NEU! Did the odd couple of German rock drive each other wahnsinnig? No question. Did they also invent music that new generations still strive to emulate? Stimmt!

IT’S A WARM JULY MORNING IN 2022 AND Michael Rother is at home in Lower Saxony talking about the forthcoming box set that celebrates 50 years of the band he formed with Dinger following their departure from Kraftwerk in July 1971.

The collection, which brings together Neu!’s frst three studio albums (plus, for the CD box, the fascinating experimental misfre of Neu! ’86) also includes a new tribute album of Neu! songs reworked by The National, Mogwai, Idles, Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor and Stephen Morris of New Order. It’s this tribute album that perhaps best attests to the lasting infuence of Neu!’s revolutionary sound – from the driving, to-the-horizon trance of 1972’s Hallogallo to the screaming spiritual ur-punk of 1975’s Hero, all underpinned by Dinger’s radically simple Apache beat, the rhythm that came to be known as ‘motorik’. Yet as Rother tells it, the story of that sound is as much one of chance and serendipity as invention and intention.

“When we went into Star Studio in Hamburg with Conny Plank to record that frst Neu! album we were still looking for the right sound,” says Rother. “Everything was like a première.”

Konrad ‘Conny’ Plank, a former jazz musician turned sound engineer, was at the heart of the new sound coming out of Germany, one with few debts to blues-based US and UK rock. Already known for his work with the early Kraftwerk and Cluster, he was more than a producer: a co-conspirator with the ability to hear potential and opportunity in disparate, protean elements.

“When we recorded Hallogallo,” says Rother, “there was this fuzzy idea of creating a strong machine pulse and then giving that pulse meaning with my guitar, but Hallogallo only came together at the mixing desk. Watching Conny memorising all these elements which were scattered on tape, mixing by hand, was unbelievable. It was like watching a great cook turning simple ingredients into this prize-winning dish.”

As well as establishing himself as the third member of the group, Plank shared the fnancial risk of the frst Neu! album, and, perhaps most importantly, acted as mediator as it became obvious Dinger and Rother were not an emotionally compatible duo.

“Before Kraftwerk and Neu!, Klaus was known to everyone in Düsseldorf as a hard, strange rock musician,” explains Neu! collaborator Eberhard Kranemann. “He’d played in two hard electric rock bands, The No and The Smash, whereas Michael had only played in a very normal rock band in the English style, Spirits Of Sound. Klaus embraced the anti-artist ideas of [German Fluxus artist and provocateur] Joseph Beuys to turn everything upside down. I don’t think this was Michael’s idea.”

Speaking to MOJO’s John Mulvey in 2000, Dinger described the working relationship between himself and Rother as “blind understanding [that emerged] sort of automatically”. Rother agrees but qualifes that “Klaus was not always in control of his desires. It made him do great things but also stupid crazy, nasty things. He went to the extreme because he thought he would reach some higher power of understanding. He wished to liberate himself from thinking.”

One area in which the duo initially disagreed was in the naming of the band. Immersed in the world of Düsseldorf advertising agencies, and then living with the photographer Peter Lindbergh, Dinger decided to name the group after what he told journalist Biba Kopf was “the strongest word in advertising… I don’t know why nobody else did that before”. “Back then I thought calling ourselves Neu! was just a bit too cool,” says Rother. “Klaus said, ‘We have to have a symbol that hits the people when the record is in the window.’ I remember going into town when it came out and seeing all the record stores with our new album in the window. And of course, Klaus was right. I tip my hat to him.”

Sounds from the metronomic underground: (clockwise from above) The Smash, 1969, with

Dinger (second right); Kraftwerk in 1971 (from left) Rother, Florian Schneider, Dinger; Rother onstage with Spirits Of Sound, 1968; Rother playing live with Kraftwerk, 1971; Dinger on-stage with Kraftwerk, 1971; Neu!, 1972; producer Conny Plank, Star Studio, Hamburg, “like a great cook turning simple ingredients into this prize-winning dish.”

