Stuart Braithwaite (Mogwai) and Christoph Dallach Talk Can, Faust, and Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock

Stuart Braithwaite is the singer and guitarist of the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai; Christoph Dallach is the author of the new book, Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock. To celebrate its release this week, the two got on a Zoom call to chat about how Dallach assembled the oral history.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Stuart Braithwaite: So, I’ve had a look at the book. I’ve not read the whole thing, but what I’ve read so far, I really, really love. 

Christoph Dallach: Thank you.

Stuart: I came in to krautrock a bit like you, just from hearing little bits. And when I first heard a lot of these bands, it was hard to get the records. 

Christoph: I know that. [Laughs.]

Stuart: It almost felt like a secret society. But a very good friend of mine who used to be my neighbor was a krautrock fan from the ‘70s and had — you know the book The Crack in the Cosmic Egg [by Steven and Alan Freeman]?

Christoph: Yes, of course.

Stuart: He had every record from that book. Some of them cost a lot of money, and it actually seemed to be that the more money they cost, the worse the record was.

Christoph: [Laughs.] I’m completely with you.

Stuart: But it was really illuminating. What I love about krautrock — and I guess this applies to a lot of genres, because genres by their very nature are ridiculous — I love in your intro when everyone was saying what a stupid name [krautrock] is, or an offensive name or a funny name, but the one guy from the record shop was like, “Oh, we love this name because we can just put all the records together in the shop.” 

Christoph: He was the manager from Rough Trade, yes. I see his point!

Stuart: Yeah. They’re good for helping to organize records and record shops. But I mean, some of these bands could not be more different. Some of them are traditional bands and some of them are the most futuristic, weird bands ever. But even though I don’t think that a lot of the music is tied together, what I do think ties them together is a mission to create something new, which was probably really important in German society at the time.

Christoph: Yes, exactly. That is my point too, because yeah, a band like Tangerine Dream could not more be different from a band like Can or Amon Düül II. But what they all have in common is an idea, and exactly as you point out, it’s the idea to create something new. After this problematic history, and having family members and neighbors and so on with dark stories in their past and growing up in a destroyed country… What I learned from the book is how many Nazis were still around in the ‘50s and ‘60s. “Entnazifizierung” [Denazification], they called it in Germany, didn’t work out at all. So they had Nazi teachers, they had Nazi policemen, and so on. What they created then was the idea to start something new, something that was their own. That’s the reason why they said, “We don’t want to sound like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles or the blues.” Not because they said it’s bad; they just said, “It’s not ours.” And this is a highly complicated thing, to create something new, but most of them, I think, created something new. This is why a band like the Scorpions — with all respect, it’s not my sound. They don’t sound unique. A band like Faust, they sound unique. A band like Can, they sound unique. Popol Vuh, Cluster, Neu! — they all sound unique. And Kraftwerk, of course.

Stuart: Yeah. I really love that and I really value that. I think there’s a certain irony that these [krautrock] bands now, for many generations, are like the Rolling Stones or the Beatles, because they were so foundational. I mean, you hear bands all the time that sound like Neu!. My own band, we try and sound like Neu! sometimes. [Laughs.] I’m not embarrassed about it, because that music was wonderful and the simplicity and the emotion of the music is so great. Another thing I love about your book — and actually, I think it’s one of my favorite styles for music books — is that it comes from the directly from the voices of the people. You obviously did tons of interviews. Is everything in the book from an interview that you did, or did you have to go back further for some people that are no longer around?

Christoph: I conducted them all. For example, Irmin Schmidt from Can invited me to his place in France, where he’s lived since the ‘70s, and we spent four days there just talking. So you get a lot of material. But that’s also the reason that some important people are not in the book, because they were not around anymore. Michael Karoli was dead. Edgar Froese was dead. I didn’t want to use old interviews, so it’s only my interviews. And an important point, too — I gave them all their quotes. So, some beautiful quotes didn’t make it to the book because they said, “Oh, no, we don’t want this to be in.” [Laughs.] But what you read in this book, they all had a look and they all said, “Yeah, that’s OK the way it is.”

