8. ClusterII
I met Cluster in 1971 when I was playing with Kraftwerk. There was this one amazing concert we did together in Hamburg where we were the main act and they were support. We were very democratic and asked them who they wanted to start. They decided ‘you start’, they wanted to take it easy! That was a big mistake, they were lucky people didn’t start beating them! Klaus Dinger, Florian Schneider and I, we wrecked the place. We played this very strong music, and then when we said ‘It’s time for the next band’, people didn’t want us to stop! They started stomping, it was a very steep venue and people came rushing to the stage and started disconnecting the speakers, it was frightening!
A year later when Neu! was invited to do a tour of the UK a guy from United Artists came over to Dusseldorf where we played and offered to do a tour. Klaus Dinger and I didn’t know any musicians that could play the stuff we wanted, and his is where Cluster II comes in, that track ‘Im Süden’ has that guitar melody, it’s only four notes, they keep on repeating, open strings played by Roedelius. There’s a lot of electronic sound going on but this guitar just keeps on repeating these four notes and they made perfect sense to me. It was a bit like the meeting with Ralf Hutter. I was sure that those musicians could work for Neu! and what I wanted to put on stage. That’s why Cluster II is on this list. I called them and took my guitar and jammed with Roedelius and that was the beginning of Harmonia. I fell in love with what we did and left Neu! behind in 1973.
