19 Dec 2006
Nederlands:
Club Risiko is een trip door de nauwelijks beschreven underground van de vroege jaren tachtig. Auteur Fred de Vries reist naar Berlijn, Johannesburg, New York, Londen, Ljubljana, Parijs en Amsterdam. Hij drinkt een glas water met de kille Einstürzende Neubauten-oprichter Blixa Bargeld en ziet de harkerige ex-krakers van The Ex in Brussel hun 25-jarige jubileum vieren. Hij onderzoekt de zelfmoord van Neil Goedhals in Zuid-Afrika en de humor van Laibach in Slovenie. In de New Yorkse Lower East Side raakt hij verzeild in de wereld van scum-culture, en in Londen in de anarcho-scene rond het roemruchte Crass. Ondertussen hunkert hij naar een levensteken van de Parijse cineast Leos Carax.
Club Risiko is veel meer dan een boek over muziek. Het is een reis door de schimmige krochten van de metropool, toen en nu. Tevens is het een persoonlijk verslag, waarbij de auteur balanceert tussen deelnemer en voyeur.
Club Risiko; de jaren tachtig toen en nu; Nijgh & Van Ditmar, Amsterdam, 2006; 256 pagina's; 22,50 euro, inclusief CD The Long Lost Koos Tapes; ISBN 90 3887458 8.
Te bestellen via: www.nl.bol.com
English:
Club Risiko is a journey through the largely
unexplored underground of the early eighties. It covers events in Berlin, New
York, London, Ljubljana, Paris, Amsterdam and Johannesburg. Author Fred de Vries drinks a
glass of water with Einstürzende Neubauten founder Blixa Bargeld and witnesses
the silver jubilee of Dutch squatterpunks The Ex in Brussels. He searches for
Laibach humour in Slovenia, and dives into the scum culture of New York’s Lower
East Side. In London he wanders around in the anarcho-scene of the notorious
punk band Crass. Meanwhile he tries to set up an interview with the elusive
French filmmaker Leos Carax, whose moody Pola X symbolised the dark side
of the 80s.
In South Africa he follows the trace of the
all but forgotten noise band Koos, which featured among others actor Marcel van
Heerden and conceptual artist Neil Goedhals, who committed suicide on August
16, 1990.
Club Risiko is more than a book about music. It is a journey through the back alleys of the metropolis, then and now. It is also a personal reportage, in which the author is both participant and voyeur.
Club Risiko; de jaren tachtig toen en nu; Nijgh & Van Ditmar, Amsterdam, 2006; 256 pagina's; 22,50 euro, inclusief CD The Long Lost Koos Tapes; ISBN 90 3887458 8.
Available from www.nl.bol.com
The following is an
excerpt from the Johannesburg
chapter “Jo’burg; dit is geen fucking television” (Jo’burg; this ain’t no fucking televsion). It originally appeared in the Mail & Guardian.
Waar es Koos?
Slowly we cruise along
Hillbrow’s main drag, Pretoria
Street. When we stop for a drink, Paul Riekert,
founder of industrial rockers Battery9, tells me about his military service in
1987. How he witnessed necklacing, and smelled burnt human flesh. “I couldn’t
interfere, because they would kill us. That gives you a perspective on things.”
Next I have to grasp the concept of vastbyt,
the physical and psychological torment that each new recruit had to endure. It
must have been something like this. The fresh recruit is pushed out of his bed
at 4 am. His rucksack is filled with heavy stuff. He gets two tins of food.
Next he is searched, just to make sure he doesn’t cheat. Then he’s ready to
walk. Three days, without sleep. Those who give in are punished. Says Riekert:
“They would ask you questions like ‘what was that farm’s name over there, about
twenty kilometers back?’ ‘Uh, dunno Sir.’ ‘Well, I think you should go and have
a look.’ They tried to break you down.”
It was during his stint in the army that
Riekert came across the Jo’burg noise band Koos. He had read about them in a
newspaper. A journalist compared Koos to Nick Cave’s
Birthday Party. “Dissonant madness,” he wrote.
