Google

1996: Faust: BBC Sessions

Karl Dallas conducted an interview with Uwe Nettelbeck at this session

Releases

199612RecommendedReR F3V
The covers were 'painted' at a concert at The Garage, London, 1996. The original recordings were prepared for a John Peel session on the BBC, aired 1st March 1973
200112Bootleg
Transparent vinyl in a plain cover. My copy is marked #224/300
2000CDRecommendedReRFB1
As one CD in the Wümme Box Set

Details

Released: 1996
Recorded: 1972-3, 1996
Werner DiermaierDrumsaka. Zappi
Engineer: Kurt Graupner
Hans-Joachim IrmlerOrgan
Producer: Uwe Nettelbeck
Jean-Hervé PéronBass
Rudolf SosnaGuitar and Keyboards
Gunter WüsthoffSynthesiser and Sax

Tracks

The original Recommended release

*The Lurcher7.56
John Peel Show, BBC 1st March 1973
*Kraut Rock11.42
  (aka Krautrock, A 70's Event, A 70's Event (edit)) 
remixed for the John Peel Show, BBC 1st March 1973
*Do So2.33
  (aka Stretch Out Time, Stretch Out) 
remixed for the John Peel Show, BBC 1st March 1973
*Kisses for Pythagoras
  (aka Noizes From Pythagoras, Pythagoras, Pythagoras Legacy) 
Recorded 1996

The bootleg release

*The Lurcher7.56
John Peel Show, BBC 1st March 1973
*Kraut Rock11.42
  (aka Krautrock, A 70's Event, A 70's Event (edit)) 
remixed for the John Peel Show, BBC 1st March 1973
*Do So2.33
  (aka Stretch Out Time, Stretch Out) 
remixed for the John Peel Show, BBC 1st March 1973
click to play...Party 9
*360° **3.38
*So Far (alternative)3.38
  (aka So Far, Not Nearest By, Waiting for Eternity) 
*Meer (alternative)3.13
  (aka Das Meer, Piano Piece) 

The Wümme Box Set CD

*The Lurcher7.56
John Peel Show, BBC 1st March 1973
*Kraut Rock11.42
  (aka Krautrock, A 70's Event, A 70's Event (edit)) 
remixed for the John Peel Show, BBC 1st March 1973
*Do So2.33
  (aka Stretch Out Time, Stretch Out) 
remixed for the John Peel Show, BBC 1st March 1973
click to play...Party 9
*360° **3.38
*Party 101.12
*Party 13.39
*We Are The Hollow Men **4.30
*So Far (alternative)3.38
  (aka So Far, Not Nearest By, Waiting for Eternity) 
*Meer (alternative)3.13
  (aka Das Meer, Piano Piece) 

top



Lyrics

  

Stretch Out Time

Yes, I see
you are the one to be me...
...
stretch out time, dive into my mind and sign
get answer and hold your dime
but not into the Coco smile
love is really so...
love is really so true
  

Stretch Out Time

Yes, I see
you are the one to be me...
...
stretch out time, dive into my mind and sign
get answer and hold your dime
but not into the Coco smile
love is really so...
love is really so true
  

Stretch Out Time

Yes, I see
you are the one to be me...
...
stretch out time, dive into my mind and sign
get answer and hold your dime
but not into the Coco smile
love is really so...
love is really so true
  

We Are The Hollow Men

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Close to the ones .who cry (try... ?

to the grumbled mood moon
coming home moaning home

you can count to dry pet
you can lick to a wet pant
you can grade to the jet set


(compare TS Eliot, The Wasteland, 1925...)

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry glass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
...
  

top



Articles

Karl Dallas: Interview with Uwe Nettelbeck

An interview with Uwe Nettelbeck conducted during the recording of the first Faust BBC Sessions

It is twelve noon, and in the smoky sunshine of a London afternoon a group of German longhairs are unloading a huge Mercedes truck full of electronic gear of various shapes and sizes and carrying it into the BBC's number one eight track studio, which has just been vacated by Victor Sylvester and His Ballroom Orchestra.

It's not a small studio by BBC standards, but when they've done there is barely room for the five Germans to pick their way among the wires and synthesizers and sound generators and other electronic paraphernalia.

BBC SessionsIt is also four-and-a-half hours later before Faust, possibly the hottest word-of-mouth group to emerge out of the Common Market mists of Eurorock, are ready to start recording.

Producer John Walters confides to me that he hasn't had so much mail about any new name since the earliest days of Family, despite the fact that both their Polydor albums have received very little exposure in this country.

