When I was an adolescent here in freedom’s land and bravery’s home, musicians all dispensed the same wisdom when they spoke to teenagers, more or less. Don’t do drugs, stay in school, practice safe sex, register to vote, reuse and recycle, and support our troops. (Of course I’m aware that not all of these items were on, say, Jello Biafra’s agenda, but I don’t remember him being asked to address a lot of tenth graders.)
 

 
How much better to have attended the German gymnasium that was Blixa Bargeld’s alma mater, which he loved so much as a student that he firebombed it. As Blixa recalled in Neubauten’s oral history, No Beauty without Danger:

One of the reasons I got kicked out of school was because I had started a fire. My expulsion had already been decided upon anyway, so I didn’t have anything to lose. But I was still the student body president, and tried to enforce my pseudo-democratic rights by decorating a “Schülermitverwaltungsversammlung”, a kind of student council assembly, with a fire bombing - in which no one was hurt - because I was no longer allowed to take part in the assembly.

Incredibly, in 1991, Bargeld obtained permission from the same headmaster who had expelled him to return to Paul-Natorp-Oberschule. There, he gave the students some news they could use about pursuing one’s individuality “as anarchically and as radically as possible,” stealing instruments from construction sites, and planning for retirement. The Neubauten fansite that published part one of this video, Seele Brennt, is now defunct; here’s hoping the rest of this enlightening discussion surfaces someday soon.
 

 
Loosely based on Voltaire’s satire Candide, Peter Semple’s film Dandy hangs together around a selection of seemingly unconnected scenes featuring Nick Cave, Blixa Bargeld, Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich and Yello’s Dieter Meier. There’s no real story to speak of, rather:

...a floating dreamlike journey that meanders from Hamburg to Berlin, Madrid, New York and Tokyo to the Ganges river, the Himalayan mountains and on to Marrakesch and Cairo. It is a collage reflecting sensations that deal with religion, blues, art, the state of being lost … more of a wondering, a stumbling…

You can tell it’s an art house film as Mr. Cave is credited as “Nicholas Cave” here, and later explained his appearance in the movie:

“It was an experimental film by an Australian/German director called Peter Semple who paid us large sums of money to sit in front of his camera and lay with a gun or a guitar. Me and Blixa were both involved in it. We were very poor at the time.”

In a more considered response, reviewer Emanuel Levy wrote:

Dealing with self-estrangement and, yes, lack of communication and love, Dandy is pregnant with heavy symbolism and simplistic allegories. Its recurrent metaphors consist of close-ups of a dead fish and a butterfly captured in a wine goblet. Drawing all too obvious analogies between the animalistic and human worlds, the image of the real butterfly is crosscut with a human butterfly, veteran Japanese performer Kazuo Ohno, who dances a Pas de Deux with his son Yoshito to the exquisite rendition of “City Called Heaven” by opera singer Jessye Norman.

Unfortunately, the continuous flow of inventive images and sounds is too often interrupted by a superfluous and unnecessary narration about nuclear, violence and torture. And as could be expected of such a film, there are brief philosophical assertions about the meaning of life and death and the dialectical relationship between art and life.

It’s all strangely compelling, though (unfortunately) it never actually goes anywhere. You will find Nick Cave covering The Moody Blues (as well as playing Russian roulette and showing-off his gun-slinging skills),  Bargeld looking for directions and singing “Death is a Dandy on a Horse” (from which the film’s title comes), and an unaccompanied duet from Hagen and Lovitch.
 

 
A 1988 interview with Nick Cave, after the jump…

 
Nick Cave once said that Blixa Bargeld’s voice could mimic the sound of cats being strangled or children dying. His group is well known for the use of power tools in their music. Who better than the front man of Einstürzende Neubauten to shill for DIY retailer Hornbach, Germany’s answer to Home Depot?

Elevates advertising to an avant-garde artform.
 

