Michael Rother
Button Factory, Dublin
★★★★☆
David Bowie and The Sex Pistols’ John Lydon may not have agreed on much, but back in the 1970s each was 100 per cent convinced of the genius of the German musical maverick Michael Rother. They correctly recognised the professorial figure, a blend of Westphalian mad scientist and Brian Wilson-style pop mastermind, as a visionary, his work blending the dazzling futurism of the early electronica scene with a rich seam of human vulnerability.
Bowie and Lydon weren’t simply in awe of the music Rother made with his bands Neu! and Harmonia, and which he replicates at a captivating sold-out show at the Button Factory, in Dublin, on Friday night. They borrowed shamelessly from him, too.
Bowie credited Neu! with directly influencing the tone and mood of his best album, the doomy and relentless Station to Station, from 1976. An equally smitten Lydon realised anger could be an energy after exposure to the rattling, furious Hero, from Neu!’s third album, Neu! 75. Without it The Sex Pistols may have never existed – and the history of music would be very different.
Rother was a man of many cameos in that decade. He was an early member of Kraftwerk, the band generally acknowledged as having created electronic music as it exists today. As Bowie admitted, he also inspired the Thin White Duke. (Alongside Station to Station, Neu!’s presence can be felt throughout Bowie’s Berlin albums, Low and Heroes). And the Roxy Music member and future U2 collaborator Brian Eno described Harmonia as “the world’s most important rock band” (sorry, Bono).
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Rother had initially emerged as a leading figure in the 1970s German “krautrock” movement, which gave an icy Teutonic makeover to the American rock’n’roll that had swept postwar Europe. But though krautrock is associated with Mitteleuropa gloom, Rother and his three-piece band’s concert in Dublin is a joyous affair, catalysed by brilliantly addictive melodies and by muscular percussion from Rother’s tireless drummer.
Bowie once noted that Neu! were “passionately, diametrically opposed” to Kraftwerk. Where his former bandmates pretended to be robots, Rother’s music is a celebration of frailty and soulfulness: he is the Wagner of bittersweet electro pop.
Those tendrils of tenderness run through the 75-year-old’s Button Factory performance, bringing a spark to his plaintive solo cut Karussell and to Harmonia’s Deluxe (Immer Wieder), both featuring Jean Michel Jarre-esque refrains so captivating they have the potential to bounce around the listener’s head for days, potentially weeks.
The same steamroller harmoniousness is a defining quality of Neu!’s Isi, accompanied by heartfelt images of a very hairy young Rother with his late bandmate and collaborator Klaus Dinger, who died in 2008. The duo were diametrical opposites, the thoughtful Rother bouncing productively off the more punk-spirited Dinger. That tension sits at the core of the Neu! DNA, driving the tempestuous Neuschnee and the nine-minute psychedelic chugger E-Musik.
The concert is a triumphant combination of something old and something Neu! It is also an antidote to the cynicism of the modern music industry. In an age of grubby comeback tours, this is nostalgia done correctly, in that almost no actual nostalgia is involved. Back in the 1970s, Rother’s music was like a grainy Polaroid from the distant future. Experienced today, it feels gloriously optimistic, a vision of tomorrow that pulsates with humanity and dazzles through its sheer, unrelenting catchiness.
