Travelogue Sound of Düs­sel­dorf

It’s high time to set off on our journey. We have taken the regional train. On the journey to Düsseldorf, we listen to 25 tracks on our headphones that we’ve chosen to represent the sound of the city. First on the list is Dieter Süverkrüp, Germany’s most eloquent and poetic political singer-songwriter. Then come NEU! and Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn”. These 22 minutes of pop history are inextricably linked to Düsseldorf. They conjure up the German motorway and international horizons, Krautrock and electronics, the machine-like chilliness of Kraftwerk and recording-mastermind Conny Plank’s warmth. In its best moments, the sound of Düsseldorf is a music of contrasts.

Timon-Karl Kalayta, lyricist and singer of the electro-pop band Susanne Blech, takes us through Düsseldorf’s old town. On the way, we pass multinational fashion chains and Rhenish dive bars, punks begging for change and the chic Königsallee. We see contrasts everywhere. In a café overlooking the Rhine, it does not take long before talk turns to the city’s most famous band. Kalayta, who caused a shitstorm by pulling Kraftwerk off their pedestal in his iconic song “1000 Jahre Kraftwerk” (“That stuff by Kraftwerk, turn it off or turn it down. Everyone sees it, no one says it: they’re the emperor’s new clothes”), is refreshingly irate: “They’re revered here like gods,” he grumbles. “It’s only right and fitting – they were pioneers and all that – but if everyone agrees on something, then there has to be a counter opinion, just out of principle, even if it’s wrong. In Kraftwerk’s case, the discussion has come to a comfortable end. No one in their right mind would say anything disreputable about electropop avant-garde from Düsseldorf without making a fool of himself. The pop references are obvious, case closed. Kraftwerk? Geniuses, of course! That’s the verdict.”

In fact, it’s almost impossible to take an impartial approach to Düsseldorf’s music scene. International superstars who have been influenced by Düsseldorf and Kraftwerk – from David Bowie to Simple Minds, Depeche Mode or the Chemical Brothers – are too numerous. And enough has been written about Kraftwerk to fill a small library with publications on the topic, while conferences and symposia on the subject are frequently held all over the world. Electri_City, the title of an oral history published in 2014 about the “Mecca of electronic music” (as the blurb states) says that the city’s pop-historical importance can’t be overestimated. And yet! Düsseldorf received its first crucial thrust from a man who was born in Kaiserslautern, was influenced by American troops stationed in German military bases, worked in Cologne and Hamburg and who spent most of his life far away from Düsseldorf.

When you hear “Hallogallo”, the first track on NEU!’s eponymous debut album from 1972, there’s no need to explain why Rother and Dinger had to part from Kraftwerk. It is ten mesmerizing minutes of proto-punkish, hand-played music, a style that harshly contrasts to Kraftwerk. Clueless German journalists have called this sound “Motorik” (which translates as something like “motor function”), reducing it to its monotonous beat. You can hear the sharp clashs between autodidact Klaus Dinger’s impetuous temperament and Rother’s balanced character, illustrated by his delicate guitar work, both held together and guided by Plank’s production.

The album NEU!, like its successors NEU!2 and NEU!75, were released on the Brain label, Krautrock’s central distributor. The albums were not commercially successful: NEU! 2 even sparked controversy because Rother and Dinger filled the B-side with new versions of already released tracks – thus, some said, inventing the remix. “The reactions to the second album and the B-side were disastrous. People did not think it was legitimate. They thought we were having a joke at their expense,” says Rother. However, the effect of the band’s third album cannot be overestimated. NEU! 75! had a great influence on English punk. David Bowie, too, whose attention was brought to Düsseldorf’s music by Brian Eno, was partially inspired by NEU!’s third album to begin recording his Berlin trilogy. Bowie invited Rother to participate on his album Heroes, but unclear circumstances, perhaps a misunderstanding on the part of Bowie’s management, prevented their cooperation in the end.

Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother did not reap the rewards of their work until the end of the 1970s. Dinger became successful with his band La Düsseldorf, and Rother, after meeting Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius von Cluster in the mid-1970s and forming the supergroup Harmonia alongside NEU! in their studio in the Weser Hills, had a commercial breakthrough as a solo artist with his album Blazing Hearts in 1977.

