"Wer zich am Kommerziellen musikgeschmack orientiert dient der Reaktion / He who orients himself to commercial music-taste deserves the reaction " Early slogan
Favorite rumours of the
A collection of facts and rumours. Please note that all of this not necessarily has to be true.
To become a legend, creating a myth is half the work...
-- Add missing rumors (and read others additions) to this
section here!
--
As someone asked Blixa if he wanted to participate, Einstürzende Neubauten was invented more or less by accident for a festival in 1 April 1980. As Blixa said later, "I just called some friends".
It has been said that Blixa Bargeld took the name from a felt tip brand - Blixa Color, plus Bargeld, which means cash in German. On the other hand, he just might be using his original name, people have interresting names in Germany...
Blixa Bargeld has worked as a grave digger and as a garbage man, two very well payed jobs in Berlin. He also owned a little store for cassettes and second hand things called Eisengrau.
Between tours and recording sessions he is (or was) a bar tender. He has brought fame to Risiko, a place where he used to work.
For a short period Blixa sung in a punk band before Einstürzende. He mentions this as "just a bunch of kids that wanted me to sing because the way I looked. The only thing which came out of this was that I started singing".
Blixa claims he found the name "Die Geniale Dilletanten". One day Wolfgang Müller of "Die Tödliche Doris" came into his shop and saw a homemade pin that said "Ich bin ein Genialer Dilletant". He became overwhelmed and used the name for various manifests and writings, which were to name the Berliner underground era.
The primitive man with a sunwheel head that has been Einstürzendes symbol and logotype since the first LP is said to be found at Stonehenge. Other, maybe more reliable, sources say that the band made up this logo themselves.
The first place they used for rehearsals was a small room within a highway bridge in the outcasts of West-Berlin. Its location was kept as a secret and friends coming to visit were blindfolded. Within the room a candle was always lit to indicate the amount of oxygene.
The recording session in the flyover that resulted in "Stahlversionen" on the first single and the cassette "Stahlmusik" is rumored to exist on video.
FM Einhehit and Mark Chung formerly played with a punk / new wave band called Abwärts. As they both joined EN, Abwärts ceased to exist until 1988, when F.M. Einheit reunited the group.
Einheit means (an) unit in German. After the reunion of Germany F.M. is often called "Mufti"
Alexander Hacke appeared on different occasions during Die Geniale Dilletanten, first as Borsig-Werke and then as von Borsig. The name comes from the place where his father worked.
Blixa claims he hate guitars in pop music, so he had to learn how to play the guitar without playing on it.
Einstürzende´s main inspiration is music they don´t like. When exposed, they listen carefully, analyzes, deconstruct...and react.
The back cover shot on the first album is a parody on the back cover shot on Pink Floyd´s classical "Umma Gumma"- double album.
On an early concert in Oslo, Norway, they left the stage by drilling a hole in the wall, through which they escaped.
After their first German tour in 1981, they refused to play in Western Germany until 1985.
Mona Mur + Die Meter is another short piece of the German new-wave history. Die Meter were Gode B, Marc Chung, F.M.Einheit & Alex von Borsig. "Jeszcze Polka", a 12" EP appears on Rip Off Verlag in spring 1982. They do, among others, a cover of the 1982 German
Grand Prix winner "Ein bisschen Frieden".
Nick Cave and The Birthday Party saw a short piece of an Einstürznde show in Dutch television as they toured Holland. They were impressed and became friends with EN. Shortly thereafter they abandoned London and moved to Berlin.
The Birthday Party guitarist Rowland S. Howard and the at the time Birthday Party-hangaround Lydia Lunch appeared on the 12" Thirsty Animal.
Blixa also appears on the title track on the last Birthday Party mini album "Mutiny!". Shortly after he claims that Nick Cave
has sung on some EN songs, but none of these recordings will ever be released until they are all dead...
Other groups have followed the trail where Neubauten were stalkers. Australian SPK renewed their sound and incooperated a big portion of metal junk, Foetus added portions of tortured metal into his songs and brittish Test Dept. started their career 1981 with metal-only instrumentation. Although none of these groups had the same chaotic and anarchistic attitude towards their deed as their gurus.
