Author: wamdines

Back in the days when God was a boy and bath nights were as much a weekly treat as they were a necessity, the local flea-pit cinema would occasionally open its doors late to deviate from its scheduled programming to indulge in all-night horror marathons, cult movies or concert films, catering for those whose tastes and interests ran counter to the mainstream.

It may seem rather quaint now in a time of information overload, instant-access entertainment and short attention spans, but for those who made the effort to rock up with smuggled beers, a packet of 10 fags and perhaps something more exotic, these encounters with the counterculture were as meaningfully informative and impactful as they were fun.

Ergo Pink Floyd‘s Live At Pompeii, which showed the generation that latched on to music in the 70s and 80s that there was so much more to the band than the imperial period that ran from the release of 1973’s The Dark Side Of The Moon to the final brick that built The Wall six years later.

Filmed and recorded live over several days in October 1971 in the ruins of Pompeii’s Roman amphitheatre with only the camera crew as the audience, these performances show a band in transition as they begin to find their direction and identity following the enforced departure of founder member Syd Barrett after his drug-induced meltdown.

With one foot in the band’s psychedelic past and the other pointing at the future, the updated and retitled Pink Floyd At Pompeii – MCMLXXII is a vital historical snapshot. Earlier material such as Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun and Careful With That Axe, Eugene are less concerned with the discipline of song structure – or indeed songcraft – as they are with creating music that enhances altered states of consciousness via the exploitation of sound effects and guitar pedals. Looking forward with the then-contemporary dips into Meddle via One Of These Days and the monumental Echoes (here split into two parts), Pink Floyd take off from the more disciplined launch pads of melody and purpose.

Visually cleaned up, and remixed by Steven Wilson, Pink Floyd At Pompeii – MCMLXXII is liberated from memories of scratchy sound and grainy visuals. Crucially, as a document of four hungry musicians working in common cause and without later bells, whistles and recriminations, this stands as Pink Floyd’s best live album.

Julian Marszalek is the former Reviews Editor of The Blues Magazine. He has written about music for Music365, Yahoo! Music, The Quietus, The Guardian, NME and Shindig! among many others. As the Deputy Online News Editor at Xfm he revealed exclusively that Nick Cave’s second novel was on the way. During his two-decade career, he’s interviewed the likes of Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne, and has been ranted at by John Lydon. He’s also in the select group of music journalists to have actually got on with Lou Reed. Marszalek taught music journalism at Middlesex University and co-ran the genre-fluid Stow Festival in Walthamstow for six years.

Readers of a certain age may recall seeing Pink Floyd At Pompeii as part of a series of all-nighter screenings featuring various rock docs in the mid-70s – events frequently accompanied by a large alcohol intake beforehand. Inevitably, as the movies in the dark and warmth of the cinema ticked by, and the booze and the wee hours took their toll, falling asleep was often the outcome.

Happily there’s no danger of nodding off in front of this extended edition of Floyd’s historic performance exhumed from their archives. With the 85-minute feature film version and a 60-minute edit, lovingly restored from the original 35mm negative, and audio remixed by Steven Wilson in Dolby Atmos, 5.1 and stereo, this 54-year-old concert now boasts crisp audio that nicely complements the improved visuals. Vinyl fans will also covet the two-LP soundtrack accompanying this release.

Taking place in a deserted amphitheatre in October 1971 with roadies and director Adrian Maben’s camera crew looking on, the group roam through a memorable set including A Saucerful Of Secrets, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, Careful With That Axe, Eugene and a truly vibrant rendition of Echoes from Meddle – which the band had only finished mixing the previous month.

The performance, interspersed with studio footage and interviews, captures Floyd at a major transition in their career. While the music of Echoes has a foot in their psych/underground past, it also points to future elements they’re seen honing for The Dark Side Of The Moon, which will arrive just three months later.

Hindsight inevitably freights portions of the interviews with a degree of extra resonance. Roger Waters – seen in Abbey Road studios working on a record that would sell more than four million copies in the UK alone – scoffs at the then-media reports that rock was a dying art form, declaring, “The market in rock’n’roll is expanding at a phenomenal rate.”

Elsewhere, the ever-diplomatic Nick Mason, asked about the state of the band’s interpersonal relationships, states that all is well; but admits that the real danger to future cohesion could be “when one person finds that what he’s doing doesn’t interest him, or he feels he could do something better by himself.”