In 1978’s hit-record Pfefferminz Westernhagen sings about his early experiences as a rock ‘n’ roll singer in Düsseldorf. And this album proved, that he Westernhagen had what it takes to be a rock star. In later albums, Westernhagen crooned popular songs like “Sexy”, “Weil ich Dich liebe” and “Willenlos”, while his bitter hymn of an alcoholic “Johnny W.” became a party-hit. During these years he increasingly outgrew his home city of Düsseldorf, but has stayed in touch with his early blues influences to this day.

At the beginning of his career, Westernhagen had to face some decisions that all German pop musicians have to face sooner or later: the chances of attracting international attention are much higher if a German musician produces electronic music, plays down his or her personality and doesn’t write German lyrics. This dominant line of tradition in Düsseldorf from Kraftwerk to NEU! to Propaganda, Kreidler and Hauschka has been successful. Westerhagen refused, clinging to his mother-tongue and his love for the blues. In the end: Although the charismatic Westernhagen is one of Germany’s hugest pop stars and can fill stadiums, he’s hardly known in Austria. “I never wanted to be internationally successful, although people have often tried to persuade me. I think I’m in a really good position. I’ve been consistently successful on a large market, but it’s still manageable. When I travel outside the country, no one knows me,” he says. He has, however, at least experimented with styles outside his field. “I had a phase when I tried to work with electronics. That was interesting, and I tried to combine it with Kralle Krawinkel, who was, in the broadest sense, a blues guitarist. But: Whatever I’m looking for, music on stage can sometimes take on an almost spiritual aspect, and you enter a zone which you can’t influence but can only ride out. I don’t think you can do that with machines,” he says.

Doro Pesch, who is a good fifteen years younger than Westernhagen, took a very different path and made a name for herself in the city’s heavy metal underground scene in the early 1980s. With her band Warlock she took up influences from the first wave of British heavy metal bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. The result was a melodic, high-energy power rock with plenty of pathos. The Belgian music label Mausoleum Records were convinced by Pesch and her crew. With English lyrics they rode the wave of a steadily growing global metal scene and quickly became cult stars with their albums Burning The Witches, Hellbound and True As Steel. Part of their novelty was to have a woman singing in heavy metal band. Warlock were also part of the immensely successful metal-scene all over North Rhine-Westphalia. Doro Pesch was also the first woman to perform at the British festival Monsters Of Rock. But then there were disputes about the band’s concept. The record label interfered with their repertoire. Rudy Graf left the band to produce the smash hit album Triumph & Agony in 1987. Pesch used this international success to launch her own very successful solo career. Unlike Westernhagen, who became a German superstar from Düsseldorf without an international reach, Doro Pesch became an international superstar from Düsseldorf in a small but significant segment of rock music.

At the outset, Ratinger Hof was a liberating space. But the only way to explain how it evolved into one of the birthplaces of the German punk and new wave is its proximity to the nearby Kunstakademie. Markus Oehlen, Jörg Immendorff and the anti-institutional Joseph Beuys in particular became regulars. Meeting these artists triggered a tremendous creativity among the DIY punk crowd. “They were interested in punks and punk people thought, ‘Who the hell are they?’ There was a reciprocal effect,” says Delgado. “And suddenly some 20 or 30 people thought, ‘We can do what we want’”. For DAF, whose signature style was Delgado’s extrovert performances and controversial lyrics combined with Robert Görl’s sequencer sound, this meant turning punk music to club music. That’s how they became crucial conduits for genres like EBM and electropunk.

Of course, we ask Delgado why DAF left Düsseldorf so quickly and went to London just as they were starting to get attention. “In Germany there was the Ratinger Hof, the Markthalle [in Hamburg] and SO36 [in Berlin] where you could play as a punk band. There was not a single label interested in music like ours,” he says. “And in London there were thousands of clubs! And thousands of punks! And thousands of labels! It was the place to be.”

Jürgen Engler, who was part of the Düsseldorf scene as a member of Male, played together with Dörper in the Krupps and now lives in Austin, Texas, confirms this view: “The Ratinger Hof was the CBGB of Düsseldorf. In the old town, everything was distilled into a microcosm where the whole world met and made plans. Initially it was like a home,” he says. “The scene in Düsseldorf itself was very small. At the beginning, between 1977 and 1979, the audience for the bands playing there was just members of other bands.” Engler also emphasises the antagonistic atmosphere of Ratinger Hof: “There was a lot of rivalry on the scene. I don’t know what caused it. People ridiculed each other and there wasn’t much cooperation. I’d put it down to the scene being quite German on the whole: rivalry, mockery, elitism and pushing others out of the way. It ruined a lot of things.”

