History doesn’t record the expression on the face of Horst Schmolzi, the A&R executive who shelled out a substantial amount of money to left-wing journalist and critic Uwe Nettelbeck in a but t0 find Germany’s answer to The Beatles – only to get Faust.
In Nettlebeck’s defence, Polydor did get a version of the Fab Four – unfortunately for them, it was the sound-collage experimentalists of Revolution 9 rather than the cuddly moptops who wanted to hold your hand.
After all, it was the 70s: the days of riots, revolt and The Red Army Faction, with a new generation of bands rejecting the Anglo-American hegemony that weighed heavily on post-war West German culture.
Nettelbeck brought Faust together from two different bands. Bassist Jean-Hervé Péron, guitarist Rudolf Sosna, and saxophonist Gunther Wüsthoff came from Nukleus. Keyboardist Hans-Joachim Irmler plus drummers Werner ‘Zappi’ Diermaier and Arnulf Meifert came from Campylongnatus Cetellli.
They used more of Polydor’s money to build themselves a studio in the village of Wümme in Lower Saxony. And while the commercial clout of Faust was minimal, it nonetheless proved influential in the decades that followed.
Opener Why Don’t You Eat Carrots? harbours no concerns of conventional songwriting as it concocts a demanding brew, using sound collages, snatches of marching band music and rough electronics as its main ingredients. It’s sampling before the invention of sampling.
The explosion of fuzz guitar that gatecrashes Meadow Meal is the only nod to orthodox instrumentation, while the chanting and random sounds that sandwich it are rounded off by Irmler’s primitive organ outro.
Spread over 16 and a half minutes, Miss Fortune finds Faust pushing forward with a live jam that veers in unexpected directions, as maps are torn up in favour of instinctive searching.
Even at a remove of over 50 years, Faust remains a bold, bewildering, but ultimately rewarding, experience.
Faust is on sale now via Bureau B.