THE FIRST NEU! ALBUM WAS A COMMERCIAL SUCCESS, selling around 30,000 copies in Germany in its frst year. A series of live gigs, however, were less successful. After playing with tapes proved an audience turn-off, the duo recruited Kranemann from Düsseldorf avant-gardists Pissoff.

“It was not possible for Klaus and Michael to play live because everything in the studio had been 50 per cent Conny Plank,” Kranemann explains. “First I played electric bass, electric cello and Hawaiian guitar and then we added Uli Trepte of Guru Guru on bass. Michael played perfect, exact, hard rhythm guitar and I played the solos on Hawaiian guitar very free and loud! Noise, noise, noise. We played six or seven live concerts in 1972 in Hamburg, University Of Münster, Düsseldorf… this wonderful experimental music.”

“People in the front row were standing there with open mouths, and then I looked at Klaus and I see blood squirting all over the stage.” Michael Rother

Unfortunately, Kranemann’s ideas of wonderful music did not correspond with those of Michael Rother.

“Eberhard was more interested in deconstructing Neu!,” laughs Rother. “That was his personality, going ‘MRRRARRGGHHGH!’ but we didn’t know any other musicians. Maybe we should have asked Ralf and Florian. That would have been marvellous.”

“Many years later,” continues Kranemann, “I realised Klaus put me in Neu! because he wanted to have a friend to use against Michael because he knew Michael wanted to make perfect clean music. I wanted to make crash-hard-noise anti-music. Years later I realised he was setting me against Michael. That was not good. It was silly and crazy. It was shit.”

With live performance ruled out, in the summer of 1972 the trio of Rother, Dinger and Plank decided to record a 7-inch single in Giorgio Moroder’s new 16-track Musicland complex, located in the basement of the Arabella Bogenhausen Hotel in Munich.

“That wasn’t very heartwarming,” says Rother. “You went down two stories underneath the earth along this endless corridor, with supply pipes overhead, no daylight. Also, Klaus was taking LSD regularly by then. His singing on Super is exciting and unusual and extrovert and he is playing the drums like his life depended on it, but there was no oxygen down there so after a minute Klaus just collapsed on the drum kit. Conny had to splice two performances together. The combination of his approach and my approach worked well in the studio but as soon as we closed the studio door we went separate ways. My girlfriend hated him because he was so very loud and demanding in a nasty way. Sorry, Klaus.”

The Metronome label released Super as a single to little fanfare. It most likely would have been forgotten, if not for its pivotal role in the recording of Neu! 2 in early 1973.

“We went into Windrose-Dumont-Time Studios in Hamburg,” says Rother. “This was a 16-track studio so the temptation was to add more colours, more layers. Five guitars, three pianos, backwards, forwards. What we didn’t take into account was that it takes twice as long to record 16 tracks as it does eight.”

Contributing to Rother and Dinger’s problems in the studio – where they were struggling to come up with enough ideas to fll an album – were problems at home: “Both our partnerships were going off the rails,” says Rother. Then they ran out of money.

“We were pointing our Titanic straight at the iceberg,” says Rother. “How much music do we have? That’s not an LP! Trying to make Für Immer a ‘super Hallogallo’ was not a smart idea. Maybe it’s psychologically understandable that we ran into this trap, trying to improve something like Hallogallo that cannot be improved in its frailty, its beauty…”

After not seeing daylight for eight days, the duo worked through the night, speeding up and slowing down the Super/Neuschnee single to make two ‘new’ tracks – Super 16 and Neuschee 78 – then playing it through a damaged cassette recorder to make another: Cassetto. Today, side two of Neu! 2 can be seen as a triumph of invention over adversity, “a pop-art cut-up statement” as Julian Cope calls it in his book Krautrocksampler, and a series of early prototypes of the modern remix. At the time, however, it marked the end of Neu! Mk1.