Riekert points at a small building in a
side street. “That used to be the Black Sun. It still looks the same, although
now it’s a youth hostel. Or maybe rooms for prostitutes. There I saw Koos for
the first time.” He smiles. Fok man,
what a gig.
While Riekert recounts that night in the
late eighties, my mind paints the accompanying pictures. A small space, crammed
with people, most of them dressed in black. They stare at the musicians on
stage who, in the words of Riekert, look “elegantly wasted”. Koos act kind of
indifferent, concentrating on their huge racket. The crowd love it. Inside
there’s camaraderie, outside there’s hostility. Or as Einstürzende Neubauten
sang: ‘Draussen ist feindlich’.
Later, when we’re sitting in Riekert’s
garden in the suburb of Albertville,
I’m eager to hear more. What made Koos so special for him?
The sun goes down. Northcliff’s Aasvoëlkop
slowly turns into a black lump. Riekert opens a beer and lights a joint. “They
expressed something else, something darker. Listening to them was creepy.
Suddenly you felt like the perpetrator.
You were the scary one. You were the mad guy blowing your brains
out. They had that nihilist, paranoid twist. I had never heard it like that
before, in my language. They used Afrikaans as a weapon. They expressed it so
well, the ugliness of those times. It especially appealed to me because I was
wasting two years of my life for a government I didn’t believe in. Fuck that,
fuck everything.”
The next time Riekert saw them, at Wits,
Koos singer Marcel Van Heerden wore a toga. “And he was giving them shit, all
those politically correct pipe smoking fucks,” laughs Riekert. “Oh, how I
enjoyed it. After them no one could take the gig higher.”
To see Koos in a mainly English speaking
institution felt like a victory for Riekert, who was studying language and
comparative literature. “At Wits Afrikaans was like farting. When you spoke it
on campus people looked at you as if you were the fucking devil. How I enjoyed
that. I made a point of speaking loud Afrikaans when I saw a bunch of kugels around. Their idea of an
Afrikaner was that guy with the wig who reads the news [Riaan Kruywagen], or Eugene Terreblanche. It
was nice to crack that stereotype. I had the goth look after a year of growing
my hair.”
The concerts of Koos were an affirmation
of his complex identity as a “different Afrikaner”. Like Bowie sang on Five Years: “You’re not alone!”
Koos, formed in 1986,
were an intensely personal reaction to the chaos to which South Africa
had succumbed. Various States of Emergency, burning townships, political
assassinations, bomb attacks, prisoners who ‘fell’ from the windows or ‘slipped
on a piece of soap’ – it was apartheid at its most paranoiac and gruesome.
At least black activists could vent their
anger by throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at the cops. But young,
progressive Afrikaners were at a loss. Their neighbourhoods and houses weren’t
raided by the police. And unless they were involved in clandestine activities,
the security forces left them alone. It was a painful
paradox. Because of your
skin-colour you were automatically part of a repressive regime - with studies
and a job guaranteed.
Koos were a metaphor for the deep revulsion
for that system.
Remarkable name, Koos.
Tough, mustached Afrikaner okes are called Koos, not a group of arty vagabonds
who make weird political noise. It was during one of the early gigs that the
band received its name. Someone in the audience was loudly looking for his
friend. “Hey Gys, waar es jy? Gyhyyys!” The band members grinned and started calling
out names from the stage. ‘Waar es Willem? Is hy nie daar nie? Waar es Koos?’
The crowd loved it, and joined them: “Koos! Koos!”
Koos, adds singer Van Heerden dryly, also
means piss-pot in Afrikaans.
Koos had the perfect ‘we don’t care attitude’.
Not about their audience, not about musical rules, not about racial laws.
Willy, the drummer, was a Soweto
boy. He loved rock, which made him an outcast in his own community. He fitted
in perfectly with Koos. Koos as a free
state.
Musically the band was way ahead of its
time. Those were the days when heavy metal was regarded as proto-rebel music.
Koos didn’t do screaming guitar solos. In fact, guitarist Neil Goedhals
abhorred solos. Koos attacked the audience with a mix of poetry, theatre and noise.
