Stern 1972/02/13

The knife music remained sharp

The Cologne quintet "Can" became famous through the music for the Durbridge thriller.

The crime thriller failed with the audience, which made the Westdeutscher Rundfunk doubt the attractiveness of its present TV star writer.

But Durbridge's dull "Messer" (knife) was a success for the Cologne rock group "Can": the composers and interpreters of the film music have now sold around 200,000 records with the theme song, to which they took the precaution of not naming it after the film title, but simply "Spoon".

Last week, the quintet (one Japanese, four Germans) showed a new way into the pop landscape, which is also heavily commercialized with progressive groups: they let their audience benefit from their success. Almost ten thousand fans were able to attend a "Can" concert in the Cologne sports hall without tickets. The city's cultural office had made the hall available free of charge. All other costs were covered by the musicians. The rock spectacle - the darkness was lightened by coloured laser beams from the Hamburg "Laser Kinetic Light Show" - was filmed by the "Can" musicians with their own equipment.

The "Can" have a special relationship to the medium of film. From Schloß Nörvenich near Cologne, which had served them temporarily as accommodation and studio, they moved into an empty cinema, where they now record their music on their own equipment. Their first LP is called "Monster Movie". The opening credits of the cinema or television films " Ein großer, blaugrauer Vogel", "Mädchen mit Gewalt", "Deep End", "Deadlock" and "Millionenspiel" show the "Can" as imaginative soundtrack suppliers. Of course, the musical background of movies is only a - however quite lucrative - sideline of the bands work. In record studios and concert halls, they have developed an idiosyncratic mixture of heavy rock rhythm, complicated harmony and melody sequences and electronic effects. Their pieces, for which they usually have only a loose concept, take at least a quarter of an hour. The Japanese singer Damo Suzuki, 22, "actually doesn't sing so much, but breathes words heavily into the microphone," wrote Europe's leading pop magazine "Melody Maker", which recommended its readers the latest "Can" album "Tago Mago" with an approving article about the Cologne group. The band members studied contemporary music with composer Stockhausen, conducted symphony orchestras and taught music or played in free-jazz formations. Despite the renunciation of common forms, the "Can" are among the most successful German rock groups. The London "Melody Maker" sees the group, which is planning a tour of England in April, as having the prerequisites for a good "heavy" band: "A heavy band must not only go to the bones like a ton of bricks, but also to the brain." That England's critical music press even takes notice of German bands is a rare occurrence. The domestic market is flooded since the Beatles times. And German rock groups either cling stubbornly to the simple forms of American rock'n'roll of the 50s or they try to be intellectual.