CONNY PLANK: THE POTENTIAL OF NOISE
8/10 Born disruptor: the Godfather Of Krautrock examined
CONNY PLANK is one of that rare subset of producers as key to the music he helped create as the artists that were his charges. History remembers him as the Godfather Of Krautrock, a gentle giant who helped usher early records by Kraftwerk, Neu! and Cluster into being. But for Plank, it was just the start. A radical thinker entranced by dub, drugs and the promise of new technology, throughout the ’80s he worked with forward-thinking groups like Devo, Eurythmics and Ultravox (although notoriously, not U2; invited to produce The Joshua Tree, Plank turned down the job after meeting Bono, declaring “I cannot work with this singer”).
Documentary films about record producers risk a certain dryness, however entertaining their subject. The twist in The Potential Of Noise is that the film’s co director and host is Stefan Plank – Conny’s son, who was just 13 when his father died from laryngeal cancer in 1987. Plank sets out to speak to his father’s friends and collaborators, to piece together the life of the man he barely remembers. Cue shot of him cruising along a German autobahn in a gleaming Volkswagen, Neu!’s seminal motorik track “Hallogallo” blasting from the speakers.
Plank emerges as a born disruptor – a man of no fixed aesthetic, but with a great ear and a million wild ideas. “Politically, he was a revolutionary; musically he was a revolutionary,” recalls Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke, while Rudolf Schenker of The Scorpions recalls Plank’s skill for producing while intoxicated: “How could he smoke and mix so precisely?” We watch Plank building a studio in an old farmhouse outside Cologne, shifting breezeblocks as roosters crow (the studio itself stood in a converted pig-sty, the control room occupying an old stable). In Plank’s own words, his new home’s remoteness was a tactic, a way to screen out unworthy collaborators.
Just when the film is feeling slightly hagiographic, things take a turn. We get a glimpse of Plank as a somewhat distant father, lost in his world of sound. Holger Czukay is painfully blunt. “He wasn’t really concerned with you,” he tells Stefan. “You weren’t part of his universe.” Yet this is balanced by moments of surprising emotion. American hip-hop duo Whodini speak fondly of their work with Plank – the first producer, they say, who really understood them – and seem genuinely moved to meet that tousel-haired child that hung around their sessions, except now all grown up. Along the way, there is some fleeting but fantastic live footage, including a raucous DAF performance and a wild clip of Neu! from 1974 – Michael Rother a proto glam hooligan throwing wild guitar shapes, Klaus Dinger a malevolent hippy clattering away at the drums. The music Plank helped usher into existence still has the capacity to thrill.