Düsseldorf didn’t quite manage to retain its status as a major player in German pop music. The period of the late 1980s and well into the 90s in particular was a time of boredom. Too many innovative musicians left the city and there was a lack of musical infrastructure. It was not until the mid-1990s that creative people like Detlef Weinrich, Alex Paulick, Andreas Reihse and Thomas Klein from Kreidler, which was founded in 1994, managed to put Düsseldorf back on the international pop map. “I’m actually from South Germany and ended up in Düsseldorf for my year of national community service,” says Reihse. “I thought ‘Great! Düsseldorf, yeah, that’s where Kraftwerk and all that post-punk stuff comes from.’ And then I got there and there was nothing!”

In reaction to this, Kreidler, who fused electronic music with analogue instruments and created a unique mixture of avant-garde electronica, dub, techno and post-something, set up their own structures over time. From 1999 onwards they ran the artist’s and musician’s association “Innenstadt Mainstream” at Düsseldorf train station, which also included the artist group hobbypopMUSEUM and the underground club Ego; later, Weinrich became one of the operators of the Salon des Amateurs.

The Oscar-nominated pianist Hauschka is another example of how Düsseldorf stil often generates an impetus that reaches far beyond the borders of Germany. He was born in 1966 as Volker Bertelmann in Kreuztal near Siegen. Around the region he refined his idea of the prepared piano. In the early 2000s, he began to compose piano music. He released his first tracks on the label Karaoke Kalk as well as his 2005 album, Prepared Piano – a highly influential, groundbreaking work.

In the supposed no-man’s-land between contemporary classical music, pop and electronics, a scene began to form. Musicians such as the German-born Brit Max Richter and the Hamburg-born Berlin-based Nils Frahm composed piano pieces, wrote film soundtracks and gave concerts that were influenced by minimal music and often used distorted piano sounds. Hauschka became one of the central figures of the scene. Records like Ferndorf (2008) and What If (2017) received critical acclaim. In 2017, he and his American composer colleague Dustin O’Halloran were nominated for an Oscar for the film soundtrack to Lion. But it was a year of tough competition: the duo was not able to contend with the musical La La Land, one of the critics’ favourites of that year.

Hauschka’s idea of the prepared piano, in which the piano strings are manipulated by objects and in doing so change their sound, originated from the American avant-garde composer John Cage in the 1940s. His goal back then was to create percussive effects for a modern dance piece with limited resources. In pop music of the early 2000s, the British experimental techno musician Aphex Twin was one of the first to take this ball and run with it. Hauschka in turn adopted and refined the concept over the years. On his 2017 album What If , there are moments of mastery. It has echoes of role models such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Sometimes tango rhythms set the pace, while at others, you feel transported back to Berlin at the turn of the millennium with its understated minimal techno. And all of it is produced on the piano.

Whether you look at Hauschka, Grandbrothers and Kreidler – or bands like the electronic musician Stabil Elite, who make unmistakable references to Krautrock in their lyrics, aesthetics and music, and who consciously released their first EP on Klaus Dinger’s death – none of the present-day Düsseldorf bands are conceivable without their forerunners. “I am a big fan of structures. One structure forms, then another, without anyone being able to say exactly where it began. Path dependence is what it’s all about!” explains Timon-Karl Kalayta at some point in our conversation. And it’s remarkable how much his own band Susanne Blech is a Düsseldorf band overall, although the members are all from outside the city and Kalayta swears he completely lacks musical training. Like many of their forerunners, Susanne Blech are bold, experimental and have been shaped by electronic influences. Without ever having been to the Ratinger Hof, Kalayta sees a compatibility between electronics and punk, sees music as a means of self-empowerment, and the fusion of art and music as the basis of his work. And he likes experimenting in unusual ways: Kalayta has set up an Institute for Contemporariness, runs a publishing house for never to be published books and organises exhibitions. Above all, however, Susanne Blech constantly blur the lines between political seriousness and postmodern irony, between affirmation and distance, regional localisation and international orientation, surface and depth. “For me, there is only one relevant principle when I write: delete every letter of kitsch and pathos! Eliminate it 100 per cent,” Kalayta explains at the end. The constant tension of moving between two poles has always characterised the sound of Düsseldorf from the outset and makes it extraordinary to this day.