DURING HIS QUEST FOR OTHER MUSICIANS TO bolster the live Neu!, Rother had visited the two members of kosmische synth duo Cluster, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, in their medieval countryside retreat, Alter Weserhof in Forst. The three musicians began to develop a delicately-wrought new sound steeped in the pastoral light of their location. They would eventually name themselves Harmonia but there was a brief moment when it could have been a new incarnation of Neu!.

“We went to Alter Weserhof,” says future Neu! drummer Hans Lampe, “Klaus, myself and Klaus’s brother, Thomas. We played together with Michael, Moebius and Roedelius. But Klaus’s behaviour was… not grounded, so Moebius and Roedelius didn’t want to make a group together with this person. No, never.”

Over the second half of 1973, Rother, Moebius and Roedelius recorded the groundbreaking Music Von Harmonia, an album that tapped into a sense-memory of Central European folk and classical music, the sound of new machines in old landscapes. The unwanted Dinger had plans of his own. ➢

Motor away: (clockwise from left) La Düsseldorf (from left) Hans Lampe, Thomas Dinger, Klaus Dinger; Neu! 50! box set; Klaus from the Neu!-La Düsseldorf TV performance of Hero, 1974; Dinger and Rother reconnected as Neu!, 2000.

“I’m trying to do this serious tape music and Klaus is jumping up and down with a bubble machine.” Michael Rother

➣ “Klaus sat down and really worked on a new concept,” says Lampe, “about the city where he lived, Düsseldorf. He said, ‘If every tenth citizen of Düsseldorf will buy an album about their city we can earn some money.’ He started learning guitar. He had a structure, an idea for a record label…”

The Dinger brothers and Lampe would become La Düsseldorf: a rapturous pop translation of the classic Neu! sound. But frst came the label, Dingerland, launched with a brace of free concerts in the city in September 1974 – the frst a surprising rapprochement with Rother, as he joined Lampe and the Dingers under the tattered banner of Neu!. Footage of one song, the squalling Hero, with Dinger stomping and wailing in his trademark white dungarees, can be seen on YouTube. In it, Rother looks bemused.

“I came back to Klaus because I’d developed some ideas which didn’t work with Harmonia,” says the guitarist. “Klaus had recruited these two drummers, Thomas and Hans, because he wanted to be centre-stage, playing rhythm guitar. German TV was invited and… I look at that clip and I know exactly how I felt, sitting in the back with two serial Vox machines… totally annoyed. I’m trying to do this serious tape music and Klaus is in the spotlight with people looking up to him in this show band, jumping up and down with a bubble machine.”

Perhaps inevitably, the Dingerland label was a failure.

“We produced 5,000 albums by the band Lilac Angels to sell to Philips,” explains Lampe. “They offered us eight Deutschmarks per album. Klaus wanted 10. No one got 10! So the deal failed which meant he couldn’t pay the invoices and everything fell apart.”

As a result, the Klaus Dinger who returned to Neu! for the recording of their fnal studio LP was a fnancially broken man.

“He was desperate, sad, and frustrated with his life,” says Rother. “Plus, his girlfriend Anita had gone back to Norway. But out of that chronic frustration at the record industry and his girlfriend grew the sound of Neu! 75.”

Split into two sides, with the second dedicated to the four-piece Neu! line-up of Rother, the Dingers and Hans Lampe, Neu! 75 is the sound of the future, the drifting side one compositions inspiring the ambient projects of Brian Eno and the driving, double-drum kit attack of side two’s Hero and After Eight sounding like eerie premonitions of the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen.

“For Hero we did the basic recordings – two guitars and two drums – then Klaus added the vocals,” explains Rother. “I was with Conny in the mixing room when Klaus started singing: ‘Back to Norway!… Fuck the press… Fuck the company!’ We just looked at each other. After he fnished, we went, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ You can’t improve on that. It will forever be one of my favourite Neu! tracks. The honesty, the desperation, the frustration at all the things that had gone wrong because of all his bad choices.”