Even the amphitheatre’s oval in which the band play seems to foreshadow the famous circular projection screen that would feature in Floyd shows from 1974 onwards.

All told, this is a truly historic artefact.

Pink Floyd At Pompeii – MCMLXXII is out now in DVD, Blu-ray, CD and vinyl formats.

Sid’s feature articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Prog, Classic Rock, Record Collector, Q, Mojo and Uncut. A full-time freelance writer with hundreds of sleevenotes and essays for both indie and major record labels to his credit, his book, In The Court Of King Crimson, an acclaimed biography of King Crimson, was substantially revised and expanded in 2019 to coincide with the band’s 50th Anniversary. Alongside appearances on radio and TV, he has lectured on jazz and progressive music in the UK and Europe.  

A resident of Whitley Bay in north-east England, he spends far too much time posting photographs of LPs he’s listening to on Twitter and Facebook.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

Half a century on from the release of their first post-Damo Suzuki release, Soon Over Babaluma, Can remain one of the most unique bands out there. As their late-period live albums campaign continues, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt looks back on the creation of their fifth record and explores the genius of the krautrock pioneers.

Of all the exceptional bands that emerged from Germany during the 1960s and 70s, none were more daring than Can. The pioneering group are now back in the public eye thanks to their ongoing series of archival live performances. They’ve also been celebrating the 50th anniversary of Soon Over Babaluma, the band’s first studio release following the departure of charismatic frontman Damo Suzuki in 1973.

Vocals on the album were handled by late guitarist Michael Karoli and keyboard player Irmin Schmidt. The latter, now 87, and original vocalist Malcolm Mooney are the only surviving members of Can’s early and classic eras, following the passing of Suzuki last year.

“It happened one generation after culture was cancelled and ruined and devastated,” says Schmidt, pondering the great wave of German musical invention. “The courage arose not to imitate, but to create something that could only be done when you grew up in this country.”

Born in Berlin in 1937, the war naturally had a profound effect on his childhood. “I heard a lot of music at home. My parents both played piano. It was normal for me. Then came the bombing and we were evacuated. After the war we had nothing. Our house was bombed – everything was lost.”

He began taking lessons on the piano and it soon became apparent that he had an instinctive talent. “From 12, 13, it was just part of my life: I was conducting the school orchestra when I was 16,” he says. “I studied piano, conducting and composition at university. I founded an ensemble and performed a lot of contemporary music in my early 20s.”

In Cologne he studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen, the groundbreaking composer dubbed ‘the father of electronic music’ – until, in 1968, Schmidt took the fateful decision to pursue a different kind of project. “I was conducting and making piano recitals,” he recalls, “especially contemporary classical music. I had studied with Stockhausen and thought, ‘This is not the only contemporary music.’

“Jazz is as much of basic importance as contemporary music of the 20th century, so I was looking for other people who were based in jazz or in contemporary electronics, and also in the most recent contemporary music: rock. I wanted to create an ensemble where the members had roots in different genres.”

Drummer Jaki Liebezeit was the first recruit. “I had played with him before in film and theatre productions. He was based in Cologne, like me, and I heard him very often with his free-jazz group – although I distrusted free jazz. I didn’t see the sense in playing drums using a bow for the cymbals and this kind of thing. So I was very unsure if it was right when Jaki said he was the drummer I was looking for. My idea of a jazz drummer was Max Roach. Jaki said, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t play free jazz!’”

Bassist Holger Czukay, guitarist Michael Karoli and vocalist Malcolm Mooney rounded out the original version of Can. Czukay had also studied under Stockhausen and had a keen interest in experimental music. Karoli came from a jazz background but had been turned on to rock by the Rolling Stones.

“The idea was that already there was this collage of four musicians, which came from totally different routes,” says Schmidt. “Jaki was a jazz drummer, Holger was into electronics, and Michael was a rock musician. My idea was also that it should be totally spontaneous – finding our way together, composing together; not me again, sitting down and composing and then telling others what to play. I had done that already.”

They found their direction by playing together, he reports. “I don’t think improvising is really the right word; it was kind of intuitive, instant composing. We were just playing. Playing for hours and hours, and all of a sudden the right groove was there. Which doesn’t mean that Jaki alone created the groove – the groove can be created by four people at the same time. And from this groove we created the song.”

