Einstürzende Neubauten (live at Shepherd’s Bush Empire)

London
11 September 2024

“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre” – Walter Benjamin.

I first saw Einstürzende Neubauten live back in 1983; along with Malaria!, they were supporting The Birthday Party at The Lyceum in London and over the next few years I would try and see them as often as I could travelling to Berlin in the 80’s and Düsseldorf in the early ’90s to catch them live.

They were not just a band; they were my obsession for a while as I lived in various Neubauten t-shirts I owned. Over the years the band’s sound has changed, but has still remained uniquely ‘them’; no other band sounds like Neubauten. When I first saw them they were the sound of the dynamite exploding the collapsing new building — now they are more akin to the dust and debris falling to the ground in slow motion.

Neubauten are on tour to promote Rampen -Alien Pop Music and the set tonight of course leans heavily on that album, with both opening songs “Pestalozzi” and “Ist Ist” taken from it. These make a powerful combination as beginning salvos and show the majestic power that Neubauten could always conjure live. Tonight, the band avoid earlier material and focus more on tracks from 2000’s Silence Is Sexy onwards, but this still gives us twenty-four years of Neubauten’s incredibly beautiful and strange Dada-like songs that haunt the very air surrounding them.

Blixa Bargeld is an engaging performer; his voice drops to almost a whisper at points and then saws high into the atmosphere. Humour is in evidence too as he informs the audience that the shopping trolley onstage has been with them since 1983, and when Bargeld dons a feather boa though there is almost a sense of Weimar era decadence in his stage presence, harking back to Berlin’s time of glamour.

NU Unruh hits the array of instruments in front of him with force, passion and subtlety, and it’s good to see the bass spring still being used after all these years. Alexander Hacke’s bass is the melodic deep throb that holds some of the songs together, and at points it rumbles through the speakers like some tectonic aftershock. Jochen Arbeit’s guitar playing is sublime: he creates textures and produces howling noise, and at times he slides serpent-like over his fretboard and is just damn cool (OK, I have to admit I would like to see a Die Haut reunion at some point). Rudi Moser’s percussion adds depth and power alongside Unruh; he is a very different percussionist than FM Einheit, but suits the neu Neubauten with his fine work exploring the songs in new and interesting ways.

I once interviewed Blixa where he told me that the band rehearse more now than they did in their early days. This is shown on the set lists now for tours where the band have more of a standard series of numbers they perform, rather than throwing in wild cards or letting loose on too much experimental jamming. This is brought home in Blixa’s book Europe Crosswise: A Litany (2009 / 2022), where he records the same list over again on the tours that he is noting the events of.

Blixa explains that the track “Wedding” is about an area of Berlin; for those that know the city, it is probably the poorest area of the metropolis and has not seen the development boom that other places have, and in a strange way it probably feels most like the ’80s Berlin Neubauten grew out of. When “Sonnenbarke” is performed, somebody said it felt like the earth was moving beneath their feet, and this deep resonance flow is verschiebung der tektonischen platte that keeps Neubauten afloat on a sea of rubble.

Songs sound almost sensual at times and Bixa’s vocal carries this over; there is even something disquietingly tactile about songs like “How Did I Die”. But more than anything there feels more of a warm connection to their audience; many, like me, have been with them for forty years. Even the stark backdrop that makes the stage smaller seems to bring the band closer to its fans, this and the fact that the gig is being streamed and for many years the band have released their own material makes them seem more approachable than ever before.

At the end of the day, Neubauten have become something more similar to a Berlin blues band: they sing songs that capture certain shifting situations and hold them in amber while at the same time sounding both minimal and furious at points. This is a wonderful thing; they are most powerful when you can hear the breath of their almost silence before they hit you with falling masonry from dilapidated architecture that still hovers phantom-like in their most powerful songs.

Neubauten are always an overpowering force live and it’s good to see them still hitting the road and wowing audiences both old (like me) and the newer converts. Every time the band release something you know it will be special and this will always translate into a wonderful live experience. I hope that they carry on doing what they have always done best, which is being Einstürzende Neubauten with no excuses and a willingness to push the boundaries for both themselves and their audience.

-Gary Parsons-