 
When director Heiner Mühlenbrock showed up with his cameras to document the tense April 1983 recording sessions for the final Birthday Party EP, Mutiny!, the group was well beyond the verge of dissolution and barely on speaking terms. Mutiny! was cut at Hansa Ton studios in Berlin and the viewer is shown the development of the haunting “Jennifer’s Veil,” one of The Birthday Party’s finest—and darkest—moments on record and Nick Cave adding his vocal to “Swampland” (some truly truly impressive scream-singing during that bit).

Although he seems pretty sharp here, initially at least, at a certain point, Cave just nods off in the studio… for several minutes (Maybe he was… tired?). Some stunning shots of Rowland S. Howard’s hands where you can really see how he wrung those bleak bluesy sounds out of his six strings. Blixa Bargeld, who played guitar on “Mutiny in Heaven” (oh how I wish Mühlenbrock’s cameras were there for that session) is seen in the control room.

When Mühlenbrock showed his film to the band, they were unimpressed. MUTINY! The Last Birthday Party was finally released in 2008, in a limited edition DVD only for sale only at The Birthday Party website.
 

 
Musician and poet Luke Rathborne spent an afternoon in March of this year with Blixa Bargeld discussing, among other things, Bargeld’s art show “Einschüsse” at the Galerie Hunchentoot in Berlin-Mitte, Germany. Lukas, a friend and follower of Dangerous Minds, was kind enough to provide us with this exclusive video interview with Bargeld.

Blixa is a word that is a hum in Berlin.

When I met up with Blixa he had a wisp in his hair.

I had been up the whole night.

A friend in Tokyo said Blixa was doing an art show here called, “Einschüsse”, meaning bullet holes, shots.. (or an ember that, “encases fossilized remains,” Blixa said.)

When I met Blixa it was at an old bar across the street.

I had flown from Paris to play at an abandoned subway station in Kreuzberg, staying with a girl in the top floor of a burnt out apartment building in East Berlin. The punks slept in the alcove of the stairs.

You can’t get rid of the punks in Berlin, everyone has tried.

In France, a punk with a dog is called, “punk-a-chien”. To be a, “punk-a-chien” is worse than just being a punk or just being a dog.

We set up in the hotel room and I felt like more like a dog than a punk. Then Blixa started to speak.” L. Rathborne

This is quite lovely, relaxed and free-flowing. Rathborne is clearly enthralled by his mentor and gives Bargeld plenty of room to expound on his art, music, influence and the nature of being Blixa.
 

 
Einstürzende Neubauten front-man Blixa Bargeld demonstrating his recipe for an ink-black calamari risotto.

About midway through, the conversation turns to memory and the sensual pleasures of cooking.

And look, not a single broken dish!
 

 
Via Nicole Panter

 
Few artists personify the spirit of demoralized post-‘60s Europe like Blixa Bargeld, the frontman for legendary German post-industrial music outfit Einstürzende Neubauten. Born in Berlin two years before the Wall went up, Bargeld leveraged his destroyed looks and singular voice—which Nick Cave likened to the sound of strangled cats or dying children—to make Neubauten the key progenitors of Western machine-age art.

As brought to our attention by TwentyFourBit‘s esteemed Peter Henry Reed (and fortunately for us English-speaking-only dopes), YouTuber Nevaree has seen fit to add English subtitles to Birgit Herdlitschke’s fascinating 2008 Blixa doc, Mein Leben. It traces Bargeld’s journey from young, torn-up Berlin musician to cosmopolitan middle-aged avant-garde artiste, actor, and gourmet, and features both answers to the heroin question and a visit with his charming mutti.
 

 
Mein Leben part 2 | Mein Leben part 3 | Mein Leben part 4
 
After the jump: Blixa grimaces at Neubauten live mistakes…

 
Wow, Einstürzende Neubauten frontman Blixa Bargeld singing Tomorrow Belongs To Me from Cabaret!  Back in the answering machine era of my youth (and much to the dismay of my Jewish friends and parents), I had this sweet, Nietzschean pastoral set for a time as my away message.  The song was used to great—and chilling—effect in the Bob Fosse film (you can compare Blixa to the original here).

The clip below is from the documentary Berlin Now.  And here’s Stormfront’s white-pride take on the song.  Is it at all perplexing that some of them find the song, written by the Jewish Kander and Ebb, “moving?”