1. La DüsseldorfLa Düsseldorf
I first heard of La Düsseldorf when I heard ‘Silver Cloud’, which is about the poppiest thing that Klaus Dinger [La Düsseldorf founding member and Neu! drummer] ever did, on John Peel. And I used to have my little cassette machine poised with a blank cassette in it ready. I still have got that somewhere, that cassette with ‘Silver Cloud’ minus the first 20 seconds which I missed before I realised that I should have been recording it. Basically when Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother went their separate ways after Neu! Dinger kind of sounded like himself really, and Michael Rother went on with the album Flammende Herzen to become the Mike Oldfield of Germany for a short amount of time. It was a massive album and very nice to listen to nonetheless, considering it’s got guitars all over it – and I’m not a guitar fan. The guitar in itself is not a vile and loathsome instrument; it’s just the way people play it that I have a problem with. So the La Düsseldorf album is really an extension of my love of Neu! and Neu! are essentially the tangential twins of Kraftwerk, and probably if you look at the music of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Neu! are the other side of the Kraftwerkian influence. Kraftwerk distilled themselves into this cubist minimal electro sound and Neu! were the noisy, emotional, human element. It wasn’t always beautiful or contained or direct but sometimes just hugely powerful.