WHEN HARMONIA DISBANDED IN 1976, ROTHER began his solo career and started to sell records. Simultaneously, Klaus started to do well with La Düsseldorf. Things were looking up.

“In the beginning of La Düsseldorf, Klaus was really grounded,” explains Lampe, “but we sold 250,000 copies of the frst LP and even more of the second and that was too much for him. Suddenly he felt he was better than Bowie, Dylan, Jagger. He stopped working hard, took lots of LSD then bought a studio complex in the Netherlands with our money without telling us. We started with court cases but I never saw that money.”

Although Neu! were no more, their infuence was growing, audible in David Bowie’s V-2 Schneider and A New Career In A New Town, PiL’s Public Image and Digital by Joy Division.

“I was already into what was derogatorily called ‘Krautrock’,”

Joy Division/New Order drummer Stephen Morris tells MOJO today. “I loved Can, Amon Düül, but Neu! was like nothing I’d ever heard before. It was beautifully simple. If we’re talking about punk, you listened to Klaus’s drumming and thought, ‘I could do that.’ So much about Neu! was punk before punk. But in terms of influence, Digital sounds like a meticulous Neu! copy to me.”

Another Neu! revival was on the cards in 1985 when Rother and Dinger cut a new set of tracks, intending to send them out to UK record labels. Initially, the plan was also to include Conny Plank as producer and mediator. Plank, understandably, asked that they use his studio and that he be incorporated into the business plan.

“I now regret we didn’t do that,” says Rother. “But Klaus and I remembered the stress of working to deadlines with Conny. Now we had our own professional recording gear and limitless hours of time to fuss about. What a mistake. We fought over really stupid things instead of focusing on the basic idea of our music. In the end, we both lost.”

A decision was made to seal the tapes and never release them. Then, in October 1995, Rother received a fax from Dinger, congratulating him on “the release of Neu! 4 in Japan tomorrow”. The drummer had released his copies of the recordings through Japanese label Captain Trip. (Some of the material would enjoy an offcial release, as the aforementioned Neu! ’86, in 2010.)

“Ah, the ’90s,” says Rother. “The dark decade. Klaus ran into money problems. Sky Records had already made us an offer and I’d refused because the [money] was embarrassing. I think that pushed Klaus over the edge. The next thing I hear is this fax and Klaus inviting me to sign a contract for my share of the deal. He was on a very lonely planet, very lost and he made many enemies. He later apologised for his actions, but not in a very sincere way.”

The dark ’90s also saw a parallel rise in groups inspired by Neu!’s motorik groove – notably, Stereolab – and Neu! CD bootlegs from unknown sources, a phenomenon which caused Mute label boss Daniel Miller to consider the possibility of releasing Neu! legitimately on his own label.

“I couldn’t understand why Neu! were seeing no money from their music,” says Miller. “The problem was they’d fallen out so badly they couldn’t even be in the same room with each other.”

After various individual meetings throughout the decade, on October 21, 1998, in a restaurant in Düsseldorf’s Nord Park, Dinger and Rother met face-to-face with Miller. “And I thought we were getting close,” says Miller. “Polygram wanted to do it. Both members of the band wanted to do it. Klaus said he wanted £100,000 but I ignored that. The real stumbling block came when Klaus refused to sign the same contract that Michael was signing. Then it fell apart and it wasn’t until Herbert Grönemeyer got involved that they agreed.”

A well-known musician and singer in Germany, in 1999 Grönemeyer organised the release of Pop 2000, eight CDs celebrating “50 years of pop music and youth culture in Germany”.