A lucky break gave Can an unusual venue for the recording of their first two albums, Monster Movie (1969) and Tago Mago (1971). Schloss Nörvenich, a sprawling 15th-century castle located just outside of Cologne, was being rented by art collector Christoph Vohwinkel, who became a friend of Schmidt.

“I was very active in the art scene,” says the keyboardist. “Most of my friends were not musicians, but painters. I made features and wrote speeches for the opening of art shows and things like this.” The pair were introduced via a gallery. “The gallery told him, ‘There’s this group looking for a place and you have this big castle – maybe there’s room for them.’ And he said, ‘Yes, there is!’”

The band’s equipment was basic, but that was never a problem. “We wanted to have our own production means,” says Schmidt, “and not be dependent on any producer or record company or whatever. So we only recorded on two two-track machines. On the second you could overdub, but only once.

“During recording, it forces you to listen exactly to the others to create the right balance. It’s an extremely good education; an extremely good way to get the group together, because you’re so dependent on listening more than playing. Listening was the secret.”

Although not a driving factor, money was also a consideration. “Of course, we wanted to make a living because we were professional musicians. I hadn’t learned anything else. When you study music, you do it because you want to become a musician. That doesn’t mean I wanted to get rich. You just want to make a living; not be dependent on anything else.”

Helpfully, Can’s popularity was steadily growing via the use of their single Spoon as the theme tune to the German TV series Das Messer. By 1972 and third album, Ege Bamyasi, they’d found a new working space. “We had to move out of the castle – we were not the only guests. The sculptor Ulrich Rückriem lived there with his family, and they had kids. We were working at night, and of course, that was too much noise.”

Schmidt’s wife Hildegard, who was also Can’s manager, discovered an abandoned cinema in the municipality of Weilerswist, which became the band’s official studio, Inner Space. Schmidt recalls: “It gradually grew from two two-track machines. By the time of Landed in 1975, we had a 16-track recording machine and a mixing desk.”

New equipment meant new ways of working. “We all had doubts about whether it changed for the good. The way we did it before forced us to listen. I think Soon Over Babaluma was the last one we recorded on two-track – and I think it’s the last of our best albums.”

Released in November 1974, Soon Over Babaluma combines elements of ambient, jazz and rock into a dazzling display of invention. “I remember the recording of Come Sta, La Luna,” says Schmidt, “because that was one of the most refined and subtle recording processes you could achieve on a two-track machine. It’s full of nuance with background sounds like in a restaurant or in a saloon, and all these very, very subtle touches – the maximum you could get with overdubbing on two tracks.”

Opening number Dizzy Dizzy made for another highlight. “It’s a wonderful piece and one of our best,” Schmidt enthuses. “We put it in our new series of live recordings, and it’s also on The Lost Tapes [a 2012 compilation]. It shows the potential – it could grow.”

With Mooney long gone, and replacement Suzuki also having departed after three albums, Schmidt stepped up for vocals on Babaluma. “Damo left, but we thought there should be some vocals. So Michael sang on Dizzy Dizzy, and I sang on Come Sta, La Luna. Then from the next record on we said, ‘We don’t really need a singer.’

“We realised – and you can hear it now with this live series – that when we played without a singer it was just as good. And it was so intense. Jaki always said: ‘Forget about singers; they’re only troublemakers!’ Playing live was always a strong point of the band.”

He admits: “Before going onstage I have terrible anxiety, but the moment I go on I feel at home – all anxiety is gone.” It had been the same since his earliest days of professional work. “My teachers, when they saw me performing, said, ‘Why can’t you play like this in our lessons?’ I was always better, much better, when I had an audience.”

It’s the unpredictability and adaptability of Can that makes listening to their music such an engrossing experience. As Schmidt says, “No record of Can repeats the same feeling; the same style. Every record was different. It was not that we said we had to make everything different. It grew totally naturally; we didn’t want to repeat ourselves.”

From the start, they knew they were charting a new path. “When we listened to what we’d done, of course we realised it sounded totally different. Everybody in Germany – journalists mostly – said we were not able to play like the American and English groups. We didn’t want to.”