Undancable rhythms rumbled under industrial soundscapes, accompanied by the
occasional twanging guitar or cheesy organ. Van Heerden
sang, spat, whispered the lyrics. Sometimes
he stuffed his mouth with pebbles to distort his voice.
Theirs was a free interpretation of punk.
Van Heerden compares it to the work of German filmmaker Rainer Fassbinder, who
attempted American style movies, but ended up making films that were deeply
personal and very German. “We operated in a similar way. We felt close to the East European, Dutch and Flemish
cultures. It’s that black and white film sensibility that struck a chord. It’s
all about applying certain codes or methodologies. I had been in Europe once, on a hitchhiking and train ride trip. Neil
had never been there.”
Not only did Koos manage to dodge rock
& roll clichés, the band also stayed clear of fashionable politically
correct dogmas. Not a single party or politician could be trusted. Politics stopped at anarchism, erotica and transgression. Says Van Heerden: “It was also about wanting to tell black people
and in the country that some of us were expressing ourselves against apartheid
as well. We did that from the perspective of the young man who gets into prison
or is forced to kill people.”
1989 could have been the year of the
breakthrough. Usually playing at political or cultural manifestations, Koos for
once took part in a mass event. The Voëlvry-tour was a series of concerts
featuring musicians who had surfaced in the slipstream of punk, the Alternatiewe
Afrikaners. They sang in Afrikaans and played lyrically defiant but musically
conventional rock & roll. They had adopted punky noms de guerre like Bernoldus Niemand, Johannes Kerkorrel and Koos
Kombuis. The Voëlvry-tour was chaotic, reminiscent of early Rolling Stones
concerts. The security forces were out in full force. Tyres
were cut. Musicians got drunk,
stoned and fell in love. The Afrikaner youth went berserk, feeling liberated. “Ons is die mense teen wie julle ouers julle gewaarsku het”, screamed
Kerkorrel in Bethlehem.
Koos quickly jumped the ship, sticking to their
hardcore doctrine of no compromise. Especially Goedhals. “He was too involved in his art work,
and he didn’t want anything to do with that bandwagon thing. He didn’t like the other music”, says Van
Heerden.
As the Alternatiewe Afrikaners released
one album after the other on the independent Shifty label, Koos only managed a
cassette. A black thing in a black box that just said KOOS, wrapped in a brown
paper bag. Conceptual art, a typical Goedhals prank. The Black Tape of Koos
versus The White Album of the Beatles. The brown paper bag symbolised the
forbidden, a sneer at America,
where the hobos have to hide their booze in a brown paper bag because it’s
forbidden to drink in public.
In 1990 Koos disbanded. The Wall had come
down, apartheid was about to implode. There was no more need for a political
noise band. That same year Van Heerden’s best friend Neil Goedhals committed
suicide by jumping off a building in Yeoville.
The following is a excerpt from chapter 2, titled Berlin; Blixa en de
liefde (Berlin; Blixa and love). It originally appeared in the webzine
Sweet.
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BERLIN
I feel slightly tense. Turn my head, to loosen my neck. Five times to the
left, five to the right, as my physiotherapist has taught me. When I hear a
small crack, I wonder if I could sample it and turn it into music.
Twenty minutes to go. At three o’clock I’ll have my interview with Blixa
Bargeld, founder member of Berlin post-punk metalbangers Einstürzende Neubauten,
long time guitarist for Nick Cave, writer, composer, 80s survivor, artist, cook.
Yes, cook too. He once made a television meal, consisting of black pasta with
inky squid-sauce, accompanied by a deep red cabernet.
I stroll along Berlin’s Potsdamer Strasse, looking for #93, where Blixa holds
office. A taxi stops across the road. The door opens. A tall man in a grey suit
steps out, into the fine drizzle. He pays and wipes a lock of hair from his
eyes. He carries his guitar-case like other people would carry a brief-case.
Leaving the greyness of the street behind, he disappears into the building.
I cross the road and look at the dozen or so copper door-plates of #93. One
of them indicates our joint destination: Bargeld Entertainment.
Commisioned Music. Emmerich. Emmerich is Blixa’s real name. Good, I
think, at least he’s on time.
