Energy: A Documentary about Damo Suzuki will be the first feature-length movie about the singer of “Vitamin C,” “Mother Sky,” “Mushroom,” “Spoon,” “Halleluwah,” and “Moonshake,” who once said he composed his lyrics in “the language of the Stone Age,” and whose inspired approach to life is of a piece with the way he sings.
A commitment to total spontaneity can be fruitful, if you happen to be Damo Suzuki. One day in 1970, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit saw him busking in a Munich street, “screaming and sort of adoring the sun,” and invited him to front Can at their show that night. Czukay later recalled:
I told him there’d be no rehearsal, that we’d see him on stage and he could just go ahead. And it worked out in a totally unexpected way. On stage he started out very calm and peaceful, then suddenly – like a Samurai warrior – he switched and became the exact opposite. The audience were frightened by him. It was like when the Sex Pistols first came out.
Director Michelle Heighway has been filming Suzuki since 2014, the year the singer was diagnosed with colon cancer. Despite his illness—the press material for Energy describes Suzuki’s good spirits even when “hooked up to a drip by a Hickman line fed directly into his heart”—he continues to perform with the ever-changing lineup of “sound carriers” who comprise Damo Suzuki’s Network. (In Berlin on June 9, Budgie and Knox Chandler will be in Damo’s band.)
Watch this space for the upcoming Dangerous Minds interview with Damo Suzuki. The Indiegogo campaign for Energy runs through June 20.