Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Electronic Sound MARCH 2025 - by Mark Roland

BOWIE'S KRAUTROCK CONNECTION

First, there was Cluster, Kraftwerk, Neu! And Harmonia, then there was David Bowie's Low. Next came the british post-punk and electronic music explosion. This is not a coincidence. Michael Rother helps join the dots

In 1975, David Bowie was in a very bad way. Feeling desperate and trapped in Los Angeles, he was surrounded by ghoulish hangers-on and was collapsing into a downward spiral of drug addiction and occultism, haunted by dark visions. He needed a new life in a new town as a matter of life and death.

Hope came in the sound of new music from Europe. Always in search of fresh input to fuel his own future directions, he was consuming and internalising the sound of German electronic music even as he was losing his marbles in the US. His LA sojourn in 1975 was soundtracked by key albums such as Kraftwerk's Autobahn, Tangerine Dream, Edgar Froese's sublime solo effort, Epsilon In Malaysian Pale, and Brian Eno's Discreet Music.

"My attention had been swung back to Europe with the release of Kraftwerk's Autobahn in 1974," said Bowie in 2001, talking to journalist Stephen Dalton. "The preponderance of electronic instruments convinced me this was an area that I had to investigate a little further."

The investigations started in earnest in September 1975 with the recording of the Station To Station album where, with the tensile playing, icy electronics and white noise of the title track, Bowie gave his reading of this new European music, splicing it with the plasticised R&B he'd explored on Young Americans.

• • •

Station To Station was released in January 1976 and Bowie immediately embarked on a world tour, which granted him the required velocity to escape the dark gravitational pull of Los Angeles. Dubbed 'Isolar, the tour started in North America, and concert audiences were treated to tracks from Kraftwerk's newly released Radio-Activity and a screening of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's 1929 surrealist short film, Un Chien Andalou, before Bowie's performance.

"I'm trying to put over the idea of the European movement with the Dali film and playing Kraftwerk over the speakers," Bowie told Chris Charlesworth of Melody Maker at the time. "I'd like to get my hands on the new Eno album to play, actually. I think Side One is absolutely fabulous."

That album was Discreet Music, Eno's fourth studio LP. Released in December 1975, Side One is the title track, a slowly unfurling thirty minutes of Eno in full ambient mode. After Bowie's 7 May 'Isolar' show in London at the Empire Pool, Wembley, he finally hooked up with Eno and the pair hatched a plan to produce Iggy Pop's new record together, to be followed by an Eno-Bowie collaboration.

"We drove back to where he was staying in Maida Vale," Eno told Stephen Dalton in 1999. "He said that he'd been listening to Discreet Music, which was very interesting because at the time it was a way-out-there record which was universally despised by the English pop press. He said he'd been playing it non-stop on his American tour, and flattery always endears you to one. I thought, 'God, he must be smart!'."

Eno himself, meanwhile, had also been thoroughly immersed in the new music coming out of Germany. With his permanently twitching antennae, he was already listening avidly to Neu!, Cluster and especially Harmonia, the krautrock supergroup of Cluster's Roedelius and Moebius, and Michael Rother of Neu!. Rother had also been in a short-lived Kraftwerk line-up in 1971. In May 1974, Eno was in Germany promoting his first solo album, Here Come The Warm Jets, which included a radio interview with the journalist Winfrid Trenkler.

"Winfrid was a big fan of our music - maybe the only fan in the media!" says Michael Rother. "He talked to Eno about our music, and told him, 'These guys, Harmonia, they are playing in Hamburg tonight'. And Eno was like, 'What? Take me there!'. So they were suddenly sitting there in the front row. There were only about 60 people at the gig, and I remember there were these three people all dressed in black, and one of them was Brian Eno. We took a break in the concert, and Winfrid came backstage and introduced us to Eno.

"After the break, he joined us onstage. We were surprised and very happy that he was very polite - British politeness - but also genuine and humble. He wasn't like the feathery guy from Roxy Music who you would think is all crazy, he was quite the opposite. We liked him a lot and invited him to our place in Forst. It took a couple of years, but he came to our studio in the late summer of 1976 and we recorded together for eleven or twelve days.

"He told us that he and Bowie were intensely listening to our music and talking about it, and they knew everything that came out of Kluster with a 'K', Cluster with a 'C', Harmonia, Neu! and Kraftwerk, the bands that are more in my corner of krautrock, or whatever you want to call that development in Germany.

"We were flattered, because as much as I was convinced of what Harmonia was doing and totally thrilled by our music, the reception from the audience in Germany was underwhelming."

• • •

When Eno arrived in Forst, Harmonia had actually Wjust disbanded.

"When Brian called us in July or August, Moebius and Roedelius had given up hope with Harmonia, and all three of us had already made plans to make solo albums with Conny Plank," says Rother. "We looked around and said, 'We can't just say no, it would be rude!'.

"So we went to pick him up at Hanover airport, and then spent twelve days drinking tea, playing table tennis and going for walks, being totally relaxed but also focused. And interested in being in the studio, sometimes only two of us at a time, sometimes all three of us. Maybe Mobi (Moebius) was cooking - he was a great cook. It was a great situation with no pressure, just working at ease with unlimited time. It was marvellous."

There was no plan that these sessions should be released, but Eno had brought some blank 4-track tape reels with him.