Fifteen minutes later I ring the bell. The door opens. I walk into the
courtyard, reach a flight of stairs, go up. Blixa’s assistant is waiting for me
at the door. She leads me into a dim room with red and black walls. The colours
of anarchism, wine, blood, the universe. The colours of Blixa’s fixations.
There’s a long wooden table, black as well. On it are two glasses of water,
opposite each other, as if for a duel. Three spotlights in a row work like tiny
floodlights. ‘Blixa will be here in a minute’, promises the assistant.
I sit down. The words Blixa and Bargeld tumble in my head. It sounds perfect,
Blixa Bargeld. I repeat it several times. Less proto-punk than Johnny Rotten. A
name you can grow old with. Blixa, I’ve read, comes from a felt pen
brand. Bargeld means cash. But it also refers to Johannes Theodor
Baargeld, a late 19th century German Dadaist. Together with Max Ernst
he established the Cologne chapter of Dada. Being the son of a banker, he used
the pseudonym Baargeld.
Legend has it that it was Iggy Pop who blessed the name Blixa Bargeld. One
day in the late 70s Iggy visited an exhibition in café Anderen Ufer. A
young Berlin artist had displayed a white sheet with sperm. He and Iggy started
talking. Iggy asked the skinny artist for his name. ‘Blixa Bargeld’, he
answered. ‘Oh’, said Iggy, ‘that sounds like washing powder, but it’s a good
name.’ And he wished him all the best.
Thus Christian Emmerich became Blixa Bargeld: a narcistic speedfreak, a bag
of bones with ratty hair. In his black rubber outfits he would frequent
underground discos like Dschungel. Those were the days of Christiane
F., the days when hanging around, being cool, coked up or speeding, brought
you instant fame. Blixa was good at that.
The alter-ego had an artistic reason as well. It gave Christian the
possibility to slide into the persona of a detached observer of the ‘self’, in
whose work there was no place for sentimentality or biographical ebullitions;
Blixa Bargeld as an empty shell.
Blixa enters the room. Under his three-piece suit he’s wearing a black shirt.
He looks reasonably well, no longer that sickly insect of twenty years ago, and
no longer the fat alcoholic who in the mid-90s fell off barstools. Substantial
nose, fish-eyes, sensual mouth with a cruel touch. Although he’s just back from
San Francisco, he looks frighteningly grey.
A bottle of beer in his hand. For his guest there’s water.
He walks towards me, shakes my hand. ‘So what do you want?’ German accent.
Sits down, leans back, feet on the table. Takes a swig from his beer. Impressive
entree.
I take out my list of questions, still tense. Blixa doesn’t suffer fools. He
scoffs at people who don’t know their facts. He also suffers from what Chekhov
called ‘autobiographobia’, the fear to divulge things of the past that would
damage a carefully constructed image. The past is banal.
So when I mention we know so little about the pre-Blixa Bargeld days, when he
was still Christian Emmerich, he yawns. ‘My youth? There’s nothing spectacular
about it. Born in West-Berlin in 1959, grew up in Schöneberg. My father was a
carpenter, my mother a housewife. Dropped out of school. Was at social security
for the unemployed, worked on a graveyard, then in a factory, ended up being a
projectionist at a cinema, then started a band when I still was a projectionist.
Then did several bar jobs and got more famous. Quit my bar job and became a full
time musician.’
That’s it. Twenty-eight seconds. Done youth.
A little more is knows. He developed an interest in rock when he was twelve.
Three years later he played rudimentary bass guitar. He also had an acoustic
guitar, for which he got lessons. When he was eighteen, he owned an electric
guitar. His first vinyl purchase was Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother.
Then, influenced by his class-mate Andrew Chudy (with whom he would subsequently
found Einstürzende Neubauten) he switched to German bands, Krautrock: Can,
Kraftwerk, Neu!.
Blixa places Einstürzende Neubauten firmly in that Krautrock-tradition. ‘We
were one of the first bands to deconstruct rock. In that sense we were
post-modern, or early industrial band or whatever you wanna call it. But we were
one of the last Krautrock bands. Neu! I regard to be one of the greatest bands
ever. I preferred the Düsseldorf, Cologne scene. The only thing liked about
Berlin was Ton Steine Scherben.’
