BBC Krautrock documentary

His description was accurate though!

(xpost) Peron from Faust: "maybe we smoked too much..."

I enjoyed it despite feeling that maybe Julian Cope might have been a better narrator, although he would have wanted to shoot and edit the whole thing, So maybe not.

I feel that it spent too much time on Bowie, but didnt really mention Krautrock creating both Ambient music as we know it and how Kraftwerk influenced modern techno. Both overused stories yes, but they had a place in a documentary about early German electronic music.

Thank God there were no talking heads telling us that "Krautrock has always been a major influence in our music" from the Horrors & Kasabian.

The BBC is not allowed to broadcast lies.

I didn't see any Bowie mentioned at all (but have only got 3/4 way through so far)...

I did note Mooney got skipped, but then an American guy being the first focus of the band (he named them too) would go against what the doc was about (the regen of German rock music by their own efforts).. They skipped The Monks as well, presumably for similar reasons.

Super-duper Neu! from 1974:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPuBCfvMrBA

Bowie was mentioned, so was Eno. There seemed to be a bummed out feeling when the Krautrockers talked about not being involved in the recording of Heroes.

Again, dislike the way that Bowie was used to almost validate Krautrock.

Interesting notion that Germans needed to get away from Anglo-UK notions of rock when you could position some of them in the acid rock/prog vein, but with a more thought-out approach to electronics; the idea that these musicians wanted to escape from Germany wasn't completely unpacked, either - Kraftwerk and Neu! did use the movement and notion of the Autobahn in their music.

The UK musicians had no problems in borrowing form the blues, nor did Japanese musicians working at the time.

All that aside there were so many groups to get through in a small chunk of time that there was no space for UK bands to say how 'influenced' they were. Totally accidental, but it worked out well.

> a wealth of stuff in the bbc achives that i'd really like to see released - Tangerine Dream At Coventry Cathedral for instance

turns out there's a dvd of this widely available (ie amazon). however it's a bit of a mongrel - appears to be video footage of the Cov Cathedral gig set to audio from Ricochet (and not synced too well by all accounts. and with shots repeated).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tangerine-Dream-Live-Conventry-Cathedral/dp/B000MXOYZW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1258108110&sr=8-1

however, based on the lengths of the recordings, this is how it was originally broadcast on bbc2 in '76.

http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/366098?view=transmission