"Strategien gegen arcitektur 80=83", the compilation album of material recorded from 1980 to 1983, was compiled by Einstürzende and Jim "Foetus" Thirlwell to present them to an English public. This album were initially presented for Stevø of Some Bizarre records, but as Neubauten were halfway through recording O.T., Stevø neglected this compilation in favour for the "real" album. Therefore Mute were asked to release it, as they did.
The "Concerto for Voices and Machinery" were performed at the Institution of Contemporary Art in London early 1984. On this legendary occasion Einstürzende Neubauten (without Blixa) were aided by Stevø of Some Bizzare, Frank Tovey (a.k.a. Fad Gadget) and Genesis P-Orridge.
The aim was to incoorperate the sounds performed by the performers into an orchestral arrangement. The instrumentation were made up by concrete mixers, electric saws, acetylene torhes and generators.
Something went wrong and a large piece of the stage were destroyed and the ICA staff forced the concerto to a quick end, but 30 or so hardcore fans refused to leave the hall. The performers later told : "After the breakdown, we decided to try and get below the stage. We´d heard that there were tunnels from (nearby subway station) Whitehall and the Palace running underneath the stage and had half the aim of getting to them. But the stage was reinforced. We decided to stop when it looked like someone might get hurt."
On the tour following "Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T." they opened with playing "Sand". "Seele Brennt" were also included in the set. In several interviews they claimed the following album to be a collection of modern love songs.
Performing live in Göteborg, Sweden, they threw molotov cocktails at the public.
The choice of playing and recording the Lee Hazelwood-cover "Sand" were to get rid of "that metal bending image" and show that it was the attitude to the music that matters.
In mid -80´s F.M Einheit appeared on several English records. He added some noice to Test Dept.´s "Beating The Retreat". He has also aided Diamanda Galas on her "Saint of the Pit"-album (1986) and on several live occations.
Blixa appears in the Lis Ann Tiboda film "Bad blood for the Vampire" in 1984.
Blixa also appears in the film "Dandy" in 1987 (directed by Peter Sampel), where he plays dice and goes to the pyramides. Also starring Nick Cave, Nina Hagen and Lene Lovich.
The Halber Mensch-tour were the first tour when they left the pneumatic drills at home. They started the set with "Zerstörte Zelle"
In USA they made a performance together with the Survival Research Laboratorys in the Mojave desert.
In 1986 a whole lot of the EN tapes originally recorded for "1/2 Mensch" were heard on both Depeche Mode´s and Howard Jones´ albums, and Holger Hiller´s album "Oben Im Eck" , due to the common producer Gareth Jones. This was the origin to Freibank, the EN:s publishing company. Freibank is run by Mark Chung:
The song "Morning Dew" was intended to be released as a single by the Japanese Wave-label in 1987, but it never appeared (or did it ?).
As Kiddy Citny took his group "Sprung aus den Wolken" into a studio 1986 he got some guitars added to the album "Story of Electricity" by Alexander Hacke.
Alex produced and added some guitars to the first LP of the Swedish group Mobile Whorehouse (with members from The Leater Nun) in 1990.
He also produced Miranda Sex Garden's "Fairytales of Slavery" in 1994.
Blixa contributed vocals to the tracks "Johnny Guitar" and "How Long" (a duet
with Anita Lane) on "Head On" by Die Haut (a band which
includes Bad Seed Thomas Wydler) in 1992.
"How Long" (re-titled "Subterranean World") also appears on Anita Lane's album "Dirty Pearl" in 1993. This release also features EN involvement on
the tracks "Blume" (as taken from EN's "Tabula Rasa"), "Picture of Mary" (with
Bargeld playing guitar), "Stories of Your Dreams" (guitars by Alex Hacke), and
"A Prison In The Desert". This last track is taken from the soundtrack to "Ghost...of the civil dead".
F.M. Einheit wrote the music for the film DEN KINDER SATANS in 1994
The movie was not very good but the musical parts of F.M are
pretty cool and are in the same way as his album 'Stein'.
The radio play "Apocalypse Live" produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk and Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel,
starring Phil Minton, Alex Hacke, Hans Joachim Friedrichs, Ulrike Haage and FM Einheit, received the best of all available awards, the "Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden 1994".
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