The Broilers were founded by singer Sammy Amara and drummer Andreas Bruges in Düsseldorf when the two were still teenagers. Besides the Toten Hosen, The Clash and Bruce Springsteen are two of the band’s main influences, whose sense of belonging is rooted in the Oi! punk movement - a wave from England, which sees itself as anti-racist and takes inspiration from ska, reggae and pub rock. Amara also used to work as a graphic designer for the Toten Hosen. So the band became aware of him and his group. Then, after playing as their support band, the Broilers became very successful very quickly. In 2011 they recorded the album Santa Muerte, which climbed to No. 3 in the German charts. And their subsequent albums, Noir (2014) and (sic!) (2017), even made it to No.1. Sammy Amara and his band are superstars from Düsseldorf in the tradition of the Toten Hosen and they define how punk rock from Germany sounds in the 2010’s.

The Broilers had their major breakthrough when they started being managed by JKP, where the Toten Hosen were also signed. Three years later, the hip-hop band Antilopen Gang joined this label. That crew brings together members of the Düsseldorf and Aachen hip-hop scene, united by intellectual, political lyrics that are often ironic and quite controversial. Antilopen Gang’s sound is very different from the widespread German gangsta/hip-hop pop: real instruments, sophisticated rap and a decidedly left-wing attitude. With their song “Beate Zschäpe hört U2” (Beate Zschäpe listens to U2), they denounced German bourgeois extremism and in “Baggersee” they suggested detonating a nuclear bomb in Germany to replace it with a man-made lake. “Drop an atomic bomb on Germany, that’ll shut everyone up,” as the provocative first verse of the chorus goes. In 2013, the suicide of their depressed band member NMZS almost brought their music-making to an end. But changing to the JKP label brought them success. The album Anarchie und Alltag, which is further proof of intertextual references within the Düsseldorf scene with its obvious allusion to Fehlfarben’s Monarchie & Alltag, made it to No. 1 in the German charts in 2017 and won the Echo Music Award in the category “National Critics’ Prize”.

Düsseldorf is very much aware of its impressive pop history in a way that is fascinating and often puzzling to outsiders. There are symposiums exhibitions about Düsseldorf’s grandes in pop, and Kraftwerk themselves were celebrated as legends during their concert at Ehrenhof in 2017. But at the same time, a feeling of satiation has spread, especially in subcultural contexts, encapsulated by Weinrich’s statement that Düsseldorf has bred an artificial idea of itself as a city of music. The journalist Philipp Hollstein from the Rheinische Post wrote a clear-sighted article, in which he claimed that Düsseldorf could only celebrate itself as a pop city if it became receptive to new influences.

But there is probably no way it can escape seeing its former heroes in museums. Kraftwerk, who have long since performed without its central members Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür, and now only consists of Ralf Hütter and three much younger musicians, have become art exhibits. In 2012, they performed their entire work since the album Autobahn in the New York’s MoMA, repeating this the following year in their hometown of Düsseldorf and in London’s Tate Modern. Meanwhile, their former patron Conny Plank has received the recognition he deserves. Herbert Grönemeyer’s label Grönland, which re-released the three NEU! albums, paid tribute to the producer in 2013 with a comprehensive LP and CD box set called Who’s That Man: A Tribute To Conny Plank. Four years later, his son Stephan Plank dedicated an intimate documentary film to him with the title The Potential Of Noise.

If Düsseldorf does not want to rest on its laurels, it has to learn, like other major pop cities, to cope with the simultaneity of museum heroes and new avantgarde forms of music. Otherwise, its impressive tradition lies like a layer of dust over everything to come. With its small old town,and the Kunstakademie, the city has ideal conditions to constantly attract fresh creative minds, who create exciting pop music with new ideas. But cultural scenes age and need fresh input to give space for growth. Places like the Salon des Amateurs show how this can be done: by an uncompromising, resistant and uncomfortable attitude that does not settle for maintaining the status quo. This attitude is the prerequisite for keeping Düsseldorf on the music map - the international one.

This text is the revised, extended version of the chapter “Düsseldorf: Menschmaschinen and Alstadtpunker” from the book “Sound of the Cities. Eine popmusikalische Entdeckungsreise”, Kein & Aber 2016, ISBN: 978-3-9540-3091-0. Reprinted with kind permission from Kein & Aber AG, Zurich.

https://keinundaber.ch/de/literary-work/sound-of-the-cities/

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