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. Karoli died in 2001, so this has to have been taped before that.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street’: German TV thriller directed by Sam Fuller with soundtrack by Can