Anyone who is looking to celebrate Halloween but insists on being totally “Kosmisch” (cosmic) about it, there’s a curious release that you’ve got to hear about. Holger Czukay of Can and Conny Plank, a respected Krautrock producer who also played frequently with Cluster‘s Dieter Moebius, teamed up in 1980 for a bizarre (and awesome) one-off project called Les Vampyrettes. Why they chose a French name is beyond me but it might have to do with Louis Feuillade’s silent Les vampires serials? 

In any case, Les Vampyrettes are totally krautrock’s salute to the spooky, scary creepy-crawlies commonly associated with Hallow’s Eve. They even put a cute little image of a bat on the cover of the maxi-single, for Can’s sake.
 

Holger Czukay and Conny Plank, 1983
 
The opening lyrics to “Biomutanten”—probably don’t have to tell you what that word means—are creepy in a fun Halloween-y way. “Pass auf wo du stehst, pass auf wo du gehst, am tag und in der nacht, überall wirst du bewacht….” means “Watch out where you stand, watch out where you go, in the day and in the night, you are being watched everywhere….” The other song is called “Menetekel” and some will recognize that as a reference to the Belshazzar’s Feast episode from the Old Testament, in which Daniel literally reads the words “Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin” on the wall, the origin for the saying “the writing on the wall.” What I didn’t know until today is that Menetekel is a German word that actually means “early warning” or “foreboding.”

Continues after the jump…

 
I’m reliably told that photographs are polysemous—that is they have multiple meanings which can change depending on mood or understanding of what the image represents. Seems legit.

So let’s take, for example, the picture posted above of three long-haired guys hanging around some city street in the 1970s. It kinda looks like a regular snap of buddies hanging together. But, as soon as we realize its a pic of John Deacon, Roger Taylor, and a rather cool-looking Freddie Mercury of Queen, this picture takes on a whole new meaning.

Now that we know who it is, we probably want to know where this picture of Freddie and co. was taken. The trio was photographed standing outside 143 Wardour Street, Soho, London, in 1974. Next, I suppose we might ask, What were they doing here? Well, from what I can gather, it was taken during a break in the recording of the band’s second album, Queen II at Trident Studios directly opposite. Then we might inspect the image to glean what feelings these young nascent superstars are showing.

Photographer Watal Asanuma beautifully captured the personalities of these three very different individuals (and to an extent their hopes and ambitions) in a seemingly unguarded moment. Queen was on the cusp of their chart success with the “Seven Seas of Rhye” and the imminent release of “Killer Queen.” This photo now has a historical importance because of what we know this trio (and Brian May) went on to achieve.

I guess some of us might even want to go and visit the location to see where exactly Freddie or Roger or John stood and maybe even recreate the photo for the LOLs. It’s a way of paying homage and drawing history into our lives.

For those who can’t make it all the way to London, Music History, the Twitter presence of Rock Walk London, has been compiling selections of such pictures and making composites of the original image with a photo of what the location looks like today. Okay, so it saves the airfare but more importantly It’s a fun and simple way of bringing to life London’s rich history of pop culture in a single image.

If you like this kinda thing and want to see more, then follow Music History here.
 

 

 

 
More then and now pix of Jagger, Clash, Floyd, and more, after the jump…
 

 
When Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart left The Tourists to form Eurythmics in 1981, they traveled to Cologne to work with noted German producer Conny Plank on their first album, In the Garden. Some of the musicians involved were Can’s Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit (billed as “Les Vampyrettes”), DAF’s Robert Görl and Blondie’s Clem Burke. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s son Markus was also on the album. (Annie Lennox would record a lot of the vocals—eight tracks—for Robert Görl’s 1984 solo LP on Mute, Night Full of Tension.)

“Never Gonna Cry Again” was the first single, and in the duo’s first TV appearance as Eurythmics, they played it along with “Belinda,” the second single release. Neither song would hit, but they became famous worldwide with their next album, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) in early 1983. Lennox and Stewart were joined by Burke and Czukay—who looks like an absent-minded old guy who just wandered onstage to jam with his French horn—when they debuted on television’s The Old Grey Whistle Test (In the album’s credits, Czukay’s include “walking.”):
 

 
A second Eurythmics recording with some even more decidedly avant garde co-conspirators than most people might assume would be a fit, was the darkly pulsating “Sweet Surprise” single they recorded with former Throbbing Gristle members Chris and Cosey, recorded in 1982, but released on Rough Trade in 1985. Lennox and Stewart are not mentioned on the sleeve which shows a photo of Chris & Cosey beside two familiar-looking silhouettes with question marks. They are credited on the label, however.