‘Liked’ is a eufemism. Outside Germany, Ton Steine Scherben may mean very
little, but in Berlin the band is of a mythical order. They were the biggest
cult band of the 70s. They invented anarcho-slogan like Keine Macht für
Niemand (no power to nobody) and Macht Kaputt was euch Kaputt macht
(destroy what destroys you) Without the Scherben there would have been no
Neubauten, and without Scherben-singer Rio Reiser there would have been no Blixa
Bargeld. ‘It would probably have never occurred to me to sing in German if it
wasn’t for Rio’, admitted Blixa in Der Spiegel shortly after Reiser’s
death in 1996.
The name Ton Steine Scherben implies ‘making music to throw stones to crack
capitalism’. The band took a defiant political stance, with informal contacts
with terrorist organisations like Rote Armee Faktion (RAF) and
Bewegung 2. Juni.
Those were the early 70s. The days of love & peace had ended. The
revolution of ’68 had failed. The system had fully recovered. Despair led
left-wing radicals onto urban guerrilla. For a teenager there was something
unmistakably romantic and heroic about long hairs who didn’t make peace-signs
but were carrying guns and subsequently crossed the fine line between violent
protest and terrorism – and couldn’t go back.
Says Blixa: ‘At the time RAF was around, there was a concurrent group here in
Berlin, Bewegung 2. Juni, which was always the one we favoured. They were
first nicknamed the Niggerkussbande. Because when they robbed banks they
put a Negerkuss [a dark chocolate cake, literally ‘Negro-kiss’] there and
left. The difference was that Baader and Meinhof come from a generation before,
after-war Germans, still fighting their fathers’ generation. RAF, had to
do with communism, while 2. Juni was anarchist. They were the black part
of the black and red flag.’
In Germany the border between squatters, anarchists, artists and terrorists
was often very blurred. Neubauten-manager Klaus Maeck, for example, distributed
RAF-statements from his shop in Hamburg. How did Blixa feel about the
ultra-lefties? ‘I was too young anyway, but never would’ve joined the RAF
or 2. Juni’, he says. ‘That’s not my cup of tea. I was more
interested in terrorism as a media phenomenon and the cracks in reality that it
created. I was a communist when I was going to school.’
As soon as he left school, Blixa said goodbye to Maoism. Daily life, he
realized, didn’t go hand in hand with endless discussions about class struggle.
‘It’s easy to be in grammar-school and say you’re a communist. After school when
I was unemployed, on social security and without a flat, I got really political,
with the squatter-movement.’
The first political squatting in Berlin took place in 1971, in
Mariannestrasse 13. In the early eighties there were about 300 bastions, often
decorated with pirate flags, loud graffiti and wild slogans. Berlin became
‘squatter capital’ of Europe; the Ton Steine Scherben-hit Macht kaputt was
euch kaputt macht became the battle cry. Einstürzende Neubauten used sounds
of riots on the album Haus der Lüge (1989).
After Berlin became the capital of a re-united Germany in 1990, the squats
were cleared or legalised. But Einstürzende Neubauten survived. They now look a
bit like refurbished squat: not as fierce and threatening as before, but still
standing proud. Bloodied but unbowed. As an alternative rock-band or as a
subversive force?
Blixa thinks for a while, then says that the band has stayed true to its
artistic principles, but hasn’t succeeded in truly undermining the music
industry. ‘From the path from right down anarchism to being subversive we have
not come much closer to the mainstream.’
The romantic notion of a parallel universe in which alternative bands kick
against the pricks, and try to stay completely autonomous, doesn’t excite Blixa.
It’s a world that’s possibly even more short-sighted than the mainstream, like
over-zealous vegans. ‘Independent bands get criticized as soon as they make one
thing different from the previous one. It’s: hey, you’ve weakened down, or
softened, or sold out. Meanwhile the mainstream is still the same shit. And it
will always be shit.’
Shit. The word resounds, hangs in the air like a lead balloon. Is an
advert for a jeans label not shit? That 28 seconds jingle for Jordache which
Neubauten recorded in 1988 and put on the compilation Strategies against
Architecture II – with the subtitle sellout. So ironic.
