‘Germans thought we couldn’t play’: Irmin Schmidt, of musical pioneers Can, interviewed

‘The records are only half of the picture,’ says Irmin Schmidt, founder member of the great German experimental collective Can. ‘Live [performance] is the side of ours which actually has still to be discovered. For many of the people who came to our concerts, it was much more important in building up the legend than the records, because it was something extraordinary.’

Rock music is neck deep in retrospection these days, but the release of a ‘new’ Can album, Live in Stuttgart 1975, can’t be dismissed as just one more trawl through the floor sweepings. Instead, as Schmidt suggests, it reshapes what we know about one of the most influential bands of the 20th century.

Formed in Cologne in 1968 by Schmidt, who played keyboards, and bassist Holger Czukay, alongside drummer Jaki Liebezeit and guitarist Michael Karoli, Can used improvisation, repetition and trance dynamics to conjure music in which, in the words of their biographer Rob Young, ‘everything appears to be changing over an unchanging same’. They pioneered what became known — with minimum regard for cultural sensitivity, perhaps — as ‘Krautrock’. The Teutonic signifier is vital, says Schmidt, the band’s sole surviving original member, who at 84 remains sharp, salty and pleasingly immune to nostalgia.

The band was a reaction to a postwar German landscape in which, he says, ‘culture was deeply devastated. Our generation had to get everything from outside, because our parents’ generation still lived in this devastation’. This accounts for ‘a certain aggressiveness in our music. We had to rebuild culture, and not everybody accepted that. In the 1960s, pop and rock was only right when it came from outside [Germany], but we wanted to create something that related to our cultural environment, something which represented the time and space we were in, which was totally different from creating art in England.