"There's so much to do," says an uncharacteristically
flustered Michael Rother. The normally unflappably beatific German
guitarist, composer and former member of Neu! and Harmonia, who also had a
stint in a nascent Kraftwerk, is packing for live dates in Russia and the UK,
including this weekend's show at the Queen Margaret Union in Glasgow.
"It has always been my choice to take care of these things myself
and not have a manager," he says. "Somehow for me the
independent aspect of doing things is really important, but it has its
disadvantages."
As well as playing selections from Neu! and Harmonia, the trio he
formed with Dieter Moebius and Hans Joachim Roedelius of Cluster, Rother's
Glasgow date will see him play a fortieth anniversary rendering of his second
solo album, Sterntaler, in full. Rother will be accompanied by guitarist
Franz Bargmann and drummer Hans Lampe, the latter of whose musical involvement
with Rother dates back to Neu! days, as well as playing alongside original
Neu! drummer Klaus Dinger in La Dusseldorf.
Originally released in 1978, Sterntaler – it translates as Star Money
and is taken from a Brothers Grimm fairytale - followed by the success of its
predecessor, Flammende Herzen (Bleeding Heart), and
featured Rother playing a series of propulsively poppy instrumentals with
drummer Jaki Leibezeit on a record produced by Conny Plank. Both records marked
a sea-change in how Rother and the generation of German musicians he worked
alongside were perceived.
“I have great memories of when Sterntaler came out, "Rother says.
“It had been a long period of low sales with Neu! and Harmonia. Mostly
it had been a great time making those records, but it was so disappointing that
people didn’t share that love. Then my first solo album came out, and
suddenly people wanted to hear it. It wasn’t like a rocket, but was a
slow-burner that just got stronger and kept on selling. It's a mystery why
that was. I remember the label calling me up and saying they were going to have
to do a repress of the first record Some voices said, oh, that guy Rother,
he's so smart knowing that this is what the public wants, but that wasn’t the
case.
"It was the same recording it. For me, it was a strange situation.
When Harmonia collapsed, I was quite frustrated. I didn’t not want to work on a
project, but I didn’t want to work with Klaus Dinger at the time either. I had
some hazy ideas I wanted to explore, and I got in touch with Conny Plank and
Jaki Leibezeit, and that was what came out. It wasn’t story-boarded, but working
with Jaki and Conny, imagine three different chefs adding different spices, and
that's what happened. They were both very important to the record. I still
feel close to the material, and playing it again, I can take liberties with it,
but the shape of it remains unchanged. "
Making music too is a mystery for Rother, and has been since his days
with Neu!
“Something like Hallogallo,” he says of the first Neu! album’s
ten-minute opening track that came to define the sound of German kosmische
music. “I can’t explain how it happened, but it’s one step away from the edge
of falling off a cliff. It’s so frail. People say, oh, it’s all about the drums
keeping it together, right, and yes, it is, but you don’t have to take much
away from that and it all falls apart.”
Rother's early exposure to music came through his mother, a classically
trained pianist, while his older brother had "rock and roll
parties. I still get excited hearing Little Richard, and seeing that BBC
film, where he starts off talking to the audience, and then, bang, bang, bang,
off he goes like a rocket."
Living in Pakistan also had an impact on Rother’s musical raison d’etre.
"It was so exotic," he says, "and the music there was so
different to what I knew. I would need psycho-analysis to find out how
that influenced my idea of total endless forward moving European music, but I
also had an interest in repetition."
Back in Germany, this didn’t stop the influence of the Kinks, the
Rolling Stones and the Beatles seeping into Rother's own mid-1960s band, The
Spirits of Sound, which also featured future Kraftwerk member Wolfgang
Flur.
"We were ambitious," he says, "but we were copycats. In
the beginning it was just okay to sound like our heroes. "
Rother soon switched to the more progressive sounds of Cream and Jimi
Hendrix.
"I saw Hendrix live in Dusseldorf in 1968," Rother says,
"and I had to accept that the world already had one Jimi Hendrix, and didn’t
need another one."
Rother moved increasingly away from blues-based music.
“In the late' 60s I ran into a crisis,” he says, “and picking up ideas
from other musicians wasn’t good enough. I had to find my own way, and
that was quite a rocky road. I felt very alone trying to find other people
to play music not based on blues, but through very lucky circumstances I met
the Kraftwerk people, Florian Schneider and Rolf Hutter, as well as Klaus
Dinger, and then Conny Plank, and realised I wasn’t alone. It was clear to
all of us there was something in the air that was about making a European
music."
