KRAUTROCK DELUXE Michael Rother (Part 1)
Jul. 17th, 2011 12:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yannisAn exclusive, sprawling conversation with the legendary German guitarist in which he discusses Kraftwerk, NEU!, Harmonia & Eno, and more
BY WILSON NEATE
It's hard to overstate the importance of the '70s generation of experimentally minded German musicians like NEU!, Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Can and Faust, usually grouped under the dodgy term, Krautrock. Having come of age in the postwar period, many of these diverse artists shared a common bond of refusal, rejecting not only their country's troubled political and cultural past, but also the global hegemony of Anglo-American pop and rock. Ironically, despite distancing themselves from the musical mainstream, these bands would exert considerable sway over those traditions they'd rejected. The line of influence stretches from punk's smarter manifestations through the post-punk generation and Bowie's vital late-'70s work, to more recent rock of all stripes -- Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Stereolab, Radiohead, Primal Scream, Secret Machines, the list goes on and on. And beyond rock, the likes of Cluster, NEU!, Kraftwerk and Harmonia have also been perennial reference points on the continuum of electronic music from the late '70s to the present, from synth-pop to techno, as well as its more abstract, experimental variants.
Michael Rother's guitar minimalism is a connecting thread weaving through and between several of the most innovative of the '70s German bands. When Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider briefly separated in 1971, Rother joined Schneider in Kraftwerk. Also present, on drums, was the late Klaus Dinger, with whom Rother formed NEU! later the same year. Between NEU!'s second and third records, in 1973, Rother teamed up with Cluster's Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius as Harmonia, a project spawning two studio albums, Muzik von Harmonia and Deluxe, plus two posthumous releases: Live 1974 and a collaboration with Brian Eno, Tracks & Traces. By 1977, Rother had hooked up with Can's drummer Jaki Liebezeit and embarked on a solo career that continues today.
Despite solo success, particularly with his first three records, Rother is still most widely known for his work with Dinger in NEU! Immensely creative as an artistic unit, Rother and Dinger were never friends, and by the mid-'90s, with the band long dead and its three original albums out of print, the pair's relationship had been reduced to an exchange of fraught faxes after Dinger -- without Rother's approval -- began putting out unreleased NEU! material on a Japanese label. Thanks to Dinger's intransigence, the original NEU! albums remained legally unavailable until 2001, when Herbert Grönemeyer stepped in and brokered their release on his Grönland label, which later also issued Harmonia's archival Live 1974. The latter prompted renewed interest in Rother's recordings with Roedelius and Moebius, which in turn led to the reactivation of Harmonia for live performances from 2007 through early 2009.
Now, on the occasion of Grönland's expanded reissue of Harmonia and Eno's Tracks & Traces, Michael Rother looks back over a career of sometimes vexed but always groundbreaking creative partnerships.
***
BLURT: How did you first connect with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius? Did you know them personally or just through their work as Cluster?
ROTHER: We did a concert together, in Hamburg, when I was with Kraftwerk in '71. Cluster worked with the same producer -- Conny Plank -- and I'm not sure how it happened, but we ended up playing at the same concert in Hamburg.
So both bands were on the same bill?
Yes, they were playing on the same night: it was Kraftwerk and Cluster in the big university hall there. There's a funny story about that. I'll never forget that concert. Kraftwerk were quite popular already. The first Kraftwerk album had been released some months earlier and so, obviously, for the crowd, we were the main attraction, but we were so democratic [laughs] that we talked to Roedelius and Moebius backstage and asked, "Who should go on first?" And they said, "Oh, you go on first and then we'll take over." There are hardly any documents of what we did as Kraftwerk, but we'd really been making quite rough music and people were very excited and when we wanted to stop our set, the people just kept on cheering and shouting and we said, "No, we have to stop because the other band's coming on." And then, when Cluster started playing, the people got really mad and they rushed the stage. I don't know how many, but maybe 20 or 30 people actually went onto the stage and disconnected their speakers and equipment. I was afraid they would start beating them up. That was the result of Kraftwerk's furious playing!
These days people don't tend to think of Kraftwerk as a rock band whipping crowds into a frenzy!
Cluster played very soft music, but what we did as Kraftwerk then wasn't very soft. It was quite the opposite: it was very rhythmical, very rough, primitive, raw music. Well, that was my memory, at least. Maybe they weren't really in danger of being beaten up, but it's something I'll never forget. So anyway, after that we stayed in touch and one year later, when we had already released our first NEU! album, we had this offer to do a tour in the UK. Our British label, United Artists, invited us and of course the two of us, Klaus Dinger and I, couldn't perform live -- playing just drums and one guitar, that's not enough. And then I remembered especially this one track on Cluster II, "Im Süden." That track really appealed to me and I had the idea that the harmonious, melodious connection was there. So I went to visit Cluster in Forst and jammed with Roedelius in order to find out whether they could join NEU! on that tour, as members of the live line-up. But, actually, in the end I liked that music much more than NEU! so [in 1973] I stopped NEU! for a while.
What was it about Cluster that you found so attractive -- attractive enough to put NEU! on hold?
When we jammed together it was a different world, a different atmospheric world. It was quiet. Roedelius played these melodious patterns on his keyboard -- I think there was maybe some influence from minimalist composers -- and there was the sound treatment, of course. Sometimes it was fuzzy -- he used wah and other filters. It was very primitive gear, actually. Nothing sophisticated. In fact, it was very similar to what I had been using with NEU! but the combination of Roedelius's piano, his electric piano, and my guitar was immediately something that connected. And, well, there was so much to discover on that road.
You mentioned minimalism. Had you listened to composers like Terry Riley by then?