Stuart: I love the humor. I also know some of these people too, and they’re very, very funny. There’s a weird falsehood that German people are not funny. Some of the funniest people I’ve ever met are Germans. I think German people are hilarious, and I love the fact that the humor comes across in the interviews, because I think that inherently being in a rock & roll band is a very silly thing to do. [Laughs.]

Christoph: [Laughs.] A beautiful thing, too!

Stuart: Oh yeah, yeah, monumentally important, but also ridiculous. So, yeah, I love the humor. Who do you think was the funniest musician that you spoke to in the process of writing the book?

Christoph: I think the story of Faust is so amazing. They have various opinions on most things, so they don’t talk to each other anymore that much. But they’re one of the few bands who just just greenlighted everything. The whole Faust story, they didn’t change a thing. They don’t talk to each other that much, but to me, they all talked. And what I love about it, it’s a contradiction — they have completely different views on some things. No one is lying, but they just remember it differently. And it’s a bit sad — there was a German journalist, Uwe Nettelbeck, famous in the ‘60s and ‘70s, who, if you will, created Faust and sold them first to Polydor as the new Beatles. And after Polydor realized they had been tricked, he sold them again to Richard Branson and Virgin. It doesn’t get better. And the shows they did with cement mixers and drill machines and stuff — really, it’s an amazing story. And every one in Faust are beautiful, friendly people. They come across as complete weird madmen, but they are such nice people. The Faust chapter was a lot of joy to create.

Stuart: That’s great. I’ve met some of those people and they’re wonderful. The stories of the bands — I mean, I think back to the very early incarnation of Kraftwerk with Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother and just this kind of weird psychedelic rock music. Then obviously Kraftwerk went on to kind of invent electronic music. There’s so much happening at once. It’s such a melting pot. And some of these bands didn’t know each other, I’m guessing, too. So there’s this amazing world of invention that’s not all connected. It’s not all happening in one city. I mean, Germany’s a really big country, so they’re very far away from each other.

Christoph: Yeah, it’s often a misconception from afar that there was a scene. There was never a scene. Everybody worked on their own. And Kraftwerk especially worked on their own. They were very different from all the others. [Florian] Schneider and [Ralf] Hütter came from very wealthy families, so they could buy whatever they wanted. That’s why they had this very expensive electronic stuff from the early days on. But I don’t want to sound disrespectful — they created something unique very [quickly], and the first two Kraftwerk records are still interesting. And it’s interesting that Hütter and Schneider decided not to rerelease the first three records ever again. Somehow, they must be unhappy. It’s the only reason I can see with, Kraftwerk and [Kraftwerk] 2, and then Ralf und Florian — which, in my opinion, is the first real Kraftwerk album, with no jazz rock in it anymore but the whole formula where style was important and every record cover and every detail was important. It’s really revolutionary.

Stuart: Yeah, it’s funny, I own those records, but I’m not sure if they’re official records. They may be bootlegs that I’ve got. But the music is superb. I mean, maybe they just saw themselves as the computer band and they didn’t want people to know they used to be a flute band.

Christoph: [Laughs.] They didn’t want to be reminded of the flute.

Stuart: But I agree with you, I think those records are really wonderful and interesting and important. I suppose that’s one of the things about Kraftwerk — they really want to curate everything they’ve done. I mean, they don’t even really make records anymore. They just kind of exist as this robotic live enterprise.

Christoph: They were really successful when I was growing up. And to be honest, I wasn’t too keen on German music when I was a teenager, but Kraftwerk — I will always love electronic music, but it’s so normal to listen to Kraftwerk like I listen to Cabaret Voltaire. I never thought of them as German, as bizarre as this might sound. I saw them live very early on in my life, in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, and they were just a great band. You didn’t think of them as, Oh, Germans. They were really cool. I can fully understand that Ralf Hütter hates the term krautrock. When I asked for an interview for this book, he politely said, “No, we don’t belong to that scene.” And somehow he is right, and somehow he’s wrong. Because, yeah, they aren’t from the same scene and they were not connected, but it was, again, this feeling of starting something new. Like in 1968, historically when students started to create a new Germany, politics were very important, and all these bands come from this era where they wanted to create a new society [with] new rules, and get rid of the old Germany. If you will, the modern Germany started in ‘68. Before that, it was still [postwar] Germany with a lot of not so nice effects on young people growing up there. Talking to all the musicians in the book, I’m so happy that I didn’t have to grow up in the ‘50s or ‘60s. It must have been horrible to be in Germany.