‘We did that because they paid us’, explains Blixa. ‘For us it wasn’t
peanuts. We were always poor. I didn’t think it was a big thing to do radio
advertising for a jeans company. We didn’t get a lot of flak. The ad is more
popular because we put it on a record. I don’t think anybody noticed it before.’
I tell him about young Berliners I’ve met the last couple of days, who
invariably criticise Blixa and Neubauten. They say the band has sold out. They
find Blixa complacent and note that he seems to be very at ease with the
champagne crowd at art openings. They reproach the band for a lack of
radicalism. Blixa, they sneer, is no longer a rebel but a dandy.
‘That’s always a great thing to say’, retorts Blixa. ‘The people who say
you’re not political enough are the ones who have no problems listening to
Street Fighting Man or White Riot, thinking that is
political. It sounds political, but they are in the same kind of distribution
and pop culture mechanisms as everybody else. Ton Steine Scherben founded their
own record label. That was difficult in 1970. Record labels were in the grip of
major companies. Now that is political to me. It’s not political to just
sing about street fighting and fuck the system.
And Neubauten?
‘If you would look at what Neubauten have done: we are our own record
company. We’ve been fucked by the industry many times. But we’ve tried to do
whatever we could to stay independent. We are independent! We can make
the records the way we want, and when we want them, because we are not signed to
any major label.’
Of course, he agrees, being subversive entails more than keeping control. But
he still finds more integrity with Neubauten than with most other bands. ‘When
Neubauten started, we came out of the squatting movement. The living situation
in Berlin was catastrophic. The squatter-movement was then the biggest political
tremor in Germany. It was a time of demonstrations, of solidarity, of
streetfights, which we all have taken part in. We supported free concerts. But I
don’t like calling the activity of a band playing or supporting
squatter-concerts a very political thing. Our choice of instrumentation was much
more of a political statement. Our denial of working within normal structures or
with normal setups and equipment, was much more political.’
Any momentous incidents? Blixa thinks for a few seconds, then tells an
anecdote about the first time Neubauten played in Eastern Europe. It was in the
city of Pilsen in former Czechoslovakia. ‘There was maximum security, with
police and dogs and everything. It was one German band, then a Czech band, then
a German band, then a Czech band. The audience was throwing stones at the Czech
band, who were kind of like Alphaville in silver costumes. They hated them, all
the East German punks who had made it to Pilsen. They started mayhem. And we
supported the mayhem.
‘We were banned from the backstage area. We were put on stage with our
equipment, surrounded by police. We never played one note. First we were
separated from the stage, then put on a bus, still surrounded by police. I
eventually wrote a message and handed it out of the window to a guy breaking
through the barrier, who ran away with it.’
He gulps down some beer. ‘The next time Neubauten played the Czech Republic,
after the Velvet Revolution, they had a huge press conference and somebody
presented me that note which I had handed out. It said: “They don’t let us play
and throw us out, not because of us but because of you”. They did get it right.
It was not because of what we did, but because what they did.’
Blixa smiles and apologises. Time for the loo.
So far, he has turned out to be a pleasant interlocutor. Not exactly warm or
affectionate, but certainly not haughty or bored. Every now and then he laughs
out loud. I look at my list with questions. We have hardly spoken about Bargeld
the artist. Nor about his influences. And then there’s the Big Subject: Love.
***
From the early days when they were banging away in a basement under a
freeway, to the recent interactive recording with fans, Einstürzende Neubauten
have always tried to be unpredictable and elusive. Even when Depeche Mode had a
huge hit sampling Neubauten-sounds on People are People, the Germans
didn’t blink an eye.
Or did they? Did they never want a hit single?
Blixa returns, fresh bottle of beer in his hand. I ask if I can have some
water. ‘Sure’, he grins. ‘As much as you want.’
Of course Blixa wanted a hit single. Especially when he saw how easily Nick
Cave surfed the charts with Where the Wild Roses Grow, his duet with
Kylie Minogue. A hit opens the doors to a different world: TV pop shows, new
fans, money. The hunger for a hit almost meant the end of the band.
