NEU! announce the release of a brand new boxset marking the 50th anniversary of their first record, with a Tribute album featuring reworks from The National, Idles, Alexis Taylor (Hot Chip), Mogwai, Fink, Stephen Morris (New Order) & more, set for release on 23rd September. Grönland Records, the legendary Berlin label and home of the duo NEU!, also reveal the boxset tracklist and share the first remix from the Tribute album, ‘Hallogallo’ Stephen Morris (New Order) & Gabe Gurnsey remix. Michael Rother has also announced a show at London’s Clapham Grand on 3rd November.
NEU!’s influence is undeniable. Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, who had both previously been members of Kraftwerk, are a product not only of West Germany but of Düsseldorf. Like other experimental bands of the late 60s and early 70s gathered under the banner of Krautrock, they were driven by a mixture of political and artistic imperatives to reject the cliches and conventions of orthodox, blues-based Anglo-American rock and create a music that was, formally, West German in origin.
NEU! are one of the great, belated success stories of rock music. Their influence is widespread, international, continued. Ian Curtis (Joy Division) played the rest of the group NEU! as part of their weekly education classes, David Bowie often spoke of his love for the duo and called them “Kraftwerk’s wayward, anarchistic brothers”, in the 1990s Stereolab paid NEU! homage in their Franco-Germanic avant-Europop and further co-signs come from Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Thom Yorke, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Sonic Youth and Placebo.
Stephen Morris of New Order has today shared his and Gabe Gurnsey’s rework of NEU!’s ‘Hallogallo’, and explains how much the group means to him: “I first heard NEU! some time late in 1972 not long after the first album came out. I think I got it as a birthday present. I was 15 and I’d never heard anything like it. It was absolutely brilliant. From the first few hypnotic seconds of ‘Hallogallo’ I was hooked. NEU! were the best thing I’d ever heard. I had no idea who Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger were, there were no interviews in the music papers, but the two tiny photos on the back of the bright red sleeve said all I needed to know. They were my kind of people. The sound NEU! made was very REAL – alive and emotional. Ambient and driving – it was like they were there in my bedroom with me. This was the sort of music I wanted to make.. 50 years later you can hear their influence everywhere”.
Rother and Dinger were yin and yang-like in their temperamental dissimilarity. Rother preferred to hover in the wings, face half-hidden by curtains of hair, responsible for the ambient drones and melodic foundation of NEU!. Dinger was a romantic but an angrier man, a self-styled “working class hero” at loggerheads with his family, attacking his drum kit with, at times, literal bloody violence. Dinger hankered for the centre stage, an ambition he would eventually fulfil with his own project, La Düsseldorf. And yet, there was between the duo what both Rother and Dinger’s widow described as a “blind understanding”. They were in sync, in lockstep from the beginning. They never argued over music, they simply rolled it out, mostly wordless, mostly instrumental, perfectly complementary.
The NEU! anniversary boxset is made up of CD and vinyl boxsets, each of which containing the first three albums, as well as the double album Tribute, which features reworks from The National, Fink, Mogwai, Man Man, Alexis Taylor, Stephen Morris and Gabe Gurnsey, Yann Tiersen, Guerilla Toss and They Hate Change. NEU! paved the road ahead, created a model of forward propulsion away from hidebound rock cliches. Which is why the NEU! Tribute volume is especially appropriate; NEU! showed how much there is for subsequent generations to unpack in NEU!, how much is buried, implied in their sound.
