I grew up in Brisbane Australia, and while it wasn’t the edge of the known world, it was pretty far removed from the music capitals of rock.

Bands of the stature of Zeppelin and Tull came through about once a year, but if you had any interest in things esoteric, then the only sources of info were the sea-mail copies of NME and Melody Maker that arrived 3 months late to give us a belated view of that revered world where the mighty walked on a daily basis.

London was viewed as the main source of music as very few US bands seemed to deem it worthwhile making the trip to such a far-off outpost.

Such it was that a 15 year old schoolboy came to read the famous 1971 Duncan Fallowell article in MM about CAN and the German scene, and I was immediately transfixed. I was a big fan of VDGG and Crimson and anything else that deviated from the dominance of the blues boom 12 –bar, (although I loved early Savoy Brown and Canned Heat) and for reasons unknown, had a fascination with repetitive beats, This meant that Zappa’s Return of the Son of Monster Magnet was one of my favourite pieces, and Hawkwind’s In Search of Space had electrified me with it’s long, driving, You Shouldn’t Do That.

The MM article was a glimpse of treasures unimagined.

I immediately approached the local import shop but the Australian record companies had mounted a fierce campaign to stamp them out, and they generally tended to bring in US copies for whatever reason, so there was nothing to be had from that quarter.

I was so desperate to hear any of this music that I took a big old cassette player into an arthouse cinema at Bulimba and recorded distant out of phase rudiments of Mother Sky from Deep End, which was enough to give me a taste. It was like an addiction; I wrote letters to import shops in the UK and Europe until I finally managed to get Tago Mago in about mid 72 . I couldn’t believe it, this was all I’d dreamed about and more. My little gang would go to each other’s houses when our parents were out and blast it as loud as we could from start to finish like a ritual.

As I was a nascent musician I contacted some mates who were diligently learning Slade songs and immediately went overboard trying to convince them that this was the way of the future, “driving repetition fellers; trust me”. I had already sourced various audio generators and pedals so we began slavishly imitating CAN, and later, Neu to the total detriment of our careers in the local School Dance market, but we carried on fired by Faust and Ash Ra Tempel and all the rest of the stuff I was now managing to get from import shops in bigger cities down south. I had a pretty idealised view of all this though, as I found out when a couple of German DJ’s arrived in town to set up their hot shot sound gear at one of the pubs where we hung out. They’d never heard of any of this stuff, and it was a shock to me: here were these guys from the promised land; and all they knew about was

The Doobie Bros.

They had some James Brown and Sly though, so we soon had packed dance floors thumping to Yoo Doo Right and Cold Sweat followed by Hallogallo.

I like to think it was pioneering stuff, and considering this was mid 73, pretty progressive for the backwater we lived in.

My band couldn’t get gigs doing it live though, that would have been too much for the fat boogie merchants who ran the local scene…we were “fucken weirdos playin heavy shit” and had to be squashed at all costs.

After a while differing musical opinions led to a major brawl and I smashed my knuckles belting the drummer’s teeth out; ended up in hospital with gangrene of my right hand, and came within an few hours of amputation. This obviously meant I couldn’t play for a while, so I decided to sell all my possessions and go to Europe and hear this stuff for real.

I arrived in Germany in Easter 74, and started hitching around looking for the action.

I couldn’t find it: there was no major rock scene as I’d dreamed, in fact the whole thing seemed virtually underground. No Amon Duul 11 down your local pub so to speak. Apart from RMO in Amsterdam, I couldn’t catch anybody really noteworthy, so after a while I gave up and went to London where I found plenty to see like Edgar Broughton and Greenslade, but all the bigger bands like Gentle Giant or Crimson had gone to the US for most of their touring due to lack of real commercial success at home, so I’d come all this way to see bands who either didn’t play much, or in obscure places, or had pissed off to greener pastures.

I was still well placed to see quite a lot though, and after a few months it was clear that I was better off staying in London and all the good stuff came to you, and so it was that Gong and Tangerine Dream, PFM and lots of LSD at last led me to some sort of nirvana. One night Magma were on at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse: I’d never really heard a bar of them properly, but liked the look of the album covers when I’d seen them, so I went along, and it was the most incredible musical experience of my life, here was everything I’d dreamed about bigger and better than the imagination could have produced……the power, the driving bass, the awesome drumming and relentless brutal rhythms. It was virtually a spiritual experience. I felt that CAN would be even better and if they could bring Tago Mago to life then Magma would be left in the dust.

It wasn’t to be so.

I finally got to see my legendary heroes at the Dagenham Roundhouse later that year.

It was the Babaluma tour and the whole vibe of the band was different, a more dreamy contemplative sound was now their direction, and the Mother Sky juggernaut sound 5 years old.

I still had them on an impossible pedestal and they sort of fell off it that night.

Karoli was unwell for whatever reason and the band meandered through lots of half-baked ideas till they locked in on various themes from the recent couple of albums. Some of it was sublime, but a lot was utter crap, and it wasn’t my imagination, as a recent listen to the bootleg I did that night proved. It was great to see them at last though, and I didn’t really walk away disappointed, but I definitely didn’t see what I had waited all those years for, which of course wasn’t their fault, it was my leftover vision and they’d moved on, as they should have. But still, that vision had sustained me through a lot of long nights in the middle of nowhere and the influence would never leave me.

When I got back to Australia I didn’t play for a couple of years till the hand cleared up and then reformed the band and we again went down that path of collective improvisation that Can had perfected, and we still sounded a lot like them. I came back to London with our demos in early 77 in time to see Punk arrive, and no-one was interested in oddball Aussies recycling Krautrock, John Peel was complimentary about the bits he heard; as were the record companies like Virgin and Charisma who gave me a personal hearing (can you imagine that today?) but the boat was gone and we struggled home.

The CAN albums grew less and less interesting as the 70’s progressed, (as did all that German stuff), although I caught ASHRA in 77 and that was pretty amazing, but a bit of a last gasp for me.

The French seemed to have taken the baton up, and bands like Heldon, Weidorje and ZAO were far more interesting than anything that the tired German scene could come up with.

It was all over by about 78 for my money, (the recent fanatic reappraisal of all this stuff notwithstanding.) A lot of obscure works are now being given far more weight than they deserve, but in the end it’s the big names that had the goods, and they stand the test of time.

I have to say that now I’ve seen footage of the Damo line-up, they were a bit messy live from the start and the sound we imagined they’d have owed a lot to Holger’s studio skills, which is not to knock the albums: they were and are masterpieces we’ll never see the like of again. Most of us can only imagine what it would have felt like to hear the band in full throttle in 69-70. I don’t know. I did my best to find out, and I’m glad I did however it turned out

My teenage worship of CAN only lasted 3 years or so, but it was something that led me out of my suburban swamp and into the real world in all sorts of ways, and for that I thank them.