When I saw the first one, a wholly transparent disc enclosed within an equally transparent sleeve - mindblower number one - I determined that I had to have it even before I 'd heard the music on it which might have been James Last for all I knew of the group.

I took it home and put it on the turntable, and then came mindblower number two: as the disc revolved, some sort of stroboscopic interaction between the grooves on one side and the grooves on the other - because, remember, being transparent, you could see both sets - made it look as if the disc was revolving a quarter turn, then stopping, then another quarter turn, then stopping again, and so on. I took it off and checked there was no equipment malfunction before I realised that I was the victim of an optical illusion.

After this the music could have been a complete let-down, but it was in fact mindblower number three. Here, as the man said, words begin to fail me, for mere vocabulary can't really express the multi-dimensional complexity of what they were doing. I doubt if even German, with its propensity for long-winded poly syllables, has words adequate to describe it.

Things were not helped by the fact that there are so few parallels one can draw either in the field of rock or modern classical music. One thinks of unsuccessful experiments like the Beatles "Revolution No. 9". Inevitable OK classical names like Karlheinz Stockhausen or John Cage leap to mind.

But producer Uwe Nettlelbeck, an intense bearded ex-journalist and film-maker who first conceived of Faust in 1970 rejects this sort of comparison and asserts that what they play is in fact rock.

"I want it to be popular music," he said. " As far as terms are concerned I wouldn't like to have it in that bag with Stockhausen, Cage and all that, what you call experimental muscle."We are avant garde not as a style but just as an accident, not by purpose. Just because some things we are doing nobody else is doing, it puts us in a position to be avant garde but that's just accidentally. I don 't rate such terms very high. Its just music.

"And I would rather like it to be considered as rock. Why not? It is. It is rhythmically based very often, it's using elements of rhythm and blues and all that in a different and twisted way, but it is still using it. I am not very much into rock music. I am listening to the records but I don't know much about other groups. I only can say what groups the band and I like, it's very strange, it goes from things like the Shangri-Las to Frank Zappa or early Velvet Underground, even the Beach Boys.

"As far as content is concerned we are realising the particular situation a German band is in, by not having any roots in rock music, but on the other hand knowing all the stuff because our record shops are just the same as yours, there's no difference. But it puts you in a strange relation to the stuff because you neither speak English nor have any connection to anything in it. It 's a second sort of reality."

"So we try to make an amalgam from all the material which comes to us to form something which goes beyond quotations. The material should be altered, shouldn't stay the same, never, and this should be combined with sounds".

Their very first, Clear album began with quotes from the Stones' "Satisfaction" and the Beatles' "All You Need is Love", while the second, "all black" album (So Far) has a song, It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl, which is recognisably derived from the Velvet Underground.

By now John Walters has wandered off, saying that his role as producer is almost superfluous. The BBC engineer is checking for level, but all the band is giving him to work on are pure tones from their sound generators. Perspex black boxes covered with dozens of white buttons enabling four out of five members to generate all kinds of sounds and inject them direct into the recording.

These boxes, in fact, are one of the secrets of Faust's unique blend of sounds - and the reason why they have not appeared in public before now, the reason why their Manchester Free Trade Hall gig on June 6 is only their seventh in two years.

"Those machines weren't ready before now," said Nettlebeck. "We had to have them custom made and it took two years. We wouldn't like to play without them because it would he too much of a compromise, we wouldn't have been able to switch sounds, to play collages on stage.

It would interrupt the flow of the music every time we had to, because we would have to disconnect and connect to get different effects and all that. With these machines we just have to press a button".

The remarkable thing as Faust begins to warm up for their "Sounds of the Seventies" recording is that already they are beginning to sound like their albums, which were the product of painstaking hours of over-dubbing and editing.

In fact, the second side of their first album on Polydor was recorded entirely live in their own studio a converted school-house in the countryside between Hamburg and Bremen, and this is how they prefer to work.

Everything they have issued so far, including the remarkable 48p LP of tapes from their own archives which launches their move to Virgin records, was recorded in that make-shift studio.

The band really began as the outcome of a dispute between two branches of the vast Polydor combine in Germany. The International wanted to show the native German Polydor company the chances it was missing. In the great flowering of German rock which has made names like Can, Neu and Amon Düül familiar to British listeners.

Polydor International asked Uwe Nettlebeck to get a group together. He was a former radical journalist who 'd had to move into films and sounds when he found no magazine would publish his views on the political trials that followed the student disorders of 1968.

" I knew this guy at Polydor International who asked me whether I knew some people to put a band together which would be a bit significant," recalled Nettlebeck.

"That was the beginning, in February 1971; but it was also the end because the national company got so upset that they started to fight us from the very first day. That is why we are unknown in Germany. That 's not a very nice situation in your own country you're just not available in a record shop.

We are better known in France than Germany, and better known in England than in France just because people like journalists and John Peel took us up.

However, when we started Polydor gave us all this old equipment, none of which would work, and we tried to make it work. It was very hard because often we would have to work for several hours getting it ready and by the time we there ready to record we were all tired and upset, but we continued to work on our concept, which was to have a band which is not featuring anyone in particular but has a combined sort of sound, just like one instrument, playing in a very wide range of sounds and styles.

For instance, even now it is hard to identity who is doing what, except the drummer or the guitarist. But if they are more into electronic stuff you wouldn't be able to figure out who is playing what if you saw them standing there.

And we definitely won't have a stage act in which somebody is in the spotlight. Actually it should be the equipment which should be in the spotlight. Sometimes Joachim Sosna (sic) plays a guitar solo, not a straight one because he plays very peculiar guitar, but he is not behaving like a guy who plays guitar solos. And we had the idea later, if we can do it, to project a film next to him on stage which shows him playing a guitar solo but he's standing still and not doing it.

The only thing we have, really, in the act is in these generators which can work by themselves. If you switch them on they can infect each other and do a sort of electronic percussion thing, completely on their own, and that's a solo. And you can leave the stage and let them do it for five minutes and you have a solo which actually the equipment is doing.

Basically, Faust is a machine, but everybody is sitting on the machine and trying to get freedom out of it we don't want to get into a formula where you have to deliver industrial product to big companies which try to make money out of it.

I have a huge collection of tapes which we have made over the two years, made on an ordinary stereo recorder without any eight-track or multi-track. When we left the studio, I took two or three weeks to go through them and collect pieces out of them and cut it together, not in chronological order but to sound right. I prefer the second side, actually. The first side is a bit hard to listen to.

I had the idea that it wouldn't be fair to sell it to the public for the price of an ordinary album because it didn't cost anything. It would be a nice gesture to put it out really cheaply. It should be less than 48p, because we are not taking anything at all out of it".

By now the session is over. The technical problems are over and already the band is talking about its first experience, starting the next day at the Manor, of recording in a commercial studio with all the facilities most bands take for granted. I see Faust's engineer at the BBC eight-track deck, wiping the tapes of music that they've rejected. "We have to avoid bootlegs," he said with a smile. For a band that's started its period with a new company by producing its own bootleg, that struck me as funny somehow.

Karl Dallas, "Faust and Foremost", Melody Maker 1973

  

K Roberts and J Blaiburg: On the BBC Sessions

We discussed the question of the different versions of this release on the Faust Mailing List, and useful comments were made by Keef Roberts and Joel Blaiberg

Keef Roberts started the discussion.

Broadcast date of the BBC session was either 1st March '73 or 3rd January '73, but it has a publishing date of 72, so it was probably made late '72. If memory serves Faust didn't perform live in the BBC studio as such but Kurt apparently sent a tape instead to Peel (this info from Zappi and Jean-Hervé, when they performed at Real Art Ways in CT and I had the chance to see them - Jean-Hervé also does not remember doing anything at all for the BBC, and points out that Do So is on Faust Tapes in the Faust Box alternate book that you got when you ordered from ReR. My educated guess is that the tape was made during '72 but was sent and broadcast for March (I say this because the release date for Tubular Bells is 25th March '73; it was the first Virgin -- Faust Tapes and Faust IV are both in the first 10 releases). Perhaps Chris Cutler knows?

My copy of this record (#199) is the same as the BBC+ disc in the box except Party 9 and (360 deg) are fused as one track, as yours appears to be. So Far and Meer are the alternate versions found on the CD. Mine has the A&B as you describe, but my cover is white with label hole. It does not include Party 10, Party 1, or Hallo Men. Mine was purchased from a collector about 1997 who listed it as Kisses For Pythagoras but I've never been able to figure out if this is a bootleg or if it's authorized. You've got it listed in your discography as 1996 from ReR (is this one of the records that Jean-Hervé was nakedly painting the covers for during the USA shows then?) Perhaps KfP is an alternate title for the BBC sessions tape?

Dr Joel Blaiberg added the following comment.

My tuppence :-)

Just dug out my copy of the BBC Sessions/Kisses For Pythagoras 12". The BBC Sessions side is exactly the same as that on the BBC Sessions + disc (The Lurcher, Kraut Rock, Do So). However, Kisses For Pythagoras seems to be a greatly extended version of the very brief Noizes From Pythagoras from You Know Faust. The label info appears to corroborate this as the BBC Sessions side is copyright 1973 while the KfP side is copyrighted 1996.

I've never seen the 12" both you and Keef possess but would hazard a guess that it was either a promo or bootleg made of some of the tracks that were to appear on the BBC Sessions + disc.

K Roberts and J Blaiburg, "BBC Sessions", Faust Mailing List 2001

  

Rob Chapman: Faust: Non-Alignment Pact

Review of the Wümme Box Set

Admirably researched and presented, right down to the information that "the X-ray on BBC Sessions is of Zappi's head", the only discrepancy on The Wümme Years appears to be the inclusion of a Peel session, supposedly boadcast on March 1, 1973. Ken Garner's essential BBC bible "In Session" gives a different tracklisting to the one here and reports that the Beeb studios didn't have enough sockets for their equipment so Faust gave them a tape instead, which was subsequently broadcast on June 6, 1973. If that's so, the version of Krautrock that they provided sounds suspiciously like a rough mix of the version that also appears on Faust IV.

The whole box set is beautifully packaged and the accompanying booklet is a delight. Original members Péron and Irmler, plus band Svengali/producer Uwe Nettelbeck, fellow traveller Peter Blegvad, engineer and equipment builder Kurt Graupner and project overseer Chris Cutler all have their say. Memories contradict and collide. Just like the music. "We didn't perform," says Péron, "we just played and played. We were just making music. Thinking about nothing." Some nothing.

Disclaimer: pointing box set at sky does not necessarily make sun come out.

Rob Chapman, "Faust: Non-Alignment Pact", Mojo 2000
read the text of the full article here

  

Peter Marsh: BBC Sessions

A review of the BBC Sessions

This CD captures Faust at their peak in 1973 at the BBC and adds a slew of recently unearthed material plus a couple of previously issued tracks. Apparently bewildered BBC technicians recall a steady stream of dishevelled long haired Germans wheeling strange perspex boxes into the studio. Indeed, engineer and unofficial seventh member Kurt Graupner's work is much in evidence throughout, treating instruments, providing tape manipulations and concrete episodes. On the opening The Lurcher, Gunther Wüsthoff's saxophone trails off into grainy pitch-shifted clouds of reverb over a stiff proto-funk vamp, eventually boiling down into a pastoral episode of almost folkish guitar from Rudolf Sosna. Suddenly we're into the mighty (and ironically titled) Krautrock, a hugely distorted throb of a riff that slowly expands and contracts while it motors to absolutely nowhere, like a dystopian take on Neu's road music. Party 9 overlays chirping electronics above Joachim Irmler's magisterial fuzzed organ lines and Jean-Hervé Péron's Phil Lesh like bass. Elsewhere, distorted children's voices scream 'Happy Birthday' over a rock and roll piano riff punctuated with sleepy acid fuzz guitar. Wonderful. An alternative take of So Far (title track of the second Faust record) marries a stripped down take on Temptations style psychedelic funk with deep space electronics, while the melancholic sub-aqua piano of the closing Meer is simply beautiful. A fine release from Chris Cutler's ReR label, who singlehandedly kept the Faust name alive after the bands demise in 1974, thus providing the inspiration for their reformation in the 90s. Great stuff.

Peter Marsh, "BBC Sessions", BBC Interactive 1996
read the text of the full article here
ref: BBCi

  

Dan Sumption: Faust Live

Dan sent me this extract from a letter he wrote to a friend

The most recent gig, about a year ago, was the most amazing yet. I was right at the front, which was caged off in a sem-circle about 3 metres around the stage, because within the cage was a woman welding bits of metal together and apart - sparks and smoke everywhere, really intense with the music. The audience was split up by large white cloths hanging from the ceiling, which everyone spontaneously ripped down a short way into the set. Then a little further on the singer/bassist (wish I knew their names) stripped off all his clothes and jumped into the audience, to emerge on the other side (I managed to get up close again) where something wall-like was covered with a sheet. He ripped it off - it was a wall of 12" singles with plain white covers. He got loads of pots of paints and rollers/brushes on long sticks and started going mad on the records, which were sold off at the end, while the band played on.

Dan Sumption, "Faust Live", The Faust Pages 1998
read the text of the full article here
ref: Dan Sumption
  

top