Not by that time. Until then, I hadn't come in contact with any of them. It was only really when I met Roedelius and Moebius.
How did working with them as Harmonia compare to working with Klaus Dinger in NEU!?
Well, there were several differences. One big difference was that with Cluster as Harmonia we could create music onstage: it was a complete musical picture. That was totally different to NEU! With Klaus, we needed the multitrack machine and that limited our possibilities, of course. And also, to be honest, I respected Klaus as an artist, as a great drummer, but as I'm sure you'll have heard, we were so different in character and personality. Maybe sometimes the impression that's created is wrong, but we weren't friends. I didn't want to spend any time with Klaus outside the studio. In the studio, it was perfect. We were a great team. We didn't have to discuss music in the studio because we had similar visions of where we were heading and what we wanted to do. But everything else was not so pleasant for me with Klaus. With Moebius and Roedelius, it was different. Klaus thought of himself as a hippie -- in later days he referred to himself as a hippie-punk or something like that -- but the calmness and surroundings of Forst had a strong appeal to me, and this all connected. It was just one big excitement. The visit to Forst was inspiring; it was an inspiring place for me to stay.
As you say, you and Klaus had very different personalities and you weren't friends. How did you come together initially?
I met him when I stumbled into the Kraftwerk studio in Düsseldorf one day, in early '71. At that time, I was working in a psychiatric hospital, as a conscientious objector [in lieu of compulsory military service], and I was with a friend who was also a guitar player and we were in Düsseldorf demonstrating against something or other -- I can't remember what it was [laughs]. At the time, there were so many reasons to be angry. Anyway, after the demonstration he said, "Oh, I have this invitation to go into the studio of a band here in Düsseldorf. They want to do some film music or something." He told me the name of the band and that didn't ring a bell -- I hadn't heard of the name Kraftwerk at the time. So, I joined him and I jammed with Ralf Hütter in that studio. Florian Schneider and Klaus Dinger were sitting on the sofa listening and, obviously, everyone had the same impression that there was something happening musically. I got on very well with Ralf Hütter. He was also a big surprise for me because there was no need for discussions: it was just the similarity of our music, our harmonious, melodious ideas maybe -- something like that -- as opposed to the blues-oriented rock musicians playing guitar solos that were around all the time in the late '60s.
Although you'd originally been inspired by Anglo-American rock, you weren't interested in reproducing it.
Well, I grew up imitating all those people. I mean, the last one who really knocked me off my feet was Jimi Hendrix and I still love his music. It's still inspiring and it's so amazing what he did at that time. But, of course, it was necessary to forget what I had heard and what I had been impressed by in the late '60s in order to be able to move forward and create my own music. And when I met the Kraftwerk guys, that was suddenly a sort of...in English do you have the phrase Hour Zero?
Yes, or Zero Hour or maybe Year Zero if you're talking about big socio-cultural paradigm shifts.
In German it's a very common expression, Stunde Null. It's used for postwar Germany, after the collapse of Nazi Germany. And everything started for me at that moment in '71, with Kraftwerk. So my main idea was to forget the clichés, all the guitar techniques and song structures of my teenage heroes, which I had so carefully adopted and copied. The Beatles, Eric Clapton and Hendrix were already around, I understood that, and copying their ideas would never be an expression of my own musical personality. The first thing I did was to slow down my fingers: no more running around on the guitar neck at high speed. Then, consequently, the ideas of pop music and blues -- their melodic and harmonic song structures -- were scrapped from my musical vocabulary. All of this left me with the basic elements of music. One string, one idea, move straight ahead, explore dynamics. An echo of my listening to music in Pakistan, probably [where Rother lived as a child]. Anyway, this minimalistic approach was not limited to guitar playing. It was an idea for a complete music which -- in the end -- was meant to express and reflect my own personality and individuality. It probably sounds very ambitious and self-confident -- but that's what I was, what we were. The future wasn't clear, I didn't know in 1971 where the musical adventure was taking me, but it was a vast open ground with lots of freedom and the chance of limitless experimentation.
So when you were working with Kraftwerk and then NEU!, you consciously tried to cut yourself off from the rock tradition.
Yes, completely. You know, it wasn't enough just to forget the English and American musical heroes. German also.... Actually, there were really no German musical heroes that I can remember -- whatever I heard from German musicians was something that didn't impress me. Later on, when I played with Kraftwerk, we also met the Can people. We had, I think, one or two concerts together and, of course, later on I listened to their albums -- not closely, but enough to know that Jaki Liebezeit was a great drummer. And that, of course, led to our collaboration later.
And you only felt musical kinship with people like Can, Kraftwerk and, of course, Cluster?
Yes. Maybe that's some sort of a family, but with very loose ties. I chose to be influenced and inspired by the people I collaborated with and not, you know, by just anyone who put out a record.
By the time you joined Kraftwerk, they'd already released that first album.
Yes, that's right. It was a few months earlier and they were becoming popular. I remember there was talk about the "Heroin Crowd" in Munich being totally taken by this first album, and then, when we did our concerts, our tours, there were so many people, especially young people, who discovered the music and it took off like a rocket.
Is there any chance that the work you did with Kraftwerk will be officially released? Some of the aborted studio work with Conny Plank or the live material?
It's hard to say. I hesitate to say never because many things happen that in earlier times I wouldn't have considered possible. I mean, the lost Harmonia tapes with Brian Eno, for instance -- the Tracks & Traces tapes. But I know, of course, that Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter did their best to forget the period in '71 when they were separated. They tried to erase that part of their history, even saying that the actual Kraftwerk story starts with Autobahn in '74, which is quite ridiculous.