"We had a TEAC 4-track recorder, but we didn't have blank tapes," recalls Rother. "We were so poor. So luckily he came over with blank tapes, but he left with the full tapes. It was a case of, 'Let's do something and, yeah, let's record it'. End of thought.

"Fortunately, the night before Eno left, I took the tapes and the 4-track machine and did rough mixes to a cassette, just to have a memory of what we recorded. And it was a good thing I did because when we finally came to release the sessions, Achim [Roedelius], who stayed in touch with Brian, went into his archive to find the tapes of that session, and some of the original 4-track tapes were missing, so I was able to add three tracks from my cassette."

All of which begs the question, did Eno use the Harmonia sessions, which weren't released until 1997 as Tracks & Traces, as a kind of experimental lab to prepare for his date with Bowie to make an album together? Bowie had explicitly used the sessions for Iggy Pop's The Idiot album, which he ended up producing on his own in the very hot summer of 1976, in precisely that way. ("Poor Iggy became a guinea pig for what I wanted to do with sound," he later confessed.)

"I don't think it was a sinister plan," says Rother. "For us it was inspiring, I think for him also. It's funny that you mention Iggy Pop. A couple of years ago he invited me to join him onstage when he played the Neu! song, 'Hero'."

Ah yes, the Hero from the 'Neu! '75' album/"Heroes" connection... a few months after the release of Low, Bowie got in touch with Rother to ask him to play on the sessions for the album that would become "Heroes", but in the end it didn't happen, and the reasons why will always remain obscure.

"It was very strange, because he was so enthusiastic and we talked and talked," says Rother. "Later, somebody from his office called about contracts, and I said, 'Yeah, don't worry about contracts. If the music is great, everything will be fine!'. That was the worst answer I could have given to this person who wanted to talk about contracts, right? It was not professional. But that was the spirit in which I worked."

Whether that was the actual reason why Rother was "uninvited" to the sessions for "Heroes", we'll probably never know. But it's hard not to assume that the title track of the album and its driving energy includes a sideways nod to Neu! and their track Hero. What would the track have been like had Rother played on it rather than Robert Fripp,

"I remember talking to Tony Visconti at a Bowie memorial event in Berlin," says Rother. "I said, 'Well, I would have proposed speeding the track up a bit. It's a little slow, sluggish...'. Which is maybe stupid, because "Heroes" is a wonderful, successful song, but then Tony said, 'Yeah, with my band, I also play it faster"'."

• • •

David Bowie's trajectory from our perspective, decades after these executed. But he and his krautrock influencers were all making it up as they went along. They were forging a future to a certain set of ideas, but the music making - and life itself, for that matter - was mostly spontaneous, improvised and uncertain. For example, the Berlin Trilogy might have been the Cologne Trilogy had Bowie actually recorded with Conny Plank. Apparently, it was briefly on the cards, but Plank wasn't having it.

His son Stephan has said that Bowie did visit Conny's farmhouse studio, hoping to work with the man who'd helmed releases by Kraftwerk, Cluster, Neu! and Harmonia, but Plank demurred.

"My father was alright with quite a lot of drugs," Stephan Plank told Loud And Quiet magazine. "But there was this rule that said no toilet drugs, so no drugs that you take on the toilet were allowed."

Plank suggested that his studio was not the right environment for Bowie to make his new album. The recommendation to use the Hansa studio in West Berlin came from Edgar Froese, so the sessions for Low, which had started at Château d'Hérouville in France, transferred to the divided city, and the legend of the Berlin Trilogy began.

Low was finally released by a reluctant RCA in January 1977. Bowie's label had really wanted another Young Americans, preferably with a chart-topping hit single like Fame onboard, and they were less than enthusiastic about a Bowie album that sported a whole side of weird, unearthly electronic instrumentals.

In the UK, 1977 was all about The Sex Pistols. But by January 1978 The Pistols had imploded and it was clear that punk was finished. In the meantime, Low had percolated through the ranks, emerging as a key influence for what was coming next. No self-respecting synthesiser enthusiast was not listening to Low in 1977.

Bowie spent March and April of 1977 on the road, playing keyboards for Iggy Pop who was on tour to promote The Idiot. Eno, meanwhile, worked with Conny Plank and Can's Jaki Liebezeit on his 1977 album Before And After Science, and with Moebius and Roedelius (also at Plank's Cologne studio) in June 1977 for the Cluster & Eno and After The Heat records, before flying off to Berlin again in July to record "Heroes" with Bowie and Tony Visconti.

In early 1978, Eno and Bowie took Devo to Plank's studio, helping to shape the off- kilter sounds of their debut album Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!. Around the same time, the Eno-related Ultravox (he'd helped make their first album) arrived to record their third album, Systems Of Romance, which eventually led to Plank's production on the smash hit Vienna album in 1980.

After Devo, Eno then started his fruitful collaboration with Talking Heads, while Bowie discovered New York's post-punk heroes Television and covered Kingdom Come from frontman Tom Verlaine's eponymous solo album, which appeared on Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), Bowie's first offering of the 1980s.

Krautrock, then, with its intriguing twists and turns - especially the input of Rother, Moebius and Roedelius - has left an important and indelible imprint on the development of post-punk and electronic music, laundered through Bowie and Eno's inspirational work on Low and "Heroes".

"For us in the band, the recognition came too late," says Rother. "But I can't complain. The perception of the music we did in the 1970s has changed dramatically and has opened many doors."