar of Buff's Bar in West Register St, way off the beaten track and completely hidden from view. With no chance of picking up any passing trade, the audience was small and the show was further compromised by the loss of Ash Pryce, whose 'baby' this show was. 

The subject this time was 'Holy Books', and of course I'm going to say it was a great set of questions because I wrote them. What followed was an hour of funny banter and intellectual one-upmanship, which was a great way to start the day if you get up at noon. 4/5

The Oxford Imps (Gilded Balloon Nightclub, Saturday 20 August, £10.00)

Improv is an acquired taste. Oxford University's improvisers seem to have acquired the taste from 20-year old re-runs of 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?', because they aren't really taking the genre any further than that. As they poured onto the stage doing enthusiastically wacky dancing to the music, I turned to my companion and said, "I hate them already." That distaste grew with the attitude of their compère, who had no idea how to engage the audience other than by grinning and generally acting smug. 

Of the troupe of six, only the balding American showed any serious talent, although most of them had at least one good moment. Given those limitations, it's perhaps a good thing that they kept within the comfort zone of a predictable structure, so that the show was an amusing diversion for an hour rather than an embarrassment. But considering the talent that could be seen for the same price, and the far more dangerous and inventive impro on offer from the likes of The Noise Next Door, a tenner seemed a bit steep for a bunch of university amateurs larking about. 2/5

Andrew Bird's Village Fete (Underbelly Balcony, Saturday 20 August, £9.50)

No doubt about it, Andrew Bird is a lovely fellow and an hour in his company is a complete pleasure. His show is essentially his impression of moving back to a village with his young family after living in London, observing the quiet insanity of village life. His observations are spot-on, and he mines a vein of humour seldom tackled by mainstream comics, where the irrelevant minutiae of life acquire a significance that makes the death toll in Midsomer Murders entirely understandable. 5/5

The Boy With Tape On His Face (Pleasance Courtyard, Saturday 20 August, £12.50) 

Back by popular demand after a sell-out show last year, Sam Wills justified his reputation with a breath-taking show of silent comedy and naïve clowning. Given that his entire mouth is covered for the whole show, his communication skills are remarkable. It's pointless describing it because it has to be seen. 5/5

Translunar Paradise (Pleasance King Dome, Sunday 21 August, £10)

Two dancers with hand-held masks, accompanied by a woman on accordion, tell the story of a marriage cut short by cancer. Sounds like the most awful kind of pretentious Edinburgh show, and it is, but performed with such skill and poignant emotion that it works – so well that many of the audience were in tears. There were times, especially in the third quarter, where I lost touch with what was happening, and some of the tribulations suffered by the couple were telegraphed a long way off, but it retained its power. The accordionist deserves special mention, using her instrument not just for music but also sound subtle yet clever sound effects. 4/5

David O'Doherty (Pleasance One, Sunday 21 August, £15)
O'Doherty's performance was capable and slick, but relied too much on the audience being in on the joke. This was absolutely a show for confirmed fans. As someone who didn't know his material, I was lost at times. This was less of a show and more of an epilogue to previous shows I hadn't seen. He's a capable comic, but this show was a bit lazy and very much over-priced. 2/5

Tom Stade (Pleasance Above, Sunday 21 August, £12)
I'm surprised only two people walked out of Tom Stade's gloriously offensive show. It was self-conscious too, with Stade asking the rhetorical question, "Why d'ya do that, Tom?" when he went over the top, as he did on many occasions. I did feel for the teenage kids in the front row as Stade compared their sex life of their parents, sitting next to them, with that of the couple a few seats along. The young man (about 19) became Stade's partner in crime throughout the show as he built a story of espionage and criminality, killing sacred cows everywhere he could find them and mounting their stuffed udders for entertainment. 5/5

Review of The Idea Hunter

Leverage your super-guru solutions

Remember the dark ages of scrambling to find the right lid for your coffee cup before civilisation was brought blinking into the sunshine world of standard lids? Never mind the budget deficit, a double-dip recession and unwinnable wars, my life was on the verge of collapse from the stress of working out which lid fitted my coffee cup at Starbucks.

The message of this book is that it didn't take a genius to come up with the idea of a standard-size lid for take-away - sorry, 'to-go' - coffee cups. Wow Einstein, you're telling me that wasn't the work of a genius? No kidding!

Admittedly, 'The Idea Hunter' doesn't get any banal than that, but how could it? It's a formulaic book whose jargonistic language and bland, templated structure makes you want to hate it so much that it's hard to remain objective and recognise any good ideas when they appear. The first 'leverage' (as a verb) is in the preface, 'ongoing' appears on page 1 and we're only on page 5 when the cretinous acronym I-D-E-A makes its painful appearance, followed a page later by 'super-guru'. If you get to page 28, you'll come across the irony-free use of the term "wow-ize". Throughout, we are in the world of the inspirational management mystic - the kind of idiot who gets shown the door in any serious organisation except in America (and even there they went out of fashion a decade ago).

The usual business paragons are here: Warren Buffett, Neutron Jack Welch and Steve Jobs; but the first company to get the sycophancy treatment is Intuit, an organisation whose recent reputation seems to be built less on intuition and more on the old-fashioned and prosaic practice of getting market dominance and squeezing its increasingly captive and unwilling customers for every last cent with the help of well-lobbied regulators.