Is Schmidt surprised that the music Can made 50 years ago is still being listened to? “Not really,” he says. “I mean, I’m very glad that it succeeded in a way, but with a classical education, you play music which is four or five hundred years old. Being successful means you last.

“If you make sense as a composer, then it should last at least as long as you live. And since I’m 87, and it still lasts, I have some hope that it will last for the rest of my life!”

Chris Wheatley is an author and writer based in Oxford, UK. You can find his writing in Prog magazine, Vintage Rock, Longreads, What Culture, Songlines, Loudwire, London Jazz News and many other websites and publications. He has too many records, too many guitars, and not enough cats.

White Lion’s stunning Fight To Survive was originally recorded in February 1984. It was a record that really sounded like no other before or since.

Sure, it had Bonham-esque drums and Van Halen-style power chords. But it was also dark, heavy and topped with the distinctive hint-of-an-accent vocals of a Danish-born frontman who only a few years before had been a member of a hugely successful pop band back home in his native Copenhagen. However, due to record label shenanigans, Fight To Survive wouldn’t hit the racks until November 1985 as a Japanese import, after the quartet had lost a mega-bucks deal with Elektra.

White Lion’s charismatic singer Mike Tramp (real name Michael Trempenau) had first been thrust into the limelight at the age of 15 as a member of the Danish teen pop band Mabel. Huge stars throughout Scandinavia and Spain, the group fleetingly came to the attention of UK audiences thanks to being Denmark’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1978 with Boom Boom (coming 16th out of 20 entries and awarded ‘nul points’ by the UK).

However, by the time the 80s dawned, and by now living as tax exiles in Spain, Tramp and cohorts began to set their sights on the USA. As Mabel morphed into the harder-edged Studs (releasing a rare, self-titled album through the Hispavox label in 1981), an opportunity to chaperone Van Halen’s David Lee Roth around Madrid made Tramp’s mind up and the group moved to New York in July 1982, adopting the new moniker of Lion along the way.

It was in the Big Apple that the Dane encountered guitarist Vito Bratta, whose band Dreamer played a local club with Tramp and friends as support. Finding a kindred spirit in the Italian-American axe-slinger, Tramp chose to put together a new incarnation of Lion (soon to be renamed White Lion) with Bratta.

Tramp recalls entering a studio in New York on May 24, 1983 with Brazilian composer and producer Eumir Deodato – who allegedly bailed from the session after a couple of hours – to record White Lion’s first demo and “walking out at 8am the next morning with four songs on tape”. He and Bratta had been joined by bassist Bruce Terkildsen and drummer Michael Clayton Arbeeny (the latter eventually going on to greater things with Tyketto).

This rhythm team had departed when Tramp and Bratta cut a second tape in August (Mike states this was the true birth of the Tramp/Bratta songwriting alliance) and it became a source of frustration for the duo that they found difficulty in finding the perfect band dynamic.

“We had a hard time to find the right rhythm section,” notes Tramp. “It wasn’t just about the ability to play but also about image. When we auditioned we were getting construction workers and pizza makers. None were right. Eventually we got Nicky Capozzi [a former member of local hard rock outfits Storm and Cities]. He was a friend of Vito’s. Nicky was a great drummer. We got him to go with ‘the look’ and he had an enormous impact on our sound.

“After we’d found Nicky we got a connection to Felix Robinson [the bassist had answered a music paper advertisement placed by the trio]. Vito and I were Angel fans, but a lot of years had gone by since the days of [Angel’s fourth album] White Hot. He was a different kind of guy. When we played together we knew we hadn’t gotten exactly what we had wanted, but we needed to progress and we had to get out and play.”

By this point White Lion had acquired new management in Michael and George Parente, who co-owned the L’Amour rock club in Brooklyn.

“They were straight-to-the-point guys, right out of The Sopranos,” Tramp recalls. “They said they wanted to work with us. It was the right thing for us to do. They added Richard Sanders and Bill Franzblau on the business side and we were able to build a rehearsal room underneath the club. That was the home for White Lion – a whole book could be written about what went on in that room.”

Despite developing a reputation as a hot-ticket live act on the New York club scene, record company interest wasn’t particularly forthcoming. “We couldn’t get a record contract anywhere, but Richard Sanders also managed Peter Hauke [who produced ex-Rainbow keysman Tony Carey and his Planet P Project]. Peter owned Hotline recording studios in Frankfurt.

