Acid, improv, cosmic coincidences and an attempt to assassinate Richard Nixon via telekinesis - all in a nacht's work for Tangerine Dream, the biggest band of Germany's '70s sonic revolution. As the prime movers in the group's rise tell Christoph Dallach in his new Krautrock oral history, "Anything could happen at any moment."
ON WEST BERLIN’S LATE-’60s SCENE, where left-field musicians gathered to smoke weed and blow minds at Kreuzberg’s Zodiak Free Arts Lab, burly, moustachioed guitarist Edgar Froese cut a forbidding figure. Between 1965 and 1967 he had led beat group The Ones, but moved between psych and jazz into free rock as early line-ups of his Tangerine Dream waxed and waned.
The first TD album, 1970’s Electronic Meditation, featured Froese, drummer Klaus Schulze and multi-instrumentalist Conrad ‘Conny’ Schnitzler, and alternated meditative balms with intense pile-ups of guitar and organ. As the ’70s progressed, Froese’s group replaced their more conventional instrumentation – notably, the organ of Steve Schroyder, then Peter Baumann – with electronics, pioneered initially by drummer Christopher Franke. Their albums on the German Ohr label, and then Virgin Records, grew the band into a surprise fixture in the higher reaches of the UK charts – where their 1974 classic Phaedra peaked in the Top 20 – as they became synonymous, along with Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre, with the cutting edge of electronic music.
What was epic in their sound suited unconventional live music spaces, and some of the band’s most talked-about shows in the early to mid-’70s were in places of worship, the cathedrals of Reims, York, Liverpool and Coventry. In the ’80s and after (Franke left after 1987’s Tyger LP), Tangerine Dream retained an avid audience, and continue even now with a line-up (Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane and Paul Frick) endorsed by Edgar Froese, who passed in 2015.
However, the Tangerine Dream chapter of Christoph Dallach’s Neu Klang book, from which the following is extracted, concentrates on the group’s 1968-75 phase, when ‘the Tangs’ were at their most ground-breaking, culturally impactful and, frankly, bananas.
Jean-Michel Jarre: I once had a debate with Edgar Froese about which of us had started making electronic music first. I was certain Tangerine Dream came before me but Edgar said it was me, and Tangerine Dream had still been playing prog rock at the time when I was already working electronically. It was a funny argument – neither of us wanted to have come first.
Irmin Schmidt (Can): I went out with a schoolfriend in Berlin one time, the painter Peter Sorge. One night he dragged me along to the Zodiak, said there was a great gro