A ‘sweet surprise’ after the jump…

 
The UK glam band Japan had a singularly interesting career—though influenced by the usual glam touchstones Bowie, Dolls, et al, their visual presentation directly predicted the New Romantic movement, and to this day the band is still somewhat incorrectly associated with that flamboyant scene, largely on the basis of similar haircuts. But Japan were more directly from the art-rock mold, experimenting with funk, electronics, and (surprise surprise) Asian musics. By 1982, as new-ro peaked, and the band was starting to climb from cult success to chart success, personal tensions broke them up. But the band’s singer, David Sylvian, continued as a solo artist in the avant-rock mold, collaborating with Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto, and releasing adventurous sophisto-pop albums inspired by jazz, prog, and contemporary classical.
 

 
On his 1984 solo debut Brilliant Trees, Sylvian was the beneficiary of vocal, brass and guitar contributions from Czukay, bassist of the long-running and influential Krautrock band Can. Though Czukay was a hired backup player on those sessions with no songwriting credits on the LP, the pair evidently found common creative ground. They’d record together in 1986, 1987, and 1988, those sessions ultimately becoming two wonderfully lush but little-known ambient LPs. Plight and Premonition, released in 1988, is a spooky and beautiful suite of two side-length songs (no points awarded for guessing that their titles are “Plight” and “Premonition”) in the Klaus Schultze vein, made with a combination of traditional instruments and manipulated radio sounds. Additionally, Czukay’s Can co-conspirator Jaki Liebezeit is credited with “Infra-sound,” which is science for “shit you can’t actually hear.”
 
More after the jump…

 
I was researching something else entirely when I stumbled on this marvelous video of Holger Czukay, bassist for Can, giving a kind of carnival barker’s pitch for his “new-old group” some twenty years after the band’s prime.

Czukay speaks English throughout, and his slight German accent and penchant for odd wordplay as well as the somewhat daffy register of the entire shebang might remind some viewers of Monty Python.

I think this video had something to do with Can’s brief reunion in 1999, during which year the band celebrated its 30th anniversary, released Can Box, and played a series of shows, which were labeled the Can Solo Projects Tour. According to the Spoon Records website, the elusive Can Box includes “recordings from the period 1971-77, a tri-lingual book featuring a comprehensive group history, interviews, reviews and photos by Hildegard Schmidt and Wolf Kampmann plus a video with both the Can Free Concert film by Peter Przygodda, and the Can Documentary by DoRo-film.” Can Box is hard to find, but you can buy the CD set here and the book here.
 

 
The commercial, for want of a better word, appears to have been distributed to “record sellers and selleresses,” as Czukay puts it, and consists of little more than Czukay tootling on the French horn, then listing the members of Can who are involved in the 1999 reunion—if my guess is right—which consisted of Czukay, Irmin Schmidt, Jaki Liebezeit, Michael Karoli, and Malcolm Mooney, the New York-based sculptor who was Can’s first singer.

Keep reading after the jump…

Holger Czukay’s first solo single “Cool in the Pool”
 
Holger Czukay, the bassist who co-founded Can, quit the group after 1977’s Saw Delight. His departure marked the beginning of the end for Can, who split in 1979 and didn’t play together again for almost a decade.

Around the time of the split, John Lydon, then leading Public Image Ltd., suggested Can take him on as lead singer. “There was all this trouble with Holger leaving, which was a sad thing,” Can’s keyboardist Irmin Schmidt told MOJO. “It was time to stop, and even John Lydon wouldn’t have brought anything into it!” (Lydon didn’t end up singing for Can, but PiL bassist Jah Wobble did collaborate with Czukay a few years later.)
 

Holger Czukay’s 1979 solo album Movies
 
Meanwhile, the 41-year-old Czukay had more important things on his mind, like how to beat the heat. With nothing more than a tuxedo, a comb, a bow and a French horn, he made this supremely silly promotional film for “Cool in the Pool,” the first song on his solo album Movies (1979). Most of the lyrics are as straightforward as it gets, though I’m afraid I can’t help you decipher the parts about the donkey dancing forward and the ice cream soda. However, Holger’s vamps can help lower your body temperature a few degrees.

Come on in—the water’s fine!
 

Holger Czukay “Cool in the Pool” music video

 
Phew is the name of the Japanese punk chanteuse who first came came to notoriety as singer in the band Aunt Sally. These tracks from her 1981 self-titled LP are most notable, however for her backing band: Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit of Can and always brilliant producer Conny Plank. This is some wonderfully austere stuff from a period in which our man Holger could virtually do no wrong. And what a prescient sound this is. Any number of current backward looking bands would give their eye teeth for the vibe and drum/synth groove made by this unlikely combination of middle aged German gents and adorable art-waif.

 
More Phew after the jump…