MICHAEL ROTHER

Under The Bridge Club, London, Fri 5th Apr



Let’s try to sneak up on on the significance of Michael Rother a little obliquely…

Too much Seventies music took the rhythm section as a basic staple, the meat and potatoes of music. To give it taste meant smothering it in all sorts of sauces. Which makes about as much sense as physicists realising atoms were the building blocks of everything so deciding they could be taken for granted. But, like some parable where one brother’s folly was met by another’s wisdom, others focused in on that rhythm section.

After a brief stint in Kraftwerk, Michael Rother worked in two classic Krautrock outfts who did just that - Neu! And Harmonia. The rhythms are insistent and captivating without being assertive, drawing you in rather than bludgeoning you. (One reason why I think the dance music comparisons can be overdone.)

Though the bulk of this gig’s given over to his second solo album, ’Sterntaler’. He asked mid-set whether people knew this and seemed pleasantly surprised that they did. So he may figure it’s the solo years which need the signal boost.

I confess to only having listened to it after buying my ticket, and to not being massively taken. It’s a little one-note, and strays just the wrong side of the nebulous but all-important divide between serene and placid.

However, played live it seems to gain some oomph. On the album, though the great Jaki Liebezeit stepped in on drums, Rother played all the other instruments. So perhaps it lives and breathes more in the interplay of live players. I found I liked most the opening tracks, discovering only later they stemmed from the next release, ’Katzenmusik, which may be the point to start with the solo output.

However, the highpoint was still the finale, where Thurston Moore (who’d provided support) stepped in on guitar for some of the classic tracks, and things got truly sense-shredding.

Now sixty-eight, Rother is looking good on his years of serene music. He has one of those preternaturally youthful faces where the lines which cross it seem an irrelevance. Let’s hope regular listening can do the same for us.

Right act, right venue, but this clip’s from two-and-a-half years back. How to choose? The version I saw of the classic ’Negativland’ with Moore’s guitar, or this with double drummers?