OLD AND NEU! TO A HARMONIOUS WIND BACK WEDNESDAY WITH MICHAEL ROTHER

The world was whispering Michael Rother to me, I swear: wherever I turned, he was there. Or thereabouts. And it seemed pointless to resist.

It was the combination of a concert tonight by fellow German experimentalists of the 1970s, Tangerine Dream – or the version of Tangerine Dream using that name – in the same room he played in 16 months ago, and a new album from Stereolab (see the last paragraphs of the following story for the connection) that brought guitarist/sonic adventurer Rother from front of mind to the halls of Wind Back Wednesday.

In 2012, Rother was about to tour Australia playing songs of Neu! and Harmonia with Dieter Moebius and Hans Lampe. The Sydney show would turn out to be, as I said in my review at the time, “a room full of us rhythmically nodding, locked into a rhythm which was relentless but not demanding, pulsing rather than pushing. It wasn't made for dancing, though you could do so without embarrassment”

But before that, Rother patiently walked through the unexpected (fame) and the surprising (his continuing influence).

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MICHAEL ROTHER IS POSSIBLY the most influential man you’ve never heard of. He definitely is one of the most important figures in music since the so-called golden decade of the 1960s.

And yet his total record sales outside of his home, Germany, wouldn't register as a blip on the Adele scale, his name won’t open a single door in the world of Gaga and Australia’s Got Talent and when he plays in Australia this month, for only the second time in a career which began as a guitar student of George Harrison and Eric Clapton in the mid-60s, he will be playing the Oxford Arts Factory not the Opera House or Entertainment Centre.

"Some people made some money even if we didn’t. But I can honestly say that I wasn't concerned about being famous; I was full of the desire to create exciting music,” says a polite and often amused Rother today, taking this call on a cold and dark German winter's night.

"I expected people to share my excitement and sometimes I didn't understand when people turned their backs on us and said go away."

To get a sense of why Rother matters you need to start with the band he joined in 1971 after a short stint as a psychiatric hospital worker, Kraftwerk. Before they streamlined into the quasi-robotic, electronic pop band of Autobahn and The Model, Kraftwerk were what Rother has described as a “primitive” art rock ensemble beginning to mash American pop, avant-garde ideas and the wild artistic freedom of Germany’s post-war generation with new technology.

He then co-founded Neu! with another ex Kraftwerk member Klaus Dinger, working now with pulsing metronomic rhythms and angular sounds that played with tape loops as well as sometimes coruscating guitars and, before a successful solo career, was a key member of Harmonia who created both space rock and ambient soundscapes while living in a classic hippie commune.

We know that Harmonia were being listened to by musicians, such as their big fan and occasional collaborator Brian Eno, who set up in their commune and then told every interviewer in the UK how his ideas were taken directly from the Germans. But sales-wise “it was a complete disaster: no one wanted to listen to Harmonia. People hated us."

It's bizarre now to think that the evocative, exploratory and often quite beautiful work of Harmonia would have been hated but that says much about how the sounds they were pioneering became part of the lexicon of contemporary music for the next 40 years.

Looking back now we can see that the 1970s, long derided as an arid if not deadening period for music established the roots of electronic music, hip hop and dance music, laid the platform for the post-punk and industrial genres of ‘80s music and provided the seeds for ambient. And most of that was first done in cities like Dusseldorf by men like Michael Rother.

Put it this way, the chances are if you've bought music in the past 25 to 30 years, you've bought something influenced by Rother or his compatriots whether it’s Radiohead (who picked up Neu! and Harmonia ideas in their career redefining albums Kid A and Amnesiac) , David Bowie (who wanted Neu! to be his backing band for the influential trio of albums he made in the late ‘70s, Low, Heroes and Lodger), Aphex Twin, Wilco, U2 or Sonic Youth (who wrote a song called Two Cool Chicks Listening to Neu!)

Rother was vaguely aware of some of this but had always been so caught up in his own work that he found it a shock when confronted by it.

"It took me some years before I noticed that people outside of Germany had grown up listing to our music,” he says. “A friend took me to a concert of [Anglo/French electronic/avant garde band] Stereolab. I didn't know the band or their music and when we were listening to the music I looked at my friend and I said, what's going on, am I listening to myself?

"They made some very beautiful music, I liked it, but it was very strange to hear this echo of our ideas.”

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