3. Neu! – Neu!
As a drummer, Klaus Dinger was important to me: [he taught me] how to make one riff last a lifetime! It’s a great riff though, don’t get me wrong. Neu! was absolutely brilliant; it’s another record where the first time you buy it and put it on, you think ‘I’ve never heard anything like this before’. I was into Krautrock and that’s why I bought it – I bought anything that came out of Germany – but Neu! were just completely out there. I had no idea who was in the band, there was just a big ‘Neu!’ image on the front… it was striking, kind of punk.
The way that they used cut up music, and bits of ambient sound… as soon as I heard it, I thought ‘If I ever start a band, I’d like them to sound a bit like this – as adventurous as this’. A lot of Krautrock was trying to plough its own furrow, but there were other bits that were trying to Germanize Western things. And the odd thing about it is, I never knew that Michael Rother lived in Wilmslow for a time – which is just around the corner from me – in the 70’s. I was watching a Krautrock documentary and he was saying: “I’ve always been surrounded by flowing water, there’s always been a river – the Rhine, the Elbe, the Bollin.” And I said: “Hang on, did he just say the Bollin!? That’s just down the road!”
