The tricky term ‘Krautrock’ was first used by the British music press in the early 1970s to describe the drones and industrial kling-klang of difficult German bands such as Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh, Faust and Can. A British fear and loathing of Germany and the Germans informed numerous New Musical Express Krautrock articles. (‘Kraftwerk: the Final Solution to the Music Problem’, or ‘Can: They Have Ways of Making You Listen’.) The term was made semi-respectable by Julian Cope, the erudite jester of English pop, in his ironically entitled book Krautrocksampler (1995), which commended the strange new music that rose from the moral and material ruins of post-Hitlerite Germany.
It is hard now to imagine how startlingly new Can must have sounded. David Niven, the matiné idol, was reportedly baffled by the ear-frazzling beeps and reverb emanating from Can at a Munich nightclub in 1970. ‘It was great,’ Niven commented afterwards, ‘but I didn’t know it was music.’ (Niven must have gone to the gig by mistake.)
From the start, Can eschewed not only the pseudo-hippie kitsch of Genesis but also the mellow denim heaven of Linda Rondstadt and the Eagles. Their abidingly great 1972 album Ege Bamyasi showed an Andy Warhol-like image of tinned Turkish food on the cover, and was very far removed from the tepid, well-mannered noodlings of Yes and Pink Floyd. Can’s signature hypnotic threnodies and percussive dancefloor grooves owed something to the American minimalists Steve Reich and Terry Riley, as well as to the atonal asperities of Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1976, bizarrely, Can appeared on Top of the Pops in a bill alongside Cliff Richard. ‘I wonder if Can will get into the top tin?’, chirruped the presenter Noel Edmonds. (They did not.)
Formed in Cologne in 1968, Can remain hugely influential.
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