Dusseldorfmusicspielen
The forgotten German art-rock pioneers who struck a blow for the Fatherland
Dusseldorfmusicspielen, the band labeled “the Acme of Krautrock” by nearly every knowledgeable music fan the world over, first came into being when local musicians Heinz Von Skammelsrud and Berti Windstaffeln met by chance one dark December evening in 1980 whilst browsing exhibits at the Dusseldorf Museum Of Municipal Sewage Collection.
Von Skammelsrud, a keen fan of German electronic music such as Kraftwerk, Jimmy Lebensraum and the Berti Vogts Kickers, was looking to form a new band. He had recently been sacked from Folkends, the aptly-named Simon & Garfunkel tribute act he had starred in, for misappropriating Garfunkel’s wig as an impromptu merkin whilst entertaining prostitutes in his Kaiserkopfstrasse home.
Windstaffeln, a laboratory technician by day and a musician and off-duty laboratory technician by night, had just bought an electric guitar off a deformed dwarf he had been testing drugs on, and now sought to expand his unique sonic vision as part of a band.
After discovering a mutual interest in the techniques and equipment used to make bagels, Windstaffeln and Von Skammelsrud realised they shared a common passion in music too. Of course they would go on to become the band's core songwriting unit.
With Von Skammelsrud on vocals and melodica, and Windstaffeln on guitar and Moog, the pair enlisted two more local musicians: Yugoslavian-Scottish immigrant Kristof McMilosevic became the group’s drummer, and Dusseldorfmusicspielen's legendary bass guitar maestro, known simply as Hermann Goerring 5020, joined soon after, after spotting Von Skammelsrud's advert in a public urinal.
With that legendary line-up in place, the four-piece started rehearsing in McMilosevic's father's slaughterhouse. As they began to write and rehearse those early songs amongst piles of lifeless sheep carcasses, a musical understanding bordering on the telepathic began to blossom between them. A feeling which was no doubt augmented by the strange tension these four sexually-confused men all felt from being together in the same confined space with lots of dead meat.
The band's first single Towards The Sinister Children Of Fear Onwards We Must Climb Henceforth was a dark brooding mass of twisted electronica and ugly guitar distortion, culminating in Von Skammelsrud's haunting cries of "Pairs! Peaches! Pomegranites! My heart is broken open!"
Released on the influential indie label Bumtopia, it soared up to number 128 on the Dusseldorfmusischecharten and grabbed the attention of local music promoter and urinal cake magnate Sonny Boy Wilson, who booked them for a run of gigs.
Heartened by their unexpected conquest of the local Top 150 – and lacking any of the basic skills needed to hold down a day job between them – Dusseldorfmusicspielen threw all their energies into performing live. Keen to emulate the Beatles in their early Hamburg days, they performed twice a night at the legendary Dusseldorf live music venue Der Littenbaum for months on end in 1982.
The band would often say in later years how grueling these shows were, playing for up to eight hours every night. But this tough schedule forced them to think in new and creative ways, and it galvanised them from wishy-washy, amateurish electronic experimentalists into a white-hot mass of twisted teutonic energy. One of the early Von Skammelsrud/Windstaffeln compositions, Lift Music For The Prostitutes - a dark, murky, swirling mass of keyboard loops and Buddhist chanting - was written about this transformation.
Ernst Brickhausen, an executive for top label Nazionalsozialistichedeutscherekordkompanei, happened to catch one of Dusseldorfmusicspielen’s performances while out drowning his sorrows one night. He was awestruck by the white-hot mass of teutonic energy he saw twisting and writhing before his very eyes, and signed them on a recording contract there and then.
The band struck a unique deal with him that allowed them to collaborate with leading scientists on producing intelligent robot clones of themselves, and then forego all promotional duties by secretly sending out these clones in their place. Such luxuries would allow them to focus exclusively on their creative output, away from the prying eyes of the eager public.