They certainly did some interesting work before Autobahn.
Yes, and some of the best work, in fact. Of course, I haven't discussed that with them; I haven't spoken with them for ages. Now I hear that they've split. I met Karl Bartos recently, who was with them for a long time, and he tells me it's only Ralf Hütter now. But as for the recordings we did with Conny Plank, to be honest, they weren't great. That was one of the reasons we stopped halfway through, because, well, maybe it wasn't the right combination. When we did it live, sometimes in the right situation, the music got very, very exciting -- for us onstage and also for the crowd. I think that the videotapes and the bootlegs that are available do not reflect that. Some of them are completely wrong in the audio balance. I think the reason for this is that the technicians didn't realize how important the stuff was that Florian Schneider played. Instead, they concentrated on my guitar much too strongly, making it dominate everything. And I thought that Florian did amazing things on the electric flute, especially. If there would be a possibility to remix that, to do proper audio balance, I guess it would be much more exciting than what is available, but I don't see Florian or Ralf Hütter at a certain time suddenly approaching me and saying, "Hey this has to be released!" [laughs]
You're not in touch with Florian Schneider at all these days?
No. I have friends who sometimes see Florian. I don't know, maybe I'll meet up with him one day. He seems to be getting calmer since he left Kraftwerk. But no, there was no reason to stay in touch. I mean, we weren't friends either. The music was exciting, but I also remember being witness to some horrible fights between Klaus and Florian: horrible arguing... and really crazy driving! Florian was such a crazy driver. I think he risked our necks many times because he was so on-edge. Everything was the complete opposite of being relaxed and driving with foresight. He didn't drive carefully...or maybe that was just my impression because I didn't have a driver's license at the time. But I think it was quite true because that's how Florian always appeared to me anyway.
Let me ask you about the dreaded term Krautrock. This was a term invented by the British music press, I think.
I can't say. It could well be, but there are several versions of the origin of this word. You know the band Faust? I heard they had a song called "Krautrock," but I don't know their music.
You've never listened to Faust?
Not really. Well, actually someone once gave me a record [laughs], but [listening to other people's records] isn't so important, really. I mean, I have my own job to do!
That's funny. Although it's heavier, Faust's "Krautrock" sounds vaguely similar to the kind of thing you were doing earlier with NEU! on "Hallogallo."
Hmmm, maybe I should go and listen to Faust.
Did you find the term Krautrock at all offensive? Or was it amusing?
I'm not sure when the expression first came up, but I remember that in '72, when our first NEU! album was released in the UK, there were some very favorable reviews -- but there were also some in which there was this old fear, do you know what I mean? Maybe it was something to do with a fear of Germany, the Teutonic cousins: a mixture of admiration and revulsion.
In my experience, at least, we British have a very, er, ambivalent relationship with the Germans.
Well, not on my side [laughs]. But many journalists and people didn't seem too fond of whatever came out of Germany -- especially if some musician thought that he'd invented something that was independent of what British or American musicians had made. That was something that the music scene first had to get used to. I mean, everyone in England and America was mostly -- and maybe even now is -- used to dominating the world with their products and with their culture. [But the rejection of their dominance was] what led us to concentrate on our own roots; our own ideas had to do with Vietnam and, of course, also with Nazi Germany. A lot of the '60s cultural struggles and political struggles went into our way of thinking.
You've touched on this, but did you see anything particularly German about your music?
That's interesting. For me the term German didn't mean anything. It wasn't connected to a specific German idea. I think Kraftwerk are a bit different -- at least that's what I read somewhere -- in that they had this idea of creating a German music, a German musical identity. But I know that my own influences come from all over the world, so it doesn't make much sense in my case: most of my time growing up, I lived in Germany, of course, but then as a child I also lived in England for a year and then Pakistan for three years.
Didn't you live just outside of Manchester?
Yes, and from there we moved to Karachi. And speaking of influences, I remember these Indian, Arabian musical sounds, the bands walking the streets, and the fascination I experienced.
You mentioned that that had an effect on the way you played later.
Oh yes, definitely. The idea of repetition and a sort of endless music, as opposed to a verse-chorus-verse-and-then-stop kind of structure. I recently saw a documentary on television about Paul Bowles, the American author who lived in Morocco, who wrote The Sheltering Sky. His work is amazing. He lived in Morocco for many years and whenever I see programs like that, with that atmosphere of the Islamic world, it touches a spot in my soul.
Have you ever been back to Pakistan?
No. In my mind I have but, you know, looking at the political situation, it's not very desirable to be there in Karachi. I'm not sure. A friend of mine worked for a fashion company and she told me she visited Karachi a few years ago and didn't feel insecure. But no, I think I'll wait and hope for a better time. I don't think it's a good idea to be running around there as a Christian foreigner. It was different back then, but I did notice some changes happening in the last year I was there. Of course, we could talk for a long time about the necessity for cultural independence, but at the beginning, as a young boy, I wasn't aware of that. But when I was 12, I remember once there was some sort of unrest. There were crowds outside the boundary of the school, outside the high walls of the school. They were demanding that the school should respect their religious holiday and close for that day; and so all these people stormed into the compound and I called home and said, "Please send the driver. We're having a revolution!" [laughs]
Did you go to university in Germany?
I tried, but I'm not sure whether I was really trying. I was interested in psychology. I mean, I worked in that psychiatric hospital as a conscientious objector and, next to music, psychology was something that interested me. But I sat in class with long hair and I stuck out from the other 28 students and I just thought about music all the time. My mind just wandered off all the time. It was clear very soon that, apart from music, nothing could get me excited.
What did the name NEU! mean to you?
