FOR a man robbed of a place in pop history, Hans-Joachim Roedelius is surprisingly serene. Then again, the gentle German who pioneered electronic rock in the late Sixties and early Seventies is now 70 years old, so there has been plenty of time to accept being overlooked. Still, with albums that predate debuts by both Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream in his back catalogue, Roedelius must be at least a little angry that his name rarely appears in rock encyclopaedias.
“Angry?” says Roedelius, softly, sitting in the corner of a tiny, trendy, record-label office in East London. “No, not at all. Nothing makes me angry. The only person I raise my voice to is my wife and she just tells me to be quiet.” Not even the mention of Kraftwerk, a band with whom Roedelius worked before they were famous, can incite much more than a smile.
Brian Eno has called Roedelius’s early Seventies band Harmonia “the world’s most important rock group”; David Bowie, U2’s the Edge and Julian Cope are among his high-profile fans, as are many of today’s more intelligent electronic acts.
Moreover, thanks to recent, long overdue reissues of some of his key recordings and an acclaimed biography by Stephen Iliffe, Painting with Sound, published 18 months ago, Roedelius is finally receiving some of the credit he deserves. His current project, Lunz, an ambient-classical act formed with the Grammy- winning American soundtrack composer Tim Story, has been one of his most successful to date. Next week sees the release of Lunz Reinterpretations, a double album on which an array of musicians — including Faultline, Adem, Elbow and even Lloyd Cole — remix their favourite Lunz tracks. Incredibly, it is the first time that Roedelius’s music has been remixed. If Reinterpretations sells well, Roedelius may take Lunz out on tour, with some of the remixers as guests.
For the past few decades he has relied mostly on his wife’s modest income as a teacher to bring up three children at their home in Austria. Making money from music, he claims, has never been a concern. “It would have been nice sometimes to be paid,” he smiles. “But had I been rich, I wouldn’t have made the same music. I wouldn’t have seen as much of life, and to create relevant art you need a lot of life experience.”
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Certainly, few artists can boast life experience on a par with Roedelius. Born into a well-connected, middle-class family in West Berlin, by ten he was a child star, having appeared in six films with some of Germany’s most popular actors. The war turned his life upside down. His family were forced to move, they lost all their money and, at 11, Roedelius was conscripted into the Volkspolizei.
“It was right at end of the war,” he recalls. “Hitler tried to make children soldiers to save Germany. I was sent to the communist part of Germany. First, the fascists tried to make me a follower, then the communists.” One day, asked to deliver post, he seized the opportunity to run away. He fled to East Germany where he lived with refugees, but at 18, attempting to return to the West to see his family, he was arrested and im prisoned. Released after two years and two months, Roedelius then trained as a masseur, a job he continued to practise off and on for three decades.
Living in West Berlin, however, it was the growing underground art scene that really caught his interest. In the late Sixties he formed an avant-garde collective called Human Being. Roedelius could neither read music nor play any instrument properly, so instead he made noise on pianos, cellos, flutes, electric guitars and even Mikados oil drums and fed it through echo machines, played with feedback and made tape loops of single notes.
At the time, Karlheinz Stockhausen was king of electronic composition, but his orchestral sound was too intellectual for Roedelius. He preferred pop and industrial noise, and with his first proper band, Kluster, he pioneered a new sound.
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“We created new music with generators and home-made instruments and treated the material with reverberation machines,” says Roedelius. “It was like a science project. In the beginning, it was just noise, but then it became more structured. We were making proper songs.”
The quiet man has never stopped making music. “I have it all at home,” says Roedelius, proudly. “Everything I ever recorded. There is about 200,000km of tape. One of these days I will archive it properly but, somehow, I just never find the time.”