Stuart: It sounded like a really, really awful time. I found that really interesting, because I’ve read a lot about krautrock, and you went right to the start and talked to them about their childhoods, which I think is so important and explains so much. Like you said, the fact that there was still people who were essentially Nazis in all parts of society — I found that really, really interesting. And I guess like all other parts of the West as well, the late ‘60s was such a revolutionary time and music was so important. But they were almost not only rebelling against society, but also rebelling against other rebellious music. It was almost like just saying “no” to everything, but coming up with something brand new. What was the the biggest surprise you found while talking to all these musicians about the book?

Christoph: The biggest surprise — I have to repeat here myself — was that I didn’t realize that Entnazifizierung didn’t work at all. It was scary listening to the stories. That’s why I give them a lot of space in my book, because I think it’s important to know where music comes from. It doesn’t come from out of nowhere. People have a history, and out of this history, they create something. So that was, for me, the most surprising thing, how tough it was to walk through Hamburg, Munich, or Berlin with long hair in the ‘60s where people said, “Oh, yeah, they forgot you in the concentration camp, haha.” Stuff like that. How horrible. And how tough they were — like Irmin Schmidt from Can was the one at his schools who checked every teacher — what did they do in the army? And what I found really touching was that some of these teachers, he really liked. But when he found out that they had some important role in the Army, he made it public and got into a lot of trouble. He had to leave schools. 

This idea of “no compromise” — that’s the whole sound of Can. Can didn’t compromise at all. So that’s where you get from politics to the private stuff to the art. And talking about private stuff, I found it really touching when Irmin told me about the big fights with his father, where he said, “What did you do in the Third Reich? And why didn’t you get up? Why did you accept it?” He said it was tough for him to fight with his father so much, and at one point they just stopped talking, because he didn’t want to fight anymore. This whole thing of having no compromise at all, that’s the sound of Can.

Stuart: A hundred percent. I feel that any music is a combination of a few things: It’s a combination of the influences of the person making it and the person themselves. I got that from those stories, that these people were deeply anti-authority. And for very good reason. That gave them the freedom to just do whatever they wanted. I can’t think of any other collection of musicians or lumping together of bands that maybe didn’t even know each other, but [krautrock included] so many revolutionary bands, that did things that no one had done. And some stuff that people have still never done — Popol Vuh still sounds like the future, you know?

Christoph: Yes. 

Stuart: It’s absolutely incredible. And I wonder — because like we said at the start of the conversation, when I first heard about this music, it was very difficult to possess it. This was in a pre-streaming or YouTube age where you can hear anything that’s ever been made. You could only hear something [if it] was played on the radio, or you had a copy of it yourself, which must seem like talking about the dinosaurs to teenagers. But how do these musicians feel about how their music is valued now? Because they must be pleasantly surprised.

Christoph: They are pleasantly surprised. And of course, they see that they’re now discovered by a young audience. Renate Knaup from Amon Düül II says how happy she is when she gets mail from young people, young women, from all over the world. She’s a very special character. She is one of the few female persons in my book and she was in a very male band like Amon Düül II. She had to fight very hard. It was the south of Germany, which was ultra-conservative. And on the other hand, most of the others from Amon Düül II came from wealthy families; she didn’t, so she had to work all the time. She made clear how tough it was for her for some time. And it’s so great that now she gets the recognition she really deserves.

On the other hand, Hildegard Schmidt, Irmin’s wife, was one of the first managers in Germany of a rock band. She said, “I had to invent this job.” She managed Can from the beginning, and she was tough. She made clear that Tago Mago would be a double album. And for a woman with a huge record company back then, this must have been very tough, when she said, “No, the music is great. We need to have a double album.” She went through the concert halls and checked all around if the sound is good, and when she was not happy, she went to the mixer and said, “That’s not good. Try again.” She is a great woman, and I’m surprised that she didn’t do more interviews. She’s very interesting and has an impressive career for herself.

