When Branson Met Faust: How a Sneaky Swindle Legitimized Krautrock
The term “krautrock” was originally coined by the British music press of the 1970s. A catchall for the exciting and experimental music coming out of Germany at the time, it was intended as a derogatory term applied by the bitter denizens of a country still smarting from World War II. But they weren’t the only ones: the original krautrock musicians were looking to forge a different path, a more utopian, utilitarian path, away from the horrors perpetrated by the generation before them. Krautrock covered a wide array of styles, from the acid-soaked primitivism of Amon Düül II, to the funky freakouts of Can, to the smooth “motorik” beat of Neu!, to the cold, danceable futurism of Kraftwerk. But there was one band that was more bizarre and daring than all of these groups combined and would eventually find themselves strange bedfellows to an eccentric millionaire, as part of a great krautrock swindle. This is their story.
Faust first came together in 1969, in the rural town of Wümme. With bassist/vocalist Jean-Hervé Péron and drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier serving as the defacto leaders, the band took the communal approach of Amon Düül II, but went even farther out. The music of Faust can oftentimes resemble anything but music. In addition to the requisite rock instrumentation, you can also expect to hear horns, tape loops, shortwave radios, sheet metal, even an industrial cement mixer. Under the tutelage of producer Uwe Nettelbeck — a known associate of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist organization — Faust landed a deal with Polydor records, and released two albums, 1971’s Faust and 1972’s Faust So Far.
These records are challenging, but in a playful way. For Faust, music meant ultimate freedom. All the rules of how a song is supposed to work — chorus, verse, middle eight, even syncopation — were thrown completely out the window. While Faust may have amused themselves and their hippie cohorts, it didn’t mean much in the way of success. One industry showcase, at the Hamburg Musikhalle, proved especially disastrous. The band’s equipment completely broke down during the first moments of the show, and the audience was told to go have a drink at the bar while they set about their repairs. When the show finally restarted, many hours later, all the industry suits were long gone, so the band invited the remaining audience members onstage for a free-form jam that lasted until the wee hours of the morning. Faust were dropped by Polydor not long after.
But the industry came calling anyway in the form of Richard Branson and Virgin Records. Though he’s seen as something of a smug playboy today, Branson’s original vision for Virgin Records came from humble backgrounds and was intended to highlight some of the most out-there music of the day; their first release was composer Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (which you know as the theme music from The Exorcist), and they would go on to release records by everyone from Aussie prog rockers Gong to Jon Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols experimental outfit Public Image Ltd. What now seems like a weird anomaly in a world where the Virgin brand is all but omnipotent was actually a perfect fit: Branson made it his mission to break Faust to a larger audience in Britain. It would be no easy feat, but leave it to Branson to find a way.
Sure enough, cultural observers were shocked when Faust’s first effort for Virgin, 1973’s The Faust Tapes, entered the charts at #12 and went on to sell somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 copies. This is especially unprecedented when you consider the actual contents of The Faust Tapes: two untitled sides of vinyl, around 23 minutes each, comprised of snippets of raw audio from the band’s archive of taped rehearsals arranged in an uninterrupted audio collage. ABBA this wasn’t. So how did Branson pull this off? By selling the album for the extremely low price of 49p, the going price of a seven-inch single. Once the scheme was uncovered, The Faust Tapes was quickly declared ineligible for chart placement, but by then, the damage was done. Branson had succeeded in turning England on to the strange and wonderful world of Faust.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqWm_hDRluc
Sadly, the victory was to be short-lived. The London recording sessions for their next album, 1974’s Faust IV, took a heavy toll on the band, who just wanted to retreat back to their uncomplicated lives in Wümmi, away from the music industry. When the recordings for their next album — which reportedly would’ve been called Faust V — were rejected by Virgin in 1975, the band split up, and didn’t surface again for nearly two decades. The recordings from the Faust V sessions would eventually surface on the compilations Munich and Elsewhere and 71 Minutes of Faust.
Today, Faust continues to record and tour on their own terms, Péron and Zappi still at the helm, lugging their trusty industrial cement mixer around the world, leaving minds blown in their wake. Though their Virgin years may have seemed like a bust at the time, Faust did more than any other German band of that era to legitimize their style of music the world over, not least of all through the opening track of their best album and final Virgin release, Faust IV: a 12-minute pulsating drone of amorphous guitars and synthesizers, painting beauty, suggesting infinite possibilities. Its title? “Krautrock.”