Let’s rewind, to 1996, to the endless recordings of EndeNeu. We find
the band in the Hansa-studios in Berlin. Blixa has locked himself in a room.
He’s struggling with a gigantic writer’s-block. Everything is stuck: him, the
band, the recording. The machine has come to a grinding halt. It’s all
directionless and powerless. They have reached the end, or so it seems.
One morning, after days of isolation, Blixa thinks he has found the key to
break out of the deadlock. He has composed Stella Maris, and will sing
that as a duet with actress Meret Becker. It has a sweet tune. Could be a hit.
Bit like Nick and Kylie.
The other Neubauten, Alex Hacke and R.U.Unruh, are glad that things are
moving again, and duly play their parts. But muscleman Mufti, the main
metal-banger, only comes in late that evening. He listens to the song, mumbles
‘oh well, that turned out to be something’, turns around and leaves. To never
come back.
A few months later he phones and announces his departure from Neubauten. ‘I
never really questioned why’, says Blixa. ‘But I’m sure he wanted to do
something different from what I wanted to do.’
Mufti himself said in an internet interview that he had left the band because
‘he couldn’t bleed for Neubauten anymore’. To him it had become an institution.
Maybe he was right, maybe Einstürzende Neubauten had become formulaic. In the
beginning, gigs were like free-jazz: nothing was planned, there was no
practicing. Blixa: ‘We just went on stage and played .I improvised the lyrics. I
made up my skeleton, phrasing around something and developing it live on stage
in different ways every evening. Some of it made it on a record.’
The second album Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T. (1983) was completely
improvised. Blixa compares it to automatic writing, an almost psychotherapeutic
technique which is related to grubbing in the subconscious. ‘It’s tricky.
Because as everything that has to do with the subconscious, it does not really
want to be there. So you have to try harder and harder. And the harder you try,
the more difficult it gets. There were really bad states during the recording of
O.T., where I thought I had lost my soul, because I was trying so hard
and nothing came out.’
A performance artist can possibly maintain such a technique, but for a
touring rock-band it’s impossible. ‘The repetition is the problem’, says Blixa.
‘The pure excitement of going on stage once in a lifetime and playing to an
audience would have been enough for me. But going on tour and doing it on a
nightly basis really makes it harder. Most people then start taking whatever
loosens the tongue, whatever makes the words fall out of their subconsciousness.
That’s what I did too. It worked for a while. But the subconscious is not
stupid, it makes it even more difficult. Then I started writing things down.’
Eventually this method resulted in proper songs. Improvisation disappeared to
the background.
Since the departure of Mufti, it’s Blixa and only Blixa who’s the centre of
attention. In the 80s he was the emaciated punk with spiky hair and leather
pants. Now he’s an ageing gentleman in a suit, with hair that seems glued to his
face. He’s pathetic, theatrical, with more than a whiff of Marlene Dietrich. The
German journalist Karin Aderhold put him firmly in the German tradition of
‘Weltschmerz and the desire for a devouring, romantic love, which is
pure, noble and innocent’.
When I read him that quote, Blixa listens impassively. ‘Which is Novalis.
Die blaue Blume, which is basically a minor work by him. Other things he
has written are much more interesting. But yes, that tradition as well. Also
German Krautrock and electronica. And in a larger bowl it would be Dada and the
Surrealists. Larger it would go back to the German romantics. And if you would
go even larger, I’m sure you would find more subversive activities that go back
to the antique times.’
OK, let’s forget about Achilles and Prometheus, and jump to the
Situationists. That radical, international group of drinkers and thinkers, led
by the Frenchman Guy Debord, who were partly responsible for the ’68 Paris
Revolution. Blixa shakes his head. Has only recently discovered them. ‘I didn’t
know anything about them, although I had heard of Guy Debord. Actually I used
the same sentence as Debord: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
[from Salamandrina]. He made a film with that title. I wasn’t
aware of that.’
I push on. I suggest that the Situationists looked for ways to beat the
‘Society of the Spectacle’, so as to avoid the colonisation of the mind.
Drunkenness and love were two escape routes. The Situationists felt affinity
with the French writer/poet Aragon who saw love as the key to making humans
irrational and lawless. ‘In love… in love there resides an outlaw principle, an
irrepressible sense of delinquency, contempt for prohibitions and a taste for
havoc’, he wrote in Paris Peasant.
I mention that love has played an increasing role in Blixa’s lyrics. I add
that the first verse of Dingsaller from Silence is Sexy (2000) is
pure Situationism. It puts love above the law. ‘Über die Liebenden gibt es
kein Gesetz/ Unter den Liebenden zählt die Regel nicht/ Wegen die Liebenden gibt
es Möglichkeit/ Und ohne die Liebenden lohnt die Suche nicht’.
Blixa looks at me, mockingly. Love more powerful than the law? ‘Yeah, well’
he says. ‘That sounds like New Testament to me. But sure, I haven’t met anyone
who doesn’t give this the highest priority. I’m sure there are people around,
but I don’t necessarily want to be their acquaintance.’
Love, it turns out, is a tricky subject. Blixa does agree that ‘nothing is
worth anything without love’, but denies that the yearning of the heart is
playing a more prominent role in his lyrics. ‘No, absolutely not. It took me,
with my punk attitude, quite a while to mention it, to hit the word on its head,
that word, the famous four letter word. But it has been in there all the time.
Sehnsucht is on the first record. And Schwarz is probably the
first love song we’ve written. Oh no, on the first double single there’s already
two love songs. Aufrecht gehen is one of them. So it has been there all
the time.’
He also denies that the more explicit pointers to love in his later work stem
from a gentleness and melancholia that comes with the years. He stresses it all
boils down to composition. ‘Around the time of Tabula Rasa (1993), the
music we released became more and more song structured. Before, they were
pieces - in the best experimental and Deutschrock tradition. It is
imminent in song structure to follow one or the other thread, a communication
that is possible within that structure. One of the most adorable and achievable
is the love song. It’s not the theme of a song, but the form. The song that is
creating a communicable universe from A to B, for two persons living within the
song. Again: that is form, not content. So the invention for us of song
structures created more love songs. It’s the ultimate of what you can achieve as
intimacy within a song.’
I push on. Isn’t love the ultimate possibility of subversion and autonomy in
a world where autonomy becomes more and more elusive?
Interesting idea, smiles Blixa, but it’s not at all like that.
‘Keine Schönheit ohne Gefahr is considered to be one of our love
songs as well, because it’s the first one where the word Liebe is sung
with all might. It was based on Alex [Hacke] playing two guitar feedbacks. It
was anything but beautiful during all the rehearsal times.’
I frown. Maybe a straightforward question will do the job. How does he see
love?
Blixa: ‘It doesn’t last...’
He empties his bottle of beer and belches.
Booze and love. For the interviewer still only water though. And I’m dying
for some alcohol. That moment is near, because Blixa is getting restless. He has
to cook for some friends tonight. One more question.
I read to him: ‘You said in 1982 that one day you would like to know the
benefits of your endeavours.’
He gets up, walks around the table, picks up my sheet and reads.
‘Endeavours? What’s that?’ Actually, he prefers the next sentence on the
page, which says: ‘Writer Maggie Estep compared attending a Neubauten show with
a dangerous love affair.’
He grins. ‘Which is exactly what I had with her after the interview.’
Yeah, that was pretty obvious, I reply.
Blixa, still grinning. ‘You could read that between the lines of the article,
yes.’
But that wasn’t the question. The question was about the benefits of
all those endeavours, two decades on.
‘Well,’ says Blixa, sitting down again, ‘I wouldn’t know what I’d have done
if I had not done this, so it’s better I’ve done this.’
Then he remembers something. ‘There’s a fairytale of Grimm called the
Bremer Stadtmusikanten. There’s this old donkey who’s to be put to
sausage. But he has a premonition and runs away. He goes down the road and next
he comes across this dog who is not really fit anymore. Then comes a cat… I
don’t know, there’s five of them. I think there’s a goat in between. They become
an orchestra and they all stand together and say: “Etwas besseres als der Tod
können wir allemal finden”.’
Something better than death, we can always find.