It was the more volatile Dinger who named his and Rother’s band.
“I didn’t like the name at first,” says Rother, “but I couldn’t think of
a better one, so it stuck. It was all about advancement, and I was very
critical of the counter-culture at the time, and the political situation in
Germany. You could see Paris burning, and the war crimes of the American army
in Vietnam, and this made me furious.
“Don’t misunderstand me, I have American friends, and I know there is a
different America. I still watch documentaries about the Vietnam War, and it’s
crazy how the politicians could be so wrong in their judgement. I feel sorry
for the soldiers and the people caught up in it.
“I was surprised when Moebius and I visited Vietnam in 1999, and I
thought people would throw stones at us, but they were so nice.
Rother and Dinger released three albums as Neu! between 1972 and
1975 before breaking up. Key to their rediscovery was Krautrocksampler, the
sprawlingly enthusiastic book by former Teardrop Explodes driving force and
weird music fan, Julian Cope, published in 1995.
"When Julian Cope's book came out, that was the first time young
journalists were able to convince their editors to write about us," says
Rother. “Traditionally the German media looked to America and Great Britain,
and in the ‘90s it was still very unusual to write about German music, but then
people like Sonic Youth started saying they were influenced by Neu!, and that's
all to do with Julian Cope.
"I met Julian when myself and Dieter Moebius played in Bristol in
2007, and he apologised for the mistakes in the book. Because there was no
internet then to do fact checking, a lot of it came out of his imagination, but
I think what impresses people is his love for the music. That changed
things, because we were underground of the underground, and we're still not
mainstream."
Rother has visited Scotland several times since then, playing in a duo
with Dieter Moebius in Edinburgh in 2006, then as Hallogallo 2010 in a trio
featuring Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley and Tall Firs bassist Aaron Mullan.
The last time Rother visited was in 2018 at Leith Theatre as part of a night
programmed by Edinburgh’s Neu! inspired spoken-word and music night, Neu!
Reekie!, when he shared a bill with New York spoken-word queen Lydia Lunch, Edinburgh’s
original post-punk incendiarists Fire Engines and Dunbar-based all-female rap
trio, Honey Farm.
“When I first read the name, Neu! Reekie!, I thought it was a bit
cheeky,” chuckles Rother, “but then they explained the meaning, which related
to the old name of Edinburgh, and I thought, that’s okay, and they were nice
guys as well,” he says of the night’s ring-maestros, poet Michael Pedersen and
Kevin Williamson.
Rother also attributes the rediscovery of his back catalogue and
subsequent raising of profile to Gronland Records, the Berlin-based label
founded by Herbert Gronemeyer. Gronland has championed Rother's work,
re-releasing Neu! and Harmonia's back-catalogue, as well as Solo, this
year’s box set of Rother's first four solo albums.
"Gronland did a great job with Neu! and Harmonia, "he
says, "They care about the artists and the music, and I'm so happy to have
them as partners. They helped me fight to get my first two albums back from
Universal, who didn’t really care about the records, and made some bad
mistakes. "
While the vinyl edition of Rother's Solo box set featured some
unreleased live material, he has not released a full new album since 2004's
Remember (The Great Adventure). Since then, it is the live arena that has
enthused Rother most.
“I enjoy playing all over the world,” he says. “the only place that’s a
bit difficult just now is North America. The U.S. authorities make it hard for
foreign musicians to play, which is due to various restrictions and the costs
of visas and so on, and this is pretty disgusting. It’s easier to play in China
just now. I remember going there for the first time, and not knowing what to
expect. Would they know the work? And would they just stand still and listen?
But it couldn’t have been more different.
“For this tour, we’re going all over Europe, which is great. We don’t
have any roadies or anything. It’s just three guys going out and enjoying being
together.”
Given Rother’s notion of forward-looking music, what happens next?
"I'm thinking about the next step," he says. "I'll
be playing the Gronland twentieth anniversary party, and I think they're hoping
for a live album at some point. I think they might just like a new studio
album, but I'm not sure I'd be happy to spend all that time in the studio to do
that. For the moment, it's the live experience I enjoy the
most. Live, live, live! "
Michael Rother, Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow, September 6.
An extended remix of an article that appeared in The Herald, September 5th 2019
ends
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