3. CanDelay 1968
This was dismissed as their first album [by numerous record companies, who rejected it], which is astonishing in itself. It feels like the most rock & roll of all of their output. When I was younger, as much as I loved Kraftwerk – and I really loved Kraftwerk, I felt they were pretty much perfect in every way – Can seemed needlessly progressive in a strange way and I didn’t get it. I think possibly that was down to the limited bits of their music that I’d heard at that time. I’m now slightly bewildered by the fact that I didn’t like them, or professed to not really like them in a kind of ‘not knowing anything about them’ way. I used to say that it felt like they were anchored. They were anchored by drums in a way but I liked music that seemed to take off. And obviously that was so far from the point, it was so far wide of reality. So when I finally found the records that I loved in their catalogue, I was knocked out by how naive that was.
But sometimes you need to find a different way in, when it comes to discovering music. If you listen to Peter Brötzmann out of nothing, it’s kind of hard to know where it is and what kind of music it is, but if you hear it via the MC5, Sun Ra, The Stooges, etcetera, you get a sense of the lineage and then it starts to make sense. It was the same with Can. This album is one that I can just play constantly. It’s one of those records where you know it so well that you know exactly what’s coming next. You almost know how long the gap is in between the tracks. The kind of record that feels like they’ve become part of the household.