At the time I was quite unsure. I thought it was too cool. You know it means "NEW!", of course. Obviously, it was perfect for what I had in mind and what Klaus had in mind and it was also a bit cheeky, you know, with the exclamation mark. A lot of people thought, "What's that?" So it was strange. And there was also the first Kraftwerk album, also with this kind of minimalist artwork approach. But it stuck out in the shops, of course.
Was it Klaus who did the cover art on the NEU! albums?
Yes. He made suggestions and I said, "OK, let's do it that way." Klaus had this to offer. We didn't argue about it. We talked about the details and moved on. Everything went very fast, actually, with NEU!
NEU! anticipated punk and post-punk: the DIY artwork, the experimentation, the simple beat, the guitar sound on the song "Hero"; in turn, the more interesting punk and post-punk artists cited NEU! as an influence. Did you have much interest in punk?
Not really. I liked some of the music, but in a distant way, and I didn't share the emotional side. The emotional connection was something that was true only to Klaus. I guess Klaus had quite strong frustrations about his life and a lot of anger at people. That's something that separated us also -- the way we reacted to rejection and things like that. Klaus had this attitude, in later days at least, that was like, "Everyone who doesn't love me hates me... and if you hate me then I hate you even more" [laughs]. I mean, that's putting it very simplistically...but I didn't share that approach, really. What I liked about the songs that may have influenced Johnny Rotten and other people -- songs like "Hero" -- is the powerful, strong forward rush of the rhythm, and I could put my guitars, my melodies, on top of that. It was much more the aesthetic of dynamic movement which appealed to me and not the emotions, like Klaus singing, "Fuck the company, fuck the press, fuck the program," whatever.
Did he become more difficult over time?
I think he did. Now that he's dead, he can't defend himself and I have to be even more careful about what I say. He wrote on his web site that he was proud of having taken more than 1000 LSD trips and that certainly affected his mental stability and also his ability to relate to other people, and that got worse. And there were certainly other drugs also. It was difficult to find the same reality in later years, to be able to discuss anything. When he released those two NEU! albums in Japan behind my back, I wrote him faxes and exchanged messages with him about all that many, many times, and my partner at the time said, "If you think you'll ever find an agreement, you're just as crazy as he is." Of course, she was right in a way, but there are also some other aspects. He was short of cash. He later apologized for what he did with the NEU! albums in Japan. On the other hand, he was a smart guy, so maybe that was a tactical apology in front of Herbert Grönemeyer, the head of the Grönland label, when he first met him [to discuss the 2001 reissue of the first three NEU! records]. So, yes, we couldn't solve our problems, unfortunately. But it wasn't just about money, of course. It was about even more important aspects: the betrayal and the way he put KLAUS DINGER all over NEU! 4 and the artwork and even wrote an editor's note in the booklet asking people to contact ME [laughs]. I'm not sure if I should laugh... but he was in a very strange mental state in later years, sending his faxes to everybody, even cc'ing the President of Germany: "Mr. President, this is not a free market... I wish you knew." Well, going back to my psychology days, I have ideas about what was wrong, but I won't talk about that.
Did he have family and friends around him?
Yes, well maybe it's being indiscreet but you know he had that band La Düsseldorf with his brother Thomas and Hans Lampe? They had very severe problems. I think they were fighting in court over royalties for about 12 or 13 years after the split of La Düsseldorf. Well, to say something nice about Klaus: I hope the impression I'm creating when I talk about him is that he was difficult as a person but that I really respected his work as an artist. You know, these days I'm in the studio working on the NEU! 86 material -- that was the NEU! project in the '80s -- and although I don't love everything we did or he did, he was a great artist. He just had some problems finding peaceful arrangements with people, especially when things went in a direction he didn't want them to go in. He could be very sweet [laughs] as long as everything went his way, and then he got very nasty when things went wrong.
When you were working with Klaus in NEU! and Kraftwerk, you also began your involvement with the late Conny Plank, of course. What do you remember about him?
With my projects, he was an amazing, creative guy at the mixing desk, with a very clear mind. He was very enthusiastic, open to all kinds of craziness. Conny was just as crazy as we were and I learned quite a lot from him, picking up his approach to changing everything, turning the sound upside down. You know, that was one of his credos: just turn everything upside down.
So he played an important role on the NEU! records.
Definitely. To be honest, at the beginning I don't know if we would have been able to record an album without Conny. He was a vital member of the team, of the production team, and he had experience. Of course, he wasn't as experienced as he was in later years, but he already had enough experience to be able to handle the studio gear and to handle the musicians. He wasn't the kind of producer who would have told us what to do -- that wasn't our idea of having a co-producer. He was part of the team, listening attentively and also, at certain times, giving inspiration: for instance, turning the tape around in "Hallogallo." I remember that clearly. It was exciting to hear all my guitars playing backwards, and then I played forward guitar to that -- matching it.
That was Conny Plank's idea for "Hallogallo"?
Yes.
Did Conny get along with Klaus?
[Pregnant pause] [laughs] You know, Klaus always wanted to crash through walls, to break down barriers. Klaus wouldn't accept a "no." That was part of his personality. He always wanted more. Always more. I remember Conny sitting at the mixing desk working on a track on the second NEU! album, trying to point out to Klaus that, no, he couldn't make the mix louder. Klaus always wanted more excitement. I understand that desire perfectly well, but in contrast to Klaus I think I was willing to accept that there were boundaries, that there were limits. Klaus, on the other hand, always said, "More! Make it louder!" [laughs] And sometimes Conny -- well, he was a very strong person, of course -- but I remember that he was a bit unhappy about those situations when Klaus just wasn't willing to understand that there was a "no" or there couldn't be "more." But otherwise, I think Conny respected Klaus in the same way that I did. We all knew that we were a good team and that we needed each other.
BY WILSON NEATE
It's hard to overstate the importance of the '70s generation of experimentally minded German musicians like NEU!, Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Can and Faust, usually grouped under the dodgy term, Krautrock. Having come of age in the postwar period, many of these diverse artists shared a common bond of refusal, rejecting not only their country's troubled political and cultural past, but also the global hegemony of Anglo-American pop and rock. Ironically, despite distancing themselves from the musical mainstream, these bands would exert considerable sway over those traditions they'd rejected. The line of influence stretches from punk's smarter manifestations through the post-punk generation and Bowie's vital late-'70s work, to more recent rock of all stripes -- Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Stereolab, Radiohead, Primal Scream, Secret Machines, the list goes on and on. And beyond rock, the likes of Cluster, NEU!, Kraftwerk and Harmonia have also been perennial reference points on the continuum of electronic music from the late '70s to the present, from synth-pop to techno, as well as its more abstract, experimental variants.
Michael Rother's guitar minimalism is a connecting thread weaving through and between several of the most innovative of the '70s German bands. When Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider briefly separated in 1971, Rother joined Schneider in Kraftwerk. Also present, on drums, was the late Klaus Dinger, with whom Rother formed NEU! later the same year. Between NEU!'s second and third records, in 1973, Rother teamed up with Cluster's Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius as Harmonia, a project spawning two studio albums, Muzik von Harmonia and Deluxe, plus two posthumous releases: Live 1974 and a collaboration with Brian Eno, Tracks & Traces. By 1977, Rother had hooked up with Can's drummer Jaki Liebezeit and embarked on a solo career that continues today.
Despite solo success, particularly with his first three records, Rother is still most widely known for his work with Dinger in NEU! Immensely creative as an artistic unit, Rother and Dinger were never friends, and by the mid-'90s, with the band long dead and its three original albums out of print, the pair's relationship had been reduced to an exchange of fraught faxes after Dinger -- without Rother's approval -- began putting out unreleased NEU! material on a Japanese label. Thanks to Dinger's intransigence, the original NEU! albums remained legally unavailable until 2001, when Herbert Grönemeyer stepped in and brokered their release on his Grönland label, which later also issued Harmonia's archival Live 1974. The latter prompted renewed interest in Rother's recordings with Roedelius and Moebius, which in turn led to the reactivation of Harmonia for live performances from 2007 through early 2009.
Now, on the occasion of Grönland's expanded reissue of Harmonia and Eno's Tracks & Traces, Michael Rother looks back over a career of sometimes vexed but always groundbreaking creative partnerships.
***
BLURT: How did you first connect with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius? Did you know them personally or just through their work as Cluster?
ROTHER: We did a concert together, in Hamburg, when I was with Kraftwerk in '71. Cluster worked with the same producer -- Conny Plank -- and I'm not sure how it happened, but we ended up playing at the same concert in Hamburg.
So both bands were on the same bill?
Yes, they were playing on the same night: it was Kraftwerk and Cluster in the big university hall there. There's a funny story about that. I'll never forget that concert. Kraftwerk were quite popular already. The first Kraftwerk album had been released some months earlier and so, obviously, for the crowd, we were the main attraction, but we were so democratic [laughs] that we talked to Roedelius and Moebius backstage and asked, "Who should go on first?" And they said, "Oh, you go on first and then we'll take over." There are hardly any documents of what we did as Kraftwerk, but we'd really been making quite rough music and people were very excited and when we wanted to stop our set, the people just kept on cheering and shouting and we said, "No, we have to stop because the other band's coming on." And then, when Cluster started playing, the people got really mad and they rushed the stage. I don't know how many, but maybe 20 or 30 people actually went onto the stage and disconnected their speakers and equipment. I was afraid they would start beating them up. That was the result of Kraftwerk's furious playing!
These days people don't tend to think of Kraftwerk as a rock band whipping crowds into a frenzy!
Cluster played very soft music, but what we did as Kraftwerk then wasn't very soft. It was quite the opposite: it was very rhythmical, very rough, primitive, raw music. Well, that was my memory, at least. Maybe they weren't really in danger of being beaten up, but it's something I'll never forget. So anyway, after that we stayed in touch and one year later, when we had already released our first NEU! album, we had this offer to do a tour in the UK. Our British label, United Artists, invited us and of course the two of us, Klaus Dinger and I, couldn't perform live -- playing just drums and one guitar, that's not enough. And then I remembered especially this one track on Cluster II, "Im Süden." That track really appealed to me and I had the idea that the harmonious, melodious connection was there. So I went to visit Cluster in Forst and jammed with Roedelius in order to find out whether they could join NEU! on that tour, as members of the live line-up. But, actually, in the end I liked that music much more than NEU! so [in 1973] I stopped NEU! for a while.
What was it about Cluster that you found so attractive -- attractive enough to put NEU! on hold?
When we jammed together it was a different world, a different atmospheric world. It was quiet. Roedelius played these melodious patterns on his keyboard -- I think there was maybe some influence from minimalist composers -- and there was the sound treatment, of course. Sometimes it was fuzzy -- he used wah and other filters. It was very primitive gear, actually. Nothing sophisticated. In fact, it was very similar to what I had been using with NEU! but the combination of Roedelius's piano, his electric piano, and my guitar was immediately something that connected. And, well, there was so much to discover on that road.
You mentioned minimalism. Had you listened to composers like Terry Riley by then?
Not by that time. Until then, I hadn't come in contact with any of them. It was only really when I met Roedelius and Moebius.