In some ways, this book lives by the principles it expounds. It insists that the best ideas aren't original but come from using "loose ties", picking up ideas from places that don't have an obvious link with a company's business and doing a lot of talking and reading. This is sensible advice and I won't disparage it.

In keeping with the authors' philosophy, there doesn't seem to be any original research here. All the quotes look like they are second-hand and there is nothing to suggest that the authors met any of the top executives quoted. The arguments follow the standard structure of hypothesis-quote-q.e.d., with little explanation of how to use those examples to advantage. Indeed, it seems to revel in its intellectual shallowness, and it seems the height of vanity to give this method its own trademark.

There is some useful content in here and there is some practical advice later in the book, but its pomposity and grandiose self-importance are extremely off-putting.

Edinburgh 2011: Fringe reviews part 1

Edinburgh's Fringe festival again proved its worth this week, although my two companions and I only had four days to sample what this year's festival had to offer. We've been lucky: there's a lot of cack at the Fringe, but we generally don't get many duffers and there was only one this time.

David Lee Nelson… Status Update (Beehive pub, Grassmarket, Thursday 18 August, free)

This was a rather odd show, which wasn't sure if it was comedy, philosophy or therapy. Nelson used video interviews with himself followed by live commentary to take us through his personal relationships, using anecdotes such as his then-future-ex-wife buying him porn for his birthday. The long pauses were probably intended to add poignancy to his story, but they tended instead to suck the energy from his performance and failed to counteract the effects of an excellent lunch at the same venue.  2/5

Colin Hoult's Inferno (Pleasance, Thursday 18 August, £12/14)

I saw Hoult on a whim last year and insisted this year that my companions come and see the man who gave me one of the highlights of 2010. Hoult's stock in trade is a series of realistic, damaged characters, all played with frightening realism and who presume that the audience understands and approves of their world-view. Last year, each character had his own slot in the show; this year a new set of characters merged and returned throughout the performance, engaging with the audience and allowing catchphrases to emerge. My favourite was the Welsh poet, listening by the wall to his neighbour – who is more successful on "the YouTube" – entertaining his friends and acolytes and "playing Monopoly and Twister and eating prawns straight out of the packet… who eats prawns straight out of the packet? Perverts, that's who." Hoult seems to have made a few changes after some bad reviews at the start of the run, but despite a couple of misfires I still found him utterly wonderful. 4/5

Tim Key, Masterslut (Pleasance, Thursday 18 August, £12)

A brilliant show from a master performer, who managed to keep a big theatre laughing without telling any obvious jokes. He used projection to enhance his show without ever losing contact with his audience, relating surreal and often meaningless stories from the life of a loser where logic collapses in on itself. Most memorable was the scene where he dived into the on-stage bath while allowing the screen to take us on a quest for a submerged can of Carlsberg, after which my companion (who had foolishly caught a thrown towel earlier in the evening) had to dry him off. Did the meaning of life emerge from any of this silliness? I hope not: neither from mine nor Key's life, but I didn't care one jot. 5/5

Shakespeare For Breakfast (C Venues, Friday 19 August, £7.50)

Gotta get up for this one. After King Lear last year, Macbeth got the treatment for an audience fighting the combined assault of hangovers and croissants that are more stale than a workingman's club comic. Here the Scottish play is re-tooled as an episode of Glee, with Duncan reduced to head boy of secondary school. As ever, there were cringeworthy moments and cultural references that went over my head (did Ross really have a monkey in Friends? Three simian seasons, apparently. How did I miss that?), but it's always a romp and the actors were excellent as usual. 3/5

Amused Moose semi-final (Bongo Club, probably £10 though I can't remember how much it cost…)

…but I do remember that it soaked up three hours of an afternoon that otherwise would probably have involved too much red wine. It's difficult even to name the comics, since I've lost my playbill and the website is so shit that it would have looked embarrassing in 1999 and even makes the lame name look professional. I mean, "Amused Moose"? And don't get me started on the fact that the two intervals were five minutes long while the queue for the understaffed bar was ten minutes. Fortunately, none of this detracts from the fact that this was a cracking afternoon's entertainment, with some quality acts giving ten-minute excerpts from their shows. DeAnne Smith deserves a mention for her warmly engaging show that constantly undermined the traditional relationship between performer and audience, ending with a 'Dear John' letter to the audience: "I love you, but I know you want to see other comedians and, to be honest, I'm seeing other audiences…"), but the clear winner for me (and the audience) was Canadian comic Tony Law with his laconic performance about how to be a comedian. Was that post-modern comedy? I think it was. 4/5

It's just such a shame that this was the prelude to Doctor Brown (Underbelly, Friday 19 August), which was the biggest pile of shit I have ever seen at the Fringe. I just don't have time to describe how rubbish this show was. I could have done better myself, except that I wouldn't have imagined anyone would pay to see such lame and irrelevant garbage. You've got to be seriously drunk to enjoy this crap, although some of the audience were, especially that annoying woman at the back who was even more annoying than the young man sitting next to her who tried to seduce me before the show. As I walked out I commented to my companions that I could have spent an hour looking at my own arse in a mirror and had more fun. 0/5