“I remember standing in the airport in February 1984, being given a bag of money, signing a contract and being sent to Germany, where we worked for a month. It was a great environment; we were able to work with no interference or distractions. It was swift. We’d written and rehearsed at Nicky’s house, so it was about getting the songs down.

“Whenever I talk about White Lion I say that [second album] Pride is the definitive White Lion album, as it was that record where Vito and I really gelled as songwriters. But what you have to remember is that Fight To Survive was recorded at a time when we were listening to Ozzy, Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Dio and Iron Maiden. Vito was more a disciple of Randy Rhoads than Eddie Van Halen, and Nicky was a huge Rush fan. Broken Heart aside, we were putting together some dark and heavy stuff.”

Indeed they were, although El Salvador had interesting origins, having been written by Tramp in Spain back in 1980 and inspired lyrically by Kim Wilde’s Cambodia.

“It was a Lion song that Vito took and turned into Iron Maiden,” Tramp laughs. “Anyway, we came back with the finished album and three weeks went by before we signed a massive deal with Elektra. Although it was the president, Bob Krasnow, who signed us, one of the other main guys, Mike Bone [executive VP of marketing] didn’t like us.

“Still, we started preparing to do press and we did a photo shoot for hours in New York City. Towards the end of the session, with dawn breaking, I crawled up on the lion outside the Public Library and lay back David Lee Roth style. Two weeks later the artwork came back and a few jaws dropped that they used the photo they did.”

But as they waited for the album’s release, and just played what they believed to be their final show at L’Amour before heading out further afield on tour to promote Fight To Survive, a bomb was dropped on White Lion.

“We were never given a reason as to why we were dropped,” states Tramp, of the group’s enforced exit from Elektra. “We had a deal one day and it was gone the next, but we still had the money in the bank. All I’ve ever figured is that Shout At The Devil-era Mötley Crüe were signed to Elektra, as were Dokken, and that maybe we were too close to both image-wise for the record company to deal with. Richard eventually licensed the album to JVC Victor in Japan and it came out a year later.”

By the time Fight To Survive was released, White Lion had long split from both Robinson and Capozzi. Bassist Robinson had departed within a month of the group returning from Frankfurt and, according to Tramp, was fired having played a mere two shows. Robinson, however, begs to differ, telling me a few years ago that he quit, had played a greater part in writing and arranging the songs than he was given credit for, and that he also had concerns over the band’s management.

“It would be hard for us to say we were ripped off. The management didn’t do anything wrong,” Tramp argues.

Robinson was somewhat older than his fellow bandmates, and concedes that he had a different outlook on things at that time in his life, so it was probably inevitable that a split would have occurred at some point anyway. Tramp says now: “We didn’t have long enough together but when we were in Frankfurt on the album it was really great to work with Felix.”

Dave ‘The Beast’ Spitz (brother of Anthrax guitarist Danny and an ex-member of fellow New York hard rock outfit Americade) was recruited in Robinson’s place and (after ex-Angel drummer Barry Brandt was mentioned for the role – “He never showed up,” says Tramp) former Anthrax drummer Greg D’Angelo replaced a ‘retiring’ Capozzi.

Although the new men were pictured on the back cover of the album, neither of them, of course, had played a note on it. Spitz wouldn’t hang around for long anyway, enticed by an offer to join Black Sabbath. Former Tyketto bassist James LoMenzo came in (after the group had worked briefly with Bruno Ravel) and although Tramp acknowledges it was a real struggle for survival at times, Fight To Survive gained them a foothold.

With worldwide interest gathering, and having built up a following on the east coast, a deal with Atlantic was secured after a “fucking killer” gig at Hammerjacks in Baltimore. Atlantic (ironically a sister label under the Warner Music umbrella to Elektra) released Pride in 1987.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock Presents AOR 12, published in September 2014. Fight To Survive was issued as a deluxe edition by Rock Candy the same year.

A resident of Germany in the late 1970s, Dave Reynolds returned to the UK a full-on metalhead thanks to life-changing exposure to Kiss, Angel, Cheap Trick, Van Halen and Status Quo. Arriving home with the NWOBHM in full swing, he would go on to write for Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Metal Forces and AOR. He is a co-author of the International Encyclopaedia Of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal.