‘Having limits is boring’: experimental survivor Damo Suzuki on Can, cancer and krautrock
In 2014 Damo Suzuki was diagnosed with colon cancer and given a 10% chance of survival. It was almost exactly 30 years earlier, when Suzuki was 33, that he was first diagnosed with the disease. The same cancer had killed his father when he was five.
When facing major surgery in 1983, his situation was made all the more life-threatening: due to Suzuki’s then faith as a Jehovah’s Witness, he couldn’t accept the blood transfusion he desperately required.
He survived both bouts of cancer. Now 72, he smiles warmly over Zoom from his home in Cologne, nonchalantly describing his situation. “Everything is OK,” he says. “I’m optimistic and if you have positive thoughts then everything will be good.”
Suzuki’s zen, positivity, dogged spirit and remarkable endurance is at the heart of a new documentary, Energy: A Film About Damo Suzuki, by Michelle Heighway. Shot over five years, it follows Suzuki as he attempts to continue a neverending global tour while mounting a herculean battle against a cancer that would see him operated on 40 times between 2014 and 2017. “The faith and resilience in his character is endless and I love that,” says Heighway. “It was so inspiring how he lived each day and moment like it was his only one. He was always in the now.”
Being in the now is the essence of Suzuki. Ever the itinerant, he left Japan in his teenage years to travel Europe to live in hippy communes. He is also a performer for whom improvised music is the only kind of music. Since surviving cancer in 1983 he has been performing without pause as the Network, playing live experimental improvisational music with ever-changing local musicians – his ensembles have included members of Mogwai, Black Midi and Bo Ningen – that he refers to as his sound carriers. It’s a ceaseless live run that even outweighs Bob Dylan’s celebrated touring stretch under the same banner.
Yet it’s as frontman of the pioneering German band Can that Suzuki remains best known. Between 1970 and 1973 he led the band through its unquestionable peak, including a trio of albums as bold and revolutionary as any in the 20th-century rock canon: Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days. But despite the band’s untouchable reputation as the archetypal krautrock outfit, cashing in on the legacy, nostalgia and status of Can is of little interest to Suzuki. “I’m not krautrock, I’m not German,” he says in the film, instead suggesting that journalists need to be more creative with their genrelabelling, offering “sushirock or sashimirock”.
He often refers to Can simply as “that German band” and will casually prevaricate about his time in them, claiming he can’t recall much because “I was always totally stoned”. Suzuki left the band to dedicate more time to religion, although some members claimed he’d been brainwashed by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. After his departure he stopped making music for a decade but re-emerged after recovering from cancer – and leaving the church.
He soon became locked into a perpetual quest for progress in music. “I’m not interested in hanging on to the past,” he says. “Because I cannot change it. If I cannot change it, I don’t want to spend time there. I like to spend time in the now because there I can create something new but in the past I cannot.”
Perhaps this ever-present attitude is bolstered by the fact that Suzuki never really set out to be where he ended up – he’s never had a plan. “I didn’t have any ambition to be a musician,” he says. It was while busking on the streets, performing intense vocal improvisations, that he accidentally ended up in Can. They saw his performance and invited him to sing with them that very night as an experiment. After the recent departure of previous vocalist Malcolm Mooney, Suzuki became a permanent member.
His unique style of singing – prone to fervent and unpredictable shrieks, gliding between multiple languages (including invented ones) with a lyrical style that favours the oblique rather than the narratively coherent – created a wildly exploratory sonic framework and band dynamic. This allowed Can to shift between stretched psychedelic grooves, eruptive blasts of avant-rock and a general amalgamation of such variant sounds and approaches – merging the bare-bones primitive with classically trained players – that remains a singular and inimitable force in music.
Suzuki has carried on this experimental approach over the years, embracing improvisation – often via one long musical piece played for an hour or two – in order to evade stagnation. “I don’t like to play the same piece again and again,” he says. “Repetition is boring. Every performance should be a unique experience.” He offers a football analogy to describe his artistic philosophy. “If you watch Sheffield Wednesday, you don’t know the score before the game starts,” he says. “Music, for me, is kind of like sport in that you don’t know any results before. People shouldn’t come to a concert and already have expectations. It should be an experience that we both go through together – a communication. Music is always a communication.”
For this reason Suzuki doesn’t record music or release albums himself. If the bands he plays with as his sound carriers wish to release a live album then that’s up to them. “I need money but the main point of my life isn’t to make bread from music,” he says. “Music is too important to think about as a business. I’ve never worked with any managers. I’m my own oneman company. I have complete freedom and no responsibilities to anyone.”
This is never more clear in the film than when Suzuki embarks on tours of DIY venues across the UK, sitting in small, shabby and palpably cold backstage areas, as he watches football or reads on an iPad while trying to mask the pain his cancer is causing him. “Music is healing me,” he justifies at one point. “At home, if I don’t do anything, I’m much more sick.” At one point he performs a staggering 24 concerts in 10 countries over eight weeks, all done with major operations taking place either side of that timeframe.
One 2016 concert during his treatment proved to be monumental. “I was in the middle of my heavy times with cancer,” he says. “I had bags in my body and everyone was worried about me. I hadn’t done a concert for two years. But this day was one of the most beautiful days I have ever experienced. Even I was doubting myself if I could make this happen but it really was one of the happiest moments of my life. I could have cried.”
At one point in the film Suzuki says “having limits is boring” – but even Covid drew a line for this seemingly unstoppable artist. He hasn’t toured since the pandemic struck and at the moment has shifted his creative forces elsewhere. “I paint,” he says. “Before I joined Can I wanted to be a comic book painter but I gave it up about 50 years ago. It was my dream to be a painter as a child and now at 72 I’m doing that.”
Despite a lifelong dedication to impulsive and groundbreaking musical adventures, he views the documentary that has been made about him as less of a music film and more of a document of hope. “It’s a message to other people who have heavy sickness,” he says. “I survived this and if somebody watches this film they may find motivation or strength. When I was sick, at times it felt like being in jail, I wasn’t allowed to eat anything for two weeks at one point. But now I can see a future that is really bright. I fear nothing.”
•Energy: A Film About Damo Suzuki tours the UK with Doc’n’Roll film festival, 30 Oct-11 Nov.