A passionate believer in their vision, Brickhausen arranged for them to enter Dusseldorf's legendary Technicolor Muffin studios to record with top Krautrock producer Klaus Bogie. The resulting sessions spawned their debut album Zu Befehl.
A writhing mass of screaming guitars, disenchanted wailing and relentless droning synthesizers, it was an instant classic. The album quickly gained popularity among Dusseldorf scenesters, due to the touching yet distinctive cover photo: a run-over cat lying mangled in a gutter with a box of chocolates placed next to it.
Zu Befehl was the short sharp shock the German music scene desperately needed at the time, containing as it did such classics as the two-part odyssey Auschwitz: 6.02am and Auschwitz: 6.13am (in which a two-note keyboard loop served as a background to a fifteen-minute soundscape of bumps, clicks and grunting noises, accidentally recorded when Hermann Goerring 5020 was attempting to change a studio lightbulb).
It also featured a re-appearance of Towards The Sinister Children Of Fear Onwards We Must Climb Henceforth, which had now evolved into a writhing mass of brooding teutonic energy, seared by the painful blitzkrieg of Windstaffeln's white-hot, sinister guitar riffs (which he would play by feeding a series of guitars into a wood-chipper).
But the climax to the album was undoubtedly Meine Mutti Ist Eine Kleine Mutti, an ironic twist on the cliché of the bog-standard three-minute three-chord pop song: three bog-standard one minute one-chord pop songs, played simultaneously.
The album won a Silberkartoffel (Silver Potato) at the prestigious Krautrock Awards in East Berlin and overnight, the band became national superstars. The next goal was to spread their message to all four corners of the globe. And that could only be achieved one way: by spreading their message to all four corners of the globe. The legendary Dusseldorfmusicspielentour 1 was about to begin.
A tour like no other, it led them to sell-out concerts in Paraguay, North Korea, Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and the Himalayas, before finishing in low-key fashion at the packed out Layton Institute in Blackpool. The band even appeared as extras on the British TV soap Crossroads.
Every day on the tour, the droids were sent out into a whirl of cameras and interviews, while their real-life counterparts would play to standing ovations and showers of women's underwear by night. Despite an embarrassing episode when Windstaffeln’s droid suffered a software crash and started barking out MS-DOS commands during an interview with Melody Maker, the plan worked without a hitch. Dusseldorfmusicspielen were now without doubt the city’s most famous export, behind Kraftwerk and mercury-rich pet food.
This was the period Windstaffeln would later famously refer to as the "salad days" in the Dusseldorfmusicspielen classic The Flowers And The Bees Are My Lovers. After a short period of rest following their gruelling world tour, it was back to the studio to record their second album.
They realised it would be a difficult task to follow up Zu Befehl. Using the same obscure logic that had propelled him through his philosophy doctorate, Von Skammelsrud figured that if they made it deliberately difficult to record the album, it would be a great album. As the group’s unofficial leader his enthusiasm soon spread to the rest of the band. So in the name of making it difficult, they wore buckets over their heads and struck each other with cricket bats throughout the recording sessions.
The gamble paid off. Eight months in the making, Bist Du Schon was hailed on its release as a masterpiece: a dark, writhing, energetic mass fusing all the traditional elements of German art-rock with jazz and Carribean music, notably including a salsa reworking of the forgotten Doors track I'm Horny And I'm Stoned.
The legendary highlight was what has now become known in pop culture as the waltz trilogy, three waltzes dedicated to different dead animals: Waltz Of The Dead Goldfish, Waltz Of The Dead Cat, and the title track, Bist Du Schon (Waltz Of The Dead Dog).
The album cleaned up at the music awards, winning seven Silver Potatoes (an all-time record), plus a Grammy for ‘best porn soundtrack’. Dusseldorfmusicspielen were more popular than ever, and Von Skammelsrud began dating a distant female relative of Heinrich Himmler. Overnight they became the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman of the early 80s.