“It’s Like A Vehicle It was the inclusion of Neu!’s Hallogallo and Hero that led to the plan of reissuing all of the Neu! albums on his own label, Grönland. That’s Barely “Talking to Herbert was like talking to a psychiatrist,” says Michael Rother, laughing. In Control” “They’d told him, ‘These guys are idiots. They just fight. Nobody manages to get them together!’ Herbert didn’t give up.” Stereolab’s TIM GANE Even then, there were problems. A week explains the appeal of before the albums’ official release, Dinger Neu!’s motorik blueprint. contacted Grönemeyer demanding the releases be stopped. “Luckily,” says Rother, “Herbert is a strong character with a good heart and he just decided, ‘Nope, we are going to shut our eyes and go ahead with the release, no matter what Klaus screams at us.’ Herbert didn’t tell me that story until

Tim Gane (centre): “Neu! months later. He knew I’d have had a created the pathway.” nervous breakdown.” “I BOUGHT the frst Neu! album from Notting Hill Record And Tape Exchange around 1980. I’d just discovered the frst Faust album so I’d started looking for other German bands. I didn’t like Neu! as much as Can or Faust at frst but after a THE LAST TIME MICHAEL ROTHER saw Klaus Dinger was during a visit to Metropolis Studios in London in February 2001 to remaster the Neu! records with while I started to fnd it much more engineer Tim Young. In the fairytale version of interesting, something about the linearity. I became obsessed with Klaus Dinger’s drumming because it was so this story, it would have resulted in reconciliation and closure. relentless, while Michael Rother’s guitar “Klaus behaved so badly,” sighs Rother. sound, a two-note chord all along the six “He was paranoid, he shouted at Tim Young. strings, was so simple but strange. People like Terry Riley had been doing that kind of minimalism for a long time He had brought two ‘witnesses’ with him, plus various documents and a video recorder. He but this was diferent because it was was really paranoid at this point. The promo frmly in the rock world, primitive, but also complex because it opens up so many vistas. When I started playing like interview we did in London was also a disaster because he mistrusted everyone. I still get that with Stereolab I noticed that the shakes when I remember that time. It was so fewer notes you have, the more choices diffcult, so psychotic.”you can make for melodies. You could have these quite linear patterns, but then One positive of Dinger’s behaviour in those have Beach Boys-style melodies over the fnal years was that it reconnected Rother with top. It transforms an ordinary idea into Hans Lampe. something very un-ordinary. So when we frst started playing gigs in London we automatically sounded diferent. “Hans and Thomas [Dinger] could no longer trust Klaus so they both looked to

Also, I discovered it’s great music to me to give them proper information about play live, because it really takes of. It’s like a vehicle that’s barely in control and you’re just about keeping it on the road. their shares in Neu! 75. Then Hans contacted me and said, ‘I still play drums. I have this It’s got the relentless excitement of punk drum kit…’” but it’s texturally not the same at all. “This was 2013,” says Lampe, “and if Harmonic resonances rise up like a cloud of bees, creating cosmic interactions. There are lots of unforeseen things you’d told me I’d leave my job in TV and go on to play over 100 concerts with Michael Rother that can happen when you’re playing I’d think I was dreaming. It’s really a pleasure that music. But you have to remember it’s not just a formula – it’s also a secret. It’s there for you to utilise, to create to play the music of Neu! again.” Lampe will be playing with Rother (plus something texturally and harmonically Franz Bargmann on guitar) at the Clapham complex. Klaus, Michael and Conny Grand in November, celebrating 50 years of created the pathway, a new approach to rock music that will always be with us.” Neu!’s debut album. Klaus Dinger died on 21 March, 2008, three days before his 62nd birthday. I ask Rother how he might have felt about these anniversary celebrations. “I have no way of knowing,” he says, “but I fear that no matter how much respect he would have received he’d still be saying, ‘Yeah, right. I’m up there with Bob Dylan. That’s where I belong.’” There is a pause. “You know,” says Rother, “I worry that I’ve been too hard on Klaus speaking to you. I still have the memories of all the bad things he did. He gave me so many pains. But I owe him so much for his artistic contributions to our music. The knowledge and experience he had, the desire to create a new musical identity, to demand to be different. That’s not such a bad legacy.” M Neu! 50! CD/vinyl box sets will be released by Grönland Records on September 23.