”It is 1971 and the summer in Sweden. In a lake in the woods sits a loving couple in a rowing boat. He comes from Dusseldorf. She comes from Stockholm. She means everything to him. He calls her lieber Honig.”
Jacob Frösséns new film begins with the sun sparkles against the water, and Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon’s narration. We hear the gentle lapping of the waves as the young German recorded in roddbåten. Klaus Dinger, who he called, only to be dumped shortly thereafter by his Swedish girlfriend. He returns to Dusseldorf, drop out of the Band (in the early edition he was the drummer), and the start of Neu, where he strikes up a beat that, according to Kim Gordon, ”echoes of desperate hope and longing, a longing to find a way back to his lieber Honig”.
once there were three important rhythms in the seventies: Fela Kutis afrofunk, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dingers Neu-beat. The German movement that Dinger belonged was given the name ”of its musical signatures” by british journalists. His relentless trumtakt called ”motor” because it gave many a sense of to travel rapidly on a highway. Himself, he preferred the name ”endlose Gerade”, the infinite straight road.
Neu only managed to release three discs, but got a great influence on both David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Postpunkare such as Joy Division and the band’s b-sides Sioux was also influenced by their sound as well as Radiohead, Primal Scream and countless others. Neus fusion of dreamy and the machine still echoes in almost all the sinnesutvidgande rock.
”The heart is a drum” contains clips from an interview that journalist Michael Dee did with Klaus Dinger in the spring of 1998. ”You could say that I abused Neu to make my romantic dreams,” said Dinger in the text published in the magazine Pop. ”I never gave up hope and it was really from there, the Neu-beat came, it was a beat that kept me going, a beat that would do, I reached back to my girl.” That Dinger accepted the invitation to be interviewed, after many years of having the right to the media, was because it was a Swedish newspaper that he hoped that the ex-girlfriend would see. Hjärtesorgen acted as a catalyst for the music. He never stopped to think of his lieber Honig. ”She was the most important girl in his life, even to the last moment,” says Dingers widow in the new movie (he died of a heart attack in 2008).
Cecilia Hansson describes in his new novel ”the Au pair”, where a fleeting halvromans with a German teacher in Vienna in the beginning of the nineties will be the trigger for her writing. Some seemingly banal moment awakens the poet in her. Almost 25 years later looking for her up the teacher. She says nothing, only meet his gaze, and he does not recognize her. But she don’t really care about him. It is the obsession itself that interests her, which makes her feel a getingsvärm inside, ”ten thousand stinger drills itself into my head.”
”Klaus was the adulation of pain a motto in life,” says Neu’s guitarist Michael Rother in the documentary. Dinger would have suffered even more if he got to see ”The heart is a drum” where Jacob Frössén tracks up ex-girlfriend who announces that she has not had any interest in his music. ”For you meant nothing?” wonder Frössén. ”Absolutely nothing,” she says.
Primal Screams singer Bobby Gillespie describes ”endlose Gerade”-the rhythm that to travel quickly and not move from the spot. Does Neus music. It plunges forward through infinity but never leaves roddbåten of the Swedish lake in the summer of 1971.
Read more chronicles of Fredrik Strage here .
