Deutsche Wall
Beachtung! For a wild new book of vintage German rock posters.
AS MOJO WENT to press, one of Howard Devoto’s original hand-rendered posters for a 1976 Sex Pistols/Buzzcocks gig sold for a cool £22,000. Further proof that the vintage concert bill demi-monde exerts a strange but undeniable pull, offering portals into legendary moments forever on the brink of explosion.
There are many such moments in new 192-page book German Underground Concert Posters 1968-1981 (Popdom), which features scarce playbills for gigs by Can, Faust, Neu!, Amon Düül II and other names familiar to Anglo audiences, plus others for lesser-known rockers including Hoity-Toity, Dog Breath, Missus Beastly and High Crack. Never intended to last, they offer novel perspectives on otherwise known quantities, revealing playful aspects to early Kraftwerk, for example, or illuminating the uncompromising radicalism of the era. A 1969 poster for an Agitation Free gig of ‘Acid Rock Guerilla Rock’ (sic) features two gas-masked, Molotov cocktail-waving urban fighters and promises ‘Terror and Drugs’. As the foreword observes, the concert was stopped by the police.
Collecting the work of designers including Jürgen and Falk Rogner, Emil Schult, Jürgen Spohn and many others, the book was put together by Gerd Siekmann and Sebastian Köpcke. The former was introduced to West Germany’s Kosmische scene when he was 13, after he saw
Berlin’s Birth Control play a youth club in 1972. “When the band plays, I feel electrified,” he recalls. “A new universe opens up for me. Suddenly, I am part of the subculture… Krautrock has seduced me.”
As well as private individuals, the posters were provided by musicians including the late Florian Schneider (Kraftwerk), Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Mani Neumeier (Guru Guru) and the Klaus Dinger Archive. They were “often made with the defiant courage of the self-taught individual,” say the curators, who add, with winning understatement, “in this way, historic documents with their own charm were created.”
“A poster for ‘Acid Rock Guerilla Rock’… promises ‘Terror and Drugs.’’’