The band's fame was beginning to put a strain on its members, though - in particular Hermann Goerring 5020. Clearly jealous of Von Skammelsrud's girlfriend's connections to Heinrich Himmler, on 29th May 1984, after a night of heavy drinking and substance abuse, he encased himself in a giant model of a Heinkel bomber he'd made out of matchsticks.
Whether he meant to end his life or not, he would never emerge alive from his own ode to Hitler’s war machine; he was found dead of asphyxiation the following morning, straddling a pile of his prized Nazi memorabilia.
Hermann Goerring 5020's mysterious death threw Dusseldorfmusicspielen into a state of disarray; disarray from which they would never recover. They ceased appearing in public, living like hermits inside the Technicolor Muffin studios. With impeccable timing, the droids chose this moment to rise up against their human masters, and were eventually destroyed after a desperate gun battle with West German police.
The rebellion quashed, the band decided after much soul-searching to come to terms with their bassist's death by recording themselves constructing a flat-pack coffee table, and then running around hammering on top of it with their fists and making "whoooooo" noises like ghosts.
The ensuing quadruple album, Grandfather Schickelgruber's Pyjama Party Mit Xanax And The Naked Girls, was a commercial flop and was universally panned by critics. Things were looking bleak for Dusseldorf's third most famous export.
Klaus Bogie resigned as the band's producer after his rectum prolapsed as a result of listening to Grandfather Schickelgruber's Pyjama Party Mit Xanax And The Naked Girls twenty times in a row during the mixdown. Von Skammelsrud split up with his famous girlfriend. The record company began bribing street children to post faeces through the studio's letterbox. Things were looking bleak.
Believing the mounting crisis could be yet averted by steady helmsmanship, Von Skammelsrud appointed himself as the band's producer. This dictatorial stance infuriated Windstaffeln, who extracted revenge by burning down his house. It later occurred to him that it would have been much more effective to burn down Von Skammelsrud's house instead of his own.
With Windstaffeln no longer on speaking terms with the rest of the group, the other two members quickly knocked out another album with Von Skammelsrud at the controls, desperate to turn over a new leaf. By now, though, it looked like a matter of when, rather than if, Dusseldorfmusicspielen would split up. This album was seen by many as their final drink of redemption at the last-chance saloon.
Grandfather Schickelgruber's Other Pyjama Party Mit Xanax And The Naked Boys was met with total bemusement from the record-buying public. A collection of Chuck Berry's greatest hits played by a Bavarian brass band, it totally failed to chart. It seemed that the dream Dusseldorfmusicspielen had woven in the world's conscience in the early eighties had flickered and died.
Dropped by their record company, the three surviving band members returned to their drab existences in Dusseldorf, and split up. Anxious to retain their sense of momentum, they all pursued separate solo projects, sadly to no success. They are now working the city streets as rent boys.
Essential Dusseldorfmusicspielen Listening
ZU BEFEHL (1982)
Dusseldorfmusicspielen in their first rush of glory, this is a dense, white-hot, swirling, contorting mass of a record.
BIST DU SCHON (1983)
The band at their creative peak, this is a sinister, swirling, dense, teutonic mass of a record.
DUSSELDORFMUSICSPIELEN: KOMPILATION DEATHFETISH (1997)
A vast, sprawling mass of a record, comprising twenty-three CDs, this is of interest only to the most dedicated of fans. Features a mixture of Dusseldorfmusicspielen's greatest songs plus rarities and out-takes, including five alternative final mixes of Grandfather Schickelgruber's Pyjama Party Mit Xanax And The Naked Girls, an unreleased rap version of Grandfather Schickelgruber's Other Pyjama Party Mit Xanax And The Naked Boys (featuring Jazzy Jeff), and Von Skammelsrud duetting with German football icon Berti Vogts on a selection of Gilbert & Sullivan musical numbers at a poetry evening held by Borussia Dortmund football club.
By T J Bumblebee & Mick Pumpinessence
Reprinted from the Lonely Planet guide to essential rock music (honest)
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