Viva Lewes Issue #134 November 2017

ON THIS MONTH: MUSIC
faUSt
Experimental krautrock legends
How did you get to be so anti-conformist? It had
a lot to do with the upheaval of ’68: there was the
need for a bit of fresh air. The air was sticky with old
generals... we needed a reversal of the situation, an
evolution if not a revolution.
You used music to make a political point? I was
born an artist in a musical family, and so music became
the obvious language to express myself. Music
is powerful because it triggers fantasies, and leaves
huge room for your own interpretation.
Could you call faUSt a radical jazz band? Not at
all! Jazz musicians practise their scales up and down:
one of our first principles was that we don’t practise,
we just play. A more adequate description of us is
‘enlightened dilettantes’.
You soon got pigeon-holed as ‘krautrock’. It’s
an ugly word, that’s for sure. And ‘kraut’, of course,
is an insulting term. But it’s an interesting one: at
first the English music press needed a term for the
interesting music coming out of Germany, then it
rapidly developed into a specific description of a new
established genre, before prostituting itself to mean
any music from Germany that was a bit repetitive.
You exploded onto the record-buying British
market with The Faust Tapes on Virgin
Records… An exceptional cocktail. It was produced
by Uwe Nettelbeck and marketed by Richard
Branson, both very clever, far-seeing people. Richard
was a visionary. He picked us up after we had been
dropped by Polydor for being undesirables. Well,
we remained undesirables, so he dropped us too,
but not before we made him a hit record. An album
for the price of a single! It was financially successful
– though not for us – and it is an excellent, hugely
influential record: music as collage, cut and paste
techniques. We threw a stone in the pond and quite
a few ripples appeared.
In the late 70s you ‘disappeared’. That is part of
our legend. It was a grey period in the faUSt saga.
We breathed. We moved our bowels. We generated
children. We still played music, but we’d had enough
of the music business, so we played outside that.
There’s more than one faUSt playing nowadays…
There were originally six musicians in the
band, all from different backgrounds or nationalities:
communication difficulties, there were lots, lots,
lots. After 50 years there was bound to be a split,
and now we are two. One is the live faUSt, and the
other is [Hans Joachim] Irmler, who is more into the
recording side: he’s doing splendid things, and we
splendidly ignore each other and don’t throw stones
at each other.
Are you still a political band? Without being
dogmatic about it, more so than ever.
What do you think of Brexit?
You Britons are still driving on the wrong side of the
road, but your kitchen is better than it used to be.
Alex Leith was talking to Jean-Herve Peron (above right)
faUSt are playing the Con Club, November 23rd and
24th, £19
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