'Neu may be something of a one-trick pony, but as with Chuck Berry's riff and Bo Diddley's rhythm, Neu's motorik is one hell of a trick.'
Neu! 75 (1975) by
Neu!
During 1975, in the midst of the Disco era and approaching
the cusp where Prog Rock would be all but pulverised by Punk Rock, three epically
ambitious singles were released. They were ‘No Woman, No Cry’ by Bob Marley
& The Wailers, ‘Born To Run’ by Bruce Springsteen, and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’
by Queen.
Although never a fan of Reggae, I couldn’t help but be moved
by Marley’s stately hymn of nostalgia for Jamaica ,
a song which effortlessly transcended the limitations of its patois and setting
(I can still recall many a singalong to jukeboxes in Leicester
pubs). Neither did I ever much like Queen and, despite appreciating their
magnum opus as an impressive feat of record-making, I just couldn’t take its
overweeningly poperatic pomposity in general, or Freddy Mercury’s preeningly soulless
histrionics in particular. ‘Born To Run’ however, was a bona fide classic from
first hearing and I still think it’s one of the very greatest and most exciting
records ever made*1.
1975 was also the year the genre becoming known – somewhat
contentiously - as ‘Krautrock’, enjoyed a commercial break-out from Germany in
the form of ‘Autobahn’, a single edited down from a version which took up a
whole side of an album of the same name by a group of four synthesiser players
called Kraftwerk. It reached # 11 in the UK
and # 25 in the US
No such heady heights of chart success in the western world
awaited Neu! - either then or thereafter. Both members of Neu!, guitarist
Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger, had been in an earlier incarnation of
Kraftwerk with Florian Schneider*2, before leaving to record their eponymous
debut album in 1972. It wasn’t until ’75 though, that it came to pass that
yours truly was listening to The John Peel Show on the BBC when I heard two
songs on the same programme which stopped me in my tracks. The first was Patti
Smith’s reinvention of Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’ by Them from 1964*3. The second
was ‘Hero’ from Neu’s third album, Neu
’75.
Both of these songs seemed to me to be fired with a similar
kind of ambition to the records discussed above (the full title of Smith’s was
‘Gloria In Excelcis Deo’, after all!), but they were coming from very different
angles of production and direction. Both were relatively lo-fi and, unlike
Springsteen, Marley and Queen, who were all working broadly in the continuum of
rock music’s evolution, Smith and Neu! appeared to be actively breaking away
from it. The ferocious attack of these records did, of course, foreshadow and
significantly influence the coming of Punk – but there was no way of knowing
that at the time.
Neu! indeed, shared an experimental and anarchic aesthetic
with other Krautrock acts such as Can, Faust, Amon Duull II, Tangerine Dream,
Cluster and Klaus Schulze.
Their first album had featured a pneumatic drill on one
track, whilst the next, Neu 2 (1973),
had a second side which ‘remixed’ the first side to varying degrees, ranging
from interesting to unlistenable*4.
But, gentle reader, do not start here to run away with the
idea that I’m luring you into some cachophonous catastrophe by recommending Neu! 75. Far from it – Neu’s penultimate
album is a beautiful and accessible record, their best by a country mile and
one of my all-time favourites. It’s a mystery to me why it, as opposed to they -
as in the band*5 – isn’t more widely known and heard.
* * * * *
In the history of guitar and drums duos, Neu come a fair
while after Shadows off-shoot, Jet Harris & Tony Meehan, and long before
the likes of The White Stripes and The Black Keys. Apart from being a largely
instrumental act like the ex-Shads, they resemble none of them, let alone the
synth and singer merchants who sprang up in the 1980s. If they resemble
anything, then it might be an unholy alliance between their contemporaries,
Suicide, a confrontationalist electro-punk pair, and Santo & Johnny, the
Hawaiian-styled melodists, who emerged in the late ‘50s.
What Neu! are most known for is their creation of the motorik drumbeat, a relentless 4/4
attack punctuated by occasional volleys around the kit (Klaus Dinger, the
drummer , preferred to call it ‘The Apache Beat’). Complemented by phasing, volume
variation and Michael Rother’s guitar harmonics and bass throbs, the motorik
has about it the impression of perpetual motion, always urgently on the move,
although appearing and disappearing, usually by means of studio fade, from - or
into - some mysterious distance.
 |
| Dinger Roth |
The motorik made its debut on ‘Hallogallo’ (‘wild partying’
in English, roughly), the instrumental opener on the first Neu album, lasting
for ten minutes. It could easily have gone on for twice as long without
becoming remotely boring, so arresting is its effect. Because of its hypnotic
originality, it is the piece that Neu! are most lauded for and it played to the more accessible features of the
obsession with minimalism and repetition that characterised the worlds of the
avant garde and classical music at the time. Neu would repeat the trick, almost
as effectively, at the start of their second album with ‘Fur Immer’ (‘forever’
in English).
By Neu 75,
however, Neu had discovered keyboards, and the album opens with a heavily
reverbed piano before the motorik gets going, its propulsion abetted by rhythm
guitar and overlaid by fluttering synthesisers. It is the piano which carries
the eminently whistleable tune and ‘Isi’ (‘easy’ in English), is a fabulously
catchy instrumental. I’m amazed that it’s not as much a staple of TV incidental
music as say, Nick Drake or Moby – perhaps it is in Germany
‘Isi’ also clues in the listener to the fact that this is a
much more tightly produced album than the first two records*7. ‘Seeland’
(German for ‘island’ generally; more specifically Sjaelland, the largest of the
Danish islands), wanders in with a strolling bass, more relaxed drums and a
woodblock, and some of Rother’s most melodic guitar playing in which he
achieves the sound of trumpets drifting on a breeze. The track fades into
rainfall, distant thunder and echoes of his guitar.
The hushed, slow ‘Leb Wohl’ (‘goodbye’ in English) is again
led by piano, accompanied by great washes of surf and muted, metronomic
percussion. Rother’s soporific, breathy vocal delivers a sparse lyric about
making love on a hill by the sea and feeling free. Wordsworth it ain’t, but it
works and, as with the other two vocals on side 2, it is in English (singing in
English, along with the more considered production, may be indicative that Neu!
were aiming for a wider audience with this album).
 |
| Rother Dinger |
By the time the first side ends, the sunlit buoyancy of
‘Isi’ has gradually sunk into a cloudy melancholic dusk. Side 2 suddenly blasts
through this inertia, with Klaus Dinger, now on rhythm guitar, carving out an
aggressive intro strum (or should that be sturm
und drang?) as Rother soars in on lead and the thunderous double-drumming
sets in. This is the track I heard on the Peel Show and its sheer intensity
still strikes me. No wonder a certain John Lydon pricked up his ears back then.
The imagery conjured up for me by the sonic storm and the words about a ‘hero
driving through the night’, is of apocalyptic horsemen galloping through a
cloud-tossed, moonlit darkness. Dinger’s slurred, furious vocal, largely
incoherent as well as being positively unhinged, actually relates a tale of a
man driven to nihilism (i.e. ‘fuck the bourgeoisie!’) by a friend’s betrayal
with his ‘Honey [who] went to Norway’ (to Seeland, perhaps?).
As the galloping dies away, it is replaced by the compelling
urgency of ‘E-Musik’, which takes its place alongside ‘Hallogallo’ and ‘Fur
Immer’ in the trinity of tracks which best exemplify the motorik. Its carefully
controlled dynamics and phasing eventually give way to sweeping wind effects
and what I can only describe as the sound of some great beast stirring from the
depths. Then there is an echoing glimmer of ‘Seeland’s’ melody played backwards,
before the galloping comes crashing back in with the electic guitars and
double-drumming of ‘After Eight’, Dinger howling for help to get him ‘through
the night’ so that he ‘can see the sun’, with Rother vamping away on piano and
the leviathan on backing vocals…
In truth, Neu may be something of a one trick pony, but as
with Chuck Berry's riff and Bo Diddley’s rhythm, Neu’s motorik is one
hell of a trick. And as with Bo and Chuck, there’s significantly more to Neu
than their one big trick. The trick is at once obvious and mysterious. Ask David Bowie or Brian Eno; ask Joy Division; ask
Hawkwind or Primal Scream.
Nearly forty years on, Neu!
75 still enthrals me. It occupies a unique place in the history of rock
music wherein Prog Rock and the avant garde coalesce with the Ambient genre,
which Neu themselves helped to create, and the proto-Punk Rock which pointed
ahead to the musical upheavals of the decade’s last few years.
N. B.
*1 – The Queen disc hit # 1 in the UK , staying there over the Dec./Jan period of
1975-6, a feat which it repeated during 1991-2, following the Assumption of St.
Freddy (in the US UK but failed to crack America , whilst the ‘Born To Run’ single – and I
do find this extraordinary – missed the UK
*2 – The same Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk, immortalised
by the track, ‘V-2 Schneider’ on David Bowie’s album, Heroes (1977).
*3 – ‘Gloria’ was the b-side of ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’,
which reached # 10 in the UK (now there’s value for money! They don’t make ‘em
like that any more - at least,
not for 6s/8d, or about 38p in ‘new money’). Them reissued
it the following year as an a-side, but it failed to chart. 
*4 – Call it cynicism, spite or simply avant garde
expression, but when the record company pulled the budget-rug from under the
production of Neu 2, the duo
completed the album by speeding up, slowing down or generally warping material
from Side 1.
*5 – Over the years, Neu have gradually become the most
cultishly cool Krautrock act – and after Kraftwerk, probably the best known. In
2009, a largely excellent tribute album appeared called Brand
Neu!, featuring, tracks inspired by
Neu! from, amongst others, Primal Scream, LCD Soundsystem, Oasis and Kasabian
as well as pieces by La Dusseldorf and Michael Rother.
*6 – On the second side of Neu! 75, Rother and Dinger are joined by two further drummers,
Thomas Dinger and Hans Lampe, who play together
on all three numbers. The short-lived quartet of Rother, the Dinger brothers
and Lampe did some live work together as Neu! before the latter three formed
the slightly more pop-orientated (and less distinctive) La Dusseldorf who enjoyed some
commercial success in Europe 1976-81. Rother
joined forces with Cluster to form Harmonia, with whom he’d already recorded Musik Von Harmonia in 1974. He stayed
for two further albums during which time they were augmented by Brian Eno.
*7 – As with their previous albums, Neu! 75 was engineered in the studio of legendary German sound-man
Conny Plank who co-produced with Rother and Klaus Dinger. Rother's fine 'Neutronics 98 (A Tribute To Conny Plank)' closes Brand Neu!
Neu’s minimalism extended to titles and cover art, both of
which are virtually non existent. All three of their albums (four if you count
– wait for it – Neu! 4 (1986) – an
ill-advised reunion, sometimes referred to as Neu! 86 and featuring a revised track-list on the vinyl box-set
supervised by Rother in 2010 have album covers which vary only in their colouration
and ‘home-made’,hand-scrawled liner info.
C. IGR 2013
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