(Rob Hughes) to EDGAR FROESE from TANGERINE DREAM – MARCH 2011
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INTERVIEW QUESTIONS FROM CLASSIC PROG MAGAZINE (Rob Hughes) to EDGAR FROESE from TANGERINE DREAM – MARCH 2011 - FULL VERSION - (1) What were your earliest musical inspirations? I believe one of your girlfriends was a classical pianist and that your late father was fond of opera. Did any of this have a bearing on your musical direction? Fortunately not – otherwise I would have become a very mediocre classical piano player. So it was my positive destiny to have omit this even if it was a painful procedure. It’s true that I fell in love with a female student during my studies at the Berlin Academy of Arts – at the age of 19. She used to be an opera singer. So we were sitting by candle light in a romantic twilight atmosphere, she sang Mozart arias or her favorite aria ‘Ave Maria’ while I was playing like a stupid blinded idiot the grand piano to accompany her truly beautiful voice. It was absolutely unreal. One year later she left me for a 10 years older Porsche car distributor because her view of life was to become famous and to make money – she never did but I was heartbroken. Instead of playing piano sonatas I was too pissed off that I changed over to my second love – the guitar – and started playing Stones cover versions in Berlins’ underground scene – so destiny had a very good eye on me. My father actually was an amateur opera singer – but just behind closed doors as he was too shy to perform in public. The audience was sitting in one room, he sang in another one, but loud enough to be heard on the streets. (2) How much of a bearing did growing up in post-war Germany have in the music you decided to make? Does this sense of creating something almost entirely new derive from the fact that Germany had to reinvent itself somehow? I’m sure that all things you experience in life will affect you one way or the other. I grew up in the post-war situation in West Berlin. People had to wait in long queues to get their allocated daily food. Even as a young kid I already realized that I was a person who jumped off my life train at a wrong time, at a wrong station, under wrong conditions. Later I realized that under the law of causality I would not have had another choice anyway. The first deep impression I remember was the brutal injustice I noticed within the neighborhood of most people I have to had contact with. Endless fraud, people telling tall stories all the time, suspiciousness from everybody’s side, crooked behavior and finally the missing of honest love and warm interest as far as your personal needs were concerned. Decades later, I moved into the political and musical underground because my deep aversion against the phoney establishment was engraved into my system – both conscious and unconscious. Till today I never sympathized with governmental politics, commercial interests or the mediocre taste of the masses. (3) In the '60s you worked with Salvador Dali. Can you explain what kind of a character he really was, why he thought your music was "rotten, religious music" and what influence the surrealist and dadaist movements had on your approach to Tangerine Dream? Was it really a case of 'everything is possible'? My relationship to Dali was greatly chappy. On one hand I was truly fascinated by his work during my time as a student at the academy, on the other hand I was somehow disgusted by some of his political attitudes. Because of my very early experiences I hated everything which could have been connected to the term ‘fascism’ in any way. Dali himself never got tired looking up to political leaders like Franco and his sympathizers. During one of my longer conversations I had with him in his olive garden in Cadaques, he turned it into the opposite by saying that he decided to be against everything the public like and adore. So if the masses like democracy he stands for dictatorship and the other way round. ‘If you’re a divine individual, you have to think and behave outside every rule the Bourgeoisie tries to dictate,’ he explained in his mixture of Catalan, English and French. Funny enough, he never said a word in his mother tongue even if I told him that I was able to communicate in his language. But nevertheless, as an artist and cosmopolitan being he was absolutely fascinating. I really think to some extend he was an egocentric performer with great knowledge of his art form and metaphysics as well. On August 8 th 1967 TD performed “The Resurrection of Rotten Christianity – Music for a Sculpture”. That took place as a happening in the olive garden behind his home and atelier in front of a sculpture built out of Coca Cola cans – some flotsam he found in the sea and olive tree branches. (4) You were using synthesizers prominently with Tangerine Dream as early as 1971's Alpha Centauri . Can you explain what kind of a reaction you received from others? Did people think synths were just a passing fad? There was no statement telling that synths would be a passing fad, because before entering in such conclusion you had to understand what it was a passing fad. Here was the problem. Critics even had no words to describe their dislikes of the equipment we were using because they hadn’t seen it before. That did show perfectly the common behavior of people in general. What they don’t know, they don’t like in the first place. Exception: Once you’ve made yourself rich with your inventions, everybody becomes a good friend and has known from the start that you’re going to make it great. It’s the typical behavior pattern we all know about. No, TD didn’t have a great open-minded crowd at their early days. There was a rejection attitude all the way through till we’ve reached number 10 with our first British release ‘Phaedra’ at the Melody Maker charts. I remember the first ever LP review in Britain was truly half a page in Melody Maker – Mr. Steve Lake, one of the MM journalists opened his review for ‘Phaedra’ with the headline ‘Eat more s…, 100.000 flies can’t be wrong.’ Anyway, that was our breakthrough into the international market even if Mr. Lake would have done everything to protect the market from the ‘German knob turners’ – he hated us. Without exaggerating our musical capabilities, but we were just very much ahead of time. (5) Was there a sense of musical community in Germany in the late '60s/early '70s? Did you ever feel part of the so-called 'Krautrock' movement? There was a strong musical community in Germany during that period – but TD wasn’t a part of it. We couldn’t even invite others for a jam session or jam around with others because when we were switching on the first knobs everybody became very suspicious like if we were just starting a rocket for a one-way space exploration. We didn’t use any of the Rock’ n ’Roll terms in music nor had we considered practicing a song structure for many days. There was one experience back in 1974 during a gig in Berlin with a band called ‘Amon Düül II’ which was quite strangely organized as well. Before we started I gave the keynote of our philosophy by saying: ‘Dear friends, it’s December the 6 th 1971at 8 pm in the city of West Berlin. Please be that kind to improvise with us the 6 th of December, 8 pm 1971 in Berlin in a way that it never can be repeated.’ They stared at me as if I had taken my head off putting it under my arms…. (6) Can you tell me a little about your relationship with Richard Branson when you signed with Virgin? I've read you played endless games of chess with him for a while? I didn’t play endless games but just five on his houseboat back in August 1973. He lost three and won two. Richard was a business entertainer all the way through. His ‘Midas Touch’ came from choosing the right people who did help him to reach a position in life he ambitiously wanted to reach. Also he never got tired to play the very high risk card. Others would have gone crazy, bankrupt or would have ended up in a lunatic asylum. Richard never left the plate being a sunny kid everybody has to love – and obviously his little very simple life philosophy paid off. Finally we ended up disagreeing about life, music and business because he turned the world into a personal Virgin space cruiser not realizing that life can and has to be more than a fun fair and commercial success. (7) When it came to recording Phaedra , you were using Moog and sequencers for the first time. What did these instruments allow you to express that you couldn't express before? It goes back to my early years as a pupil of classical music when I realized that everything in musical structure is bass oriented. Specifically Bach’s compositions where he explained it perfectly in his fugues and toccatas that even the strict counterpoint in top of a bass line is the backbone of every serious composition. Even in various free forms of musical developments in later years it always reminded me never to forget about Bach’s serious ‘bass line crutches’.