If you are a musician is it better to have brief global success early in your career or to plod away without selling anything only to be heralded as a visionary genius thirty or forty years later? Michael Rother would be the man to whom you should  put that question. NEU! released only three albums between 1972 and 1975, which it’s fair to say had pretty limited commercial success at the time. Now you can buy T shirts and carrier bags with the band’s logo and they are probably name checked by new bands more than any other group. When was the last time you heard someone cite Nirvana as an influence?

The German music scene from the 1970s is unbelievably rich. It’s the sound of people trying to make music of a sort that hadn’t been heard before and if you are acquainted with the sort of singalong bollocks that still fills German TV at the weekend you’ll know they had a lot to rebel against. You would think any genre of music that includes thirteen minute long tracks with noodly flutes drifting over a mechanical rhythm would be offensive tripe but if it was recorded in Germany in the mid 70s you’d be wrong. Check out High Life by Ibliss.

Rother was involved with the two best groups NEU! and Harmonia and anyone looking for an introduction to the genre should start with the first NEU! album and Harmonia Live. The video below is the opening track of NEU! and gives you a good idea what to expect. His collaborator Klaus Dinger died a couple of years ago and he’s teamed up with Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth on drums and Aaron Mullan of the  Tall Firs on guitar to perform three UK shows featuring his work.

Given that the average track in this genre is often in the region of six or seven minutes the hour and a quarter set felt a little bit on the stingy side and added to a sense of resentment against the support band. Rother slightly reworked the arrangements in many of the tunes. The addition of intro passages of random noise was not necessarily a welcome one but the fundamental change was to make the live versions a little bit harder and more aggressive than the recordings. My hypothesis, which may be utterly wrong, is that the original versions were recorded late in the evening with some chemical inspiration. This could explain the some mellow feel in many of the tracks.

Many but not all. At times during the performance you had a sense that the original intention was sometimes to create a soundscape for an idyllic industrial, pastoral, social democratic utopia where humans, factories and nature co-existed harmoniously. Pretentious but plausible. There’s no doubt that the primary inspiration was the re-industrialised post-war Germany and to this day I can’t hear a pneumatic drill without thinking of Negativland.

Posterity demands that Hallogallo make a DVD of this set. It was probably cheating for them to use a laptop, a device which doesn’t seem to be in any of the original studio photos but that can be forgiven .This was a rare chance to see a pioneer get the acknowledgement he deserved and maybe next time he’ll do a longer set.