How did working with them as Harmonia compare to working with Klaus Dinger in NEU!?
Well, there were several differences. One big difference was that with Cluster as Harmonia we could create music onstage: it was a complete musical picture. That was totally different to NEU! With Klaus, we needed the multitrack machine and that limited our possibilities, of course. And also, to be honest, I respected Klaus as an artist, as a great drummer, but as I'm sure you'll have heard, we were so different in character and personality. Maybe sometimes the impression that's created is wrong, but we weren't friends. I didn't want to spend any time with Klaus outside the studio. In the studio, it was perfect. We were a great team. We didn't have to discuss music in the studio because we had similar visions of where we were heading and what we wanted to do. But everything else was not so pleasant for me with Klaus. With Moebius and Roedelius, it was different. Klaus thought of himself as a hippie -- in later days he referred to himself as a hippie-punk or something like that -- but the calmness and surroundings of Forst had a strong appeal to me, and this all connected. It was just one big excitement. The visit to Forst was inspiring; it was an inspiring place for me to stay.
As you say, you and Klaus had very different personalities and you weren't friends. How did you come together initially?
I met him when I stumbled into the Kraftwerk studio in Düsseldorf one day, in early '71. At that time, I was working in a psychiatric hospital, as a conscientious objector [in lieu of compulsory military service], and I was with a friend who was also a guitar player and we were in Düsseldorf demonstrating against something or other -- I can't remember what it was [laughs]. At the time, there were so many reasons to be angry. Anyway, after the demonstration he said, "Oh, I have this invitation to go into the studio of a band here in Düsseldorf. They want to do some film music or something." He told me the name of the band and that didn't ring a bell -- I hadn't heard of the name Kraftwerk at the time. So, I joined him and I jammed with Ralf Hütter in that studio. Florian Schneider and Klaus Dinger were sitting on the sofa listening and, obviously, everyone had the same impression that there was something happening musically. I got on very well with Ralf Hütter. He was also a big surprise for me because there was no need for discussions: it was just the similarity of our music, our harmonious, melodious ideas maybe -- something like that -- as opposed to the blues-oriented rock musicians playing guitar solos that were around all the time in the late '60s.
Although you'd originally been inspired by Anglo-American rock, you weren't interested in reproducing it.
Well, I grew up imitating all those people. I mean, the last one who really knocked me off my feet was Jimi Hendrix and I still love his music. It's still inspiring and it's so amazing what he did at that time. But, of course, it was necessary to forget what I had heard and what I had been impressed by in the late '60s in order to be able to move forward and create my own music. And when I met the Kraftwerk guys, that was suddenly a sort of...in English do you have the phrase Hour Zero?
Yes, or Zero Hour or maybe Year Zero if you're talking about big socio-cultural paradigm shifts.
In German it's a very common expression, Stunde Null. It's used for postwar Germany, after the collapse of Nazi Germany. And everything started for me at that moment in '71, with Kraftwerk. So my main idea was to forget the clichés, all the guitar techniques and song structures of my teenage heroes, which I had so carefully adopted and copied. The Beatles, Eric Clapton and Hendrix were already around, I understood that, and copying their ideas would never be an expression of my own musical personality. The first thing I did was to slow down my fingers: no more running around on the guitar neck at high speed. Then, consequently, the ideas of pop music and blues -- their melodic and harmonic song structures -- were scrapped from my musical vocabulary. All of this left me with the basic elements of music. One string, one idea, move straight ahead, explore dynamics. An echo of my listening to music in Pakistan, probably [where Rother lived as a child]. Anyway, this minimalistic approach was not limited to guitar playing. It was an idea for a complete music which -- in the end -- was meant to express and reflect my own personality and individuality. It probably sounds very ambitious and self-confident -- but that's what I was, what we were. The future wasn't clear, I didn't know in 1971 where the musical adventure was taking me, but it was a vast open ground with lots of freedom and the chance of limitless experimentation.
So when you were working with Kraftwerk and then NEU!, you consciously tried to cut yourself off from the rock tradition.
Yes, completely. You know, it wasn't enough just to forget the English and American musical heroes. German also.... Actually, there were really no German musical heroes that I can remember -- whatever I heard from German musicians was something that didn't impress me. Later on, when I played with Kraftwerk, we also met the Can people. We had, I think, one or two concerts together and, of course, later on I listened to their albums -- not closely, but enough to know that Jaki Liebezeit was a great drummer. And that, of course, led to our collaboration later.
And you only felt musical kinship with people like Can, Kraftwerk and, of course, Cluster?
Yes. Maybe that's some sort of a family, but with very loose ties. I chose to be influenced and inspired by the people I collaborated with and not, you know, by just anyone who put out a record.
By the time you joined Kraftwerk, they'd already released that first album.
Yes, that's right. It was a few months earlier and they were becoming popular. I remember there was talk about the "Heroin Crowd" in Munich being totally taken by this first album, and then, when we did our concerts, our tours, there were so many people, especially young people, who discovered the music and it took off like a rocket.
Is there any chance that the work you did with Kraftwerk will be officially released? Some of the aborted studio work with Conny Plank or the live material?
It's hard to say. I hesitate to say never because many things happen that in earlier times I wouldn't have considered possible. I mean, the lost Harmonia tapes with Brian Eno, for instance -- the Tracks & Traces tapes. But I know, of course, that Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter did their best to forget the period in '71 when they were separated. They tried to erase that part of their history, even saying that the actual Kraftwerk story starts with Autobahn in '74, which is quite ridiculous.
They certainly did some interesting work before Autobahn.
Yes, and some of the best work, in fact. Of course, I haven't discussed that with them; I haven't spoken with them for ages. Now I hear that they've split. I met Karl Bartos recently, who was with them for a long time, and he tells me it's only Ralf Hütter now. But as for the recordings we did with Conny Plank, to be honest, they weren't great. That was one of the reasons we stopped halfway through, because, well, maybe it wasn't the right combination. When we did it live, sometimes in the right situation, the music got very, very exciting -- for us onstage and also for the crowd. I think that the videotapes and the bootlegs that are available do not reflect that. Some of them are completely wrong in the audio balance. I think the reason for this is that the technicians didn't realize how important the stuff was that Florian Schneider played. Instead, they concentrated on my guitar much too strongly, making it dominate everything. And I thought that Florian did amazing things on the electric flute, especially. If there would be a possibility to remix that, to do proper audio balance, I guess it would be much more exciting than what is available, but I don't see Florian or Ralf Hütter at a certain time suddenly approaching me and saying, "Hey this has to be released!" [laughs]
You're not in touch with Florian Schneider at all these days?
No. I have friends who sometimes see Florian. I don't know, maybe I'll meet up with him one day. He seems to be getting calmer since he left Kraftwerk. But no, there was no reason to stay in touch. I mean, we weren't friends either. The music was exciting, but I also remember being witness to some horrible fights between Klaus and Florian: horrible arguing... and really crazy driving! Florian was such a crazy driver. I think he risked our necks many times because he was so on-edge. Everything was the complete opposite of being relaxed and driving with foresight. He didn't drive carefully...or maybe that was just my impression because I didn't have a driver's license at the time. But I think it was quite true because that's how Florian always appeared to me anyway.
Let me ask you about the dreaded term Krautrock. This was a term invented by the British music press, I think.
I can't say. It could well be, but there are several versions of the origin of this word. You know the band Faust? I heard they had a song called "Krautrock," but I don't know their music.
You've never listened to Faust?
Not really. Well, actually someone once gave me a record [laughs], but [listening to other people's records] isn't so important, really. I mean, I have my own job to do!
That's funny. Although it's heavier, Faust's "Krautrock" sounds vaguely similar to the kind of thing you were doing earlier with NEU! on "Hallogallo."
Hmmm, maybe I should go and listen to Faust.
Did you find the term Krautrock at all offensive? Or was it amusing?
I'm not sure when the expression first came up, but I remember that in '72, when our first NEU! album was released in the UK, there were some very favorable reviews -- but there were also some in which there was this old fear, do you know what I mean? Maybe it was something to do with a fear of Germany, the Teutonic cousins: a mixture of admiration and revulsion.
In my experience, at least, we British have a very, er, ambivalent relationship with the Germans.
Well, not on my side [laughs]. But many journalists and people didn't seem too fond of whatever came out of Germany -- especially if some musician thought that he'd invented something that was independent of what British or American musicians had made. That was something that the music scene first had to get used to. I mean, everyone in England and America was mostly -- and maybe even now is -- used to dominating the world with their products and with their culture. [But the rejection of their dominance was] what led us to concentrate on our own roots; our own ideas had to do with Vietnam and, of course, also with Nazi Germany. A lot of the '60s cultural struggles and political struggles went into our way of thinking.
You've touched on this, but did you see anything particularly German about your music?
That's interesting. For me the term German didn't mean anything. It wasn't connected to a specific German idea. I think Kraftwerk are a bit different -- at least that's what I read somewhere -- in that they had this idea of creating a German music, a German musical identity. But I know that my own influences come from all over the world, so it doesn't make much sense in my case: most of my time growing up, I lived in Germany, of course, but then as a child I also lived in England for a year and then Pakistan for three years.
Didn't you live just outside of Manchester?
Yes, and from there we moved to Karachi. And speaking of influences, I remember these Indian, Arabian musical sounds, the bands walking the streets, and the fascination I experienced.
You mentioned that that had an effect on the way you played later.
Oh yes, definitely. The idea of repetition and a sort of endless music, as opposed to a verse-chorus-verse-and-then-stop kind of structure. I recently saw a documentary on television about Paul Bowles, the American author who lived in Morocco, who wrote The Sheltering Sky. His work is amazing. He lived in Morocco for many years and whenever I see programs like that, with that atmosphere of the Islamic world, it touches a spot in my soul.
Have you ever been back to Pakistan?
No. In my mind I have but, you know, looking at the political situation, it's not very desirable to be there in Karachi. I'm not sure. A friend of mine worked for a fashion company and she told me she visited Karachi a few years ago and didn't feel insecure. But no, I think I'll wait and hope for a better time. I don't think it's a good idea to be running around there as a Christian foreigner. It was different back then, but I did notice some changes happening in the last year I was there. Of course, we could talk for a long time about the necessity for cultural independence, but at the beginning, as a young boy, I wasn't aware of that. But when I was 12, I remember once there was some sort of unrest. There were crowds outside the boundary of the school, outside the high walls of the school. They were demanding that the school should respect their religious holiday and close for that day; and so all these people stormed into the compound and I called home and said, "Please send the driver. We're having a revolution!" [laughs]
Did you go to university in Germany?
I tried, but I'm not sure whether I was really trying. I was interested in psychology. I mean, I worked in that psychiatric hospital as a conscientious objector and, next to music, psychology was something that interested me. But I sat in class with long hair and I stuck out from the other 28 students and I just thought about music all the time. My mind just wandered off all the time. It was clear very soon that, apart from music, nothing could get me excited.
What did the name NEU! mean to you?
At the time I was quite unsure. I thought it was too cool. You know it means "NEW!", of course. Obviously, it was perfect for what I had in mind and what Klaus had in mind and it was also a bit cheeky, you know, with the exclamation mark. A lot of people thought, "What's that?" So it was strange. And there was also the first Kraftwerk album, also with this kind of minimalist artwork approach. But it stuck out in the shops, of course.
Was it Klaus who did the cover art on the NEU! albums?
Yes. He made suggestions and I said, "OK, let's do it that way." Klaus had this to offer. We didn't argue about it. We talked about the details and moved on. Everything went very fast, actually, with NEU!
NEU! anticipated punk and post-punk: the DIY artwork, the experimentation, the simple beat, the guitar sound on the song "Hero"; in turn, the more interesting punk and post-punk artists cited NEU! as an influence. Did you have much interest in punk?
Not really. I liked some of the music, but in a distant way, and I didn't share the emotional side. The emotional connection was something that was true only to Klaus. I guess Klaus had quite strong frustrations about his life and a lot of anger at people. That's something that separated us also -- the way we reacted to rejection and things like that. Klaus had this attitude, in later days at least, that was like, "Everyone who doesn't love me hates me... and if you hate me then I hate you even more" [laughs]. I mean, that's putting it very simplistically...but I didn't share that approach, really. What I liked about the songs that may have influenced Johnny Rotten and other people -- songs like "Hero" -- is the powerful, strong forward rush of the rhythm, and I could put my guitars, my melodies, on top of that. It was much more the aesthetic of dynamic movement which appealed to me and not the emotions, like Klaus singing, "Fuck the company, fuck the press, fuck the program," whatever.
Did he become more difficult over time?
I think he did. Now that he's dead, he can't defend himself and I have to be even more careful about what I say. He wrote on his web site that he was proud of having taken more than 1000 LSD trips and that certainly affected his mental stability and also his ability to relate to other people, and that got worse. And there were certainly other drugs also. It was difficult to find the same reality in later years, to be able to discuss anything. When he released those two NEU! albums in Japan behind my back, I wrote him faxes and exchanged messages with him about all that many, many times, and my partner at the time said, "If you think you'll ever find an agreement, you're just as crazy as he is." Of course, she was right in a way, but there are also some other aspects. He was short of cash. He later apologized for what he did with the NEU! albums in Japan. On the other hand, he was a smart guy, so maybe that was a tactical apology in front of Herbert Grönemeyer, the head of the Grönland label, when he first met him [to discuss the 2001 reissue of the first three NEU! records]. So, yes, we couldn't solve our problems, unfortunately. But it wasn't just about money, of course. It was about even more important aspects: the betrayal and the way he put KLAUS DINGER all over NEU! 4 and the artwork and even wrote an editor's note in the booklet asking people to contact ME [laughs]. I'm not sure if I should laugh... but he was in a very strange mental state in later years, sending his faxes to everybody, even cc'ing the President of Germany: "Mr. President, this is not a free market... I wish you knew." Well, going back to my psychology days, I have ideas about what was wrong, but I won't talk about that.
Did he have family and friends around him?
Yes, well maybe it's being indiscreet but you know he had that band La Düsseldorf with his brother Thomas and Hans Lampe? They had very severe problems. I think they were fighting in court over royalties for about 12 or 13 years after the split of La Düsseldorf. Well, to say something nice about Klaus: I hope the impression I'm creating when I talk about him is that he was difficult as a person but that I really respected his work as an artist. You know, these days I'm in the studio working on the NEU! 86 material -- that was the NEU! project in the '80s -- and although I don't love everything we did or he did, he was a great artist. He just had some problems finding peaceful arrangements with people, especially when things went in a direction he didn't want them to go in. He could be very sweet [laughs] as long as everything went his way, and then he got very nasty when things went wrong.
When you were working with Klaus in NEU! and Kraftwerk, you also began your involvement with the late Conny Plank, of course. What do you remember about him?
With my projects, he was an amazing, creative guy at the mixing desk, with a very clear mind. He was very enthusiastic, open to all kinds of craziness. Conny was just as crazy as we were and I learned quite a lot from him, picking up his approach to changing everything, turning the sound upside down. You know, that was one of his credos: just turn everything upside down.
So he played an important role on the NEU! records.
Definitely. To be honest, at the beginning I don't know if we would have been able to record an album without Conny. He was a vital member of the team, of the production team, and he had experience. Of course, he wasn't as experienced as he was in later years, but he already had enough experience to be able to handle the studio gear and to handle the musicians. He wasn't the kind of producer who would have told us what to do -- that wasn't our idea of having a co-producer. He was part of the team, listening attentively and also, at certain times, giving inspiration: for instance, turning the tape around in "Hallogallo." I remember that clearly. It was exciting to hear all my guitars playing backwards, and then I played forward guitar to that -- matching it.
That was Conny Plank's idea for "Hallogallo"?
Yes.
Did Conny get along with Klaus?
[Pregnant pause] [laughs] You know, Klaus always wanted to crash through walls, to break down barriers. Klaus wouldn't accept a "no." That was part of his personality. He always wanted more. Always more. I remember Conny sitting at the mixing desk working on a track on the second NEU! album, trying to point out to Klaus that, no, he couldn't make the mix louder. Klaus always wanted more excitement. I understand that desire perfectly well, but in contrast to Klaus I think I was willing to accept that there were boundaries, that there were limits. Klaus, on the other hand, always said, "More! Make it louder!" [laughs] And sometimes Conny -- well, he was a very strong person, of course -- but I remember that he was a bit unhappy about those situations when Klaus just wasn't willing to understand that there was a "no" or there couldn't be "more." But otherwise, I think Conny respected Klaus in the same way that I did. We all knew that we were a good team and that we needed each other.