Stuart: That’s amazing. That’s so good to hear. I mean, Can as well — there have been books written about Can, but they have one of the most varied discographies. The eras are so different and I’m always so inspired by them. We met Jaki [Liebezeit] a few years ago. He was a really, really good guy. I mean, obviously one of the greatest musicians of all time, but really good to talk to. What always amazes me about him was even though he’s one of the most on-the-beat drummers, he was a jazz drummer before he joined the rock band, which is incredible.

Christoph: He had a very dry sense of humor. But when he told me how there was a point when he was in free jazz, and he said, “Nothing in free jazz is free.” Because he remembered that he wanted to change some of the rules in free jazz, and they said, “No, you can’t do it.” And he said, “What’s free about a music where you can’t do what you want to do?” I think it was a beautiful coincidence when Irmin wrote to all the members in Can — he wrote to Jaki and to Holger [Czukay] and said, “Let’s start a band,” in ‘68. And Holger had Michael Karoli, who was his pupil in school. Holger was a teacher back then. It was so great that the timing was so perfect. Can are still, to me, a completely unique band. They just sound so modern. Through working on this book, I would say I rediscovered Can and had another Can phase, if you will. What an amazing band. You can’t compare them to anyone.

But to go back to your question — Hildegard had this beautiful story where she said she knows that sometimes when they produce a clip for Gucci or Chanel, and they need a song, they normally get Serge Gainsbourg or the Rolling Stones, some cool track. But a lot of times, she heard stories that while producing [the commercials], the directors have Can on in the background. But when they have to decide what they use in the actual clip, they always get Can out and [replace them with] the Rolling Stones. I think she was a bit disappointed that the big decision makers always think of Can as too weird still. 

Stuart: I mean, I remember hearing a Can track in a movie — was it The Bling Ring? I remember, because I’m not used to hearing them in that context, it just stood out so much. You can hear it straight away. They’re like the Velvet Underground or Joy Division, where you can hear it and in one second know what band it is. And in the mainstream, they’re still a relatively obscure band. I’m surprised they’re not used more, because they’re unique and incredible.

Christoph: It’s funny, though: I think Can are in the process of being reevaluated. I think they should be on the same level as Kraftwerk, and I’m pretty sure one day it will happen. I know there were sampled by Kanye West. Jaki found this hilariously funny, because he said the rule with Can was everything they do, every band member gets the same share of whatever comes out. And the track that Kanye West sampled, he didn’t even play on it. He found it so super funny that he got the biggest check in a long time for a track where he wasn’t involved at all. He was such a funny and great guy, Jaki.

Stuart: Yeah, I only met him a couple of times, but I really enjoyed his company. 

Christoph: Yeah. But going back again to your question, I think a lot of these bands are happy about the internet and getting in touch with a new audience. There’s this great artist called Suzanne Doucet from [the band] Zweistein — which is a really obscure record. If you get the original album, it’s like, €500, maybe a thousand. And nobody ever knew [about Zweistein], because she was singing schlager in Germany, and she just did the [band] for fun. It was always a big mystery — there’s only one album, and here were blog posts like, “Who are Zweistein?” And some people found out, and then she got in touch and talked to them. When I talked to her, it was so great because she enjoyed it so much. She’s in touch with a new young generation of admirers. And she made a big career being some kind of ambient queen in the US — she’s lived in the US for a long time and does Brian Eno-like ambient music for meditation and stuff. But not too many people who like her stuff know about her krautrock past. She’s a great example of finding finally, after decades of being super obscure, an audience and getting some respect and attention. The internet changed a lot here. These, for some time, very obscure musicians now can face their audience. If you read in my book about bands like Zweistein, you can Google it, and two clicks away, you can listen to it.

(Photo Credit: left, Elisabeth Elektra; right, Stefanie Dallach)