Michael Rother – Flammende Herzen

I love Michael Rother. All these things that I find by chance I sometimes think that weird little goblins leave out for me to find. And they have been doing this since I was 11. I would find these things at random. It’s like this Léo Ferré album that I really love; I think I came to it because of the sleeve and then I found out later that he was this really cool anarchist who knew Jean Genet. I just consume a lot of music.

Obviously, I got into Neu! and then through Neu! I checked out Michael’s solo albums. I was living in Berlin until recently and I had this vision of [ex-P.I.L. guitarist] Keith Levene who I’ve got playing on my new album and Michael Rother doing Duelling Banjos against each other like a dream team! I was really, really, really trying to get hold of Rother [for The Politics Of Envy] but he had reformed Neu! with Steve Shelley on drums so he didn’t make it on this one. But I love Michael Rother. Daniel Miller and me just used to talk about this album all the time. We were meant to be having meetings about deals but we’d sit around talking about this album and La Düsseldorf. This one particular album I just love and I found it in a junk shop in this weird little market town in Dorset. There were about four albums and there was this brilliant Michael Rother album.

For the first Pop Group album we were talking about working with Conny Plank and for me, Conny is the German equivalent of Adrian Sherwood. [But] I got near to some people… like the guys from Cluster. It’s quite interesting travelling around and just hanging around with Kenneth Anger in Portugal; you think these are people that are quite far away and distant and exotic and then you realise that they’re the same as the rest of us. And I’m sure Michael would be up for something; you’ve just got to approach people, you know? And then you hear that people haven’t worked for ages because other people think they’re so famous that they’re unapproachable and so nobody’s asking them!