Damo Suzuki and Paul Woods – I Am Damo Suzuki

Omnibus Press

Damo Suzuki will be seventy years old next year and has spent the best part of half of those traversing the globe with two distinct iterations of his musical caravan; first the Damo Suzuki Band / Network and latterly the ever-evolving global musical cast that are his Sound Carriers. Interspersed in those years were twenty-six spent working full time for a Japanese company that manufactured measuring instruments, marrying twice and having three children, and also spending long bouts in hospital with two occurrences of life-threatening illness. However and much to his eternal chagrin, he will always be best known for the four years spent in Can. This is a frustration to him, because there is only one gear for Damo and that is forward.

I was fortunate to catch him a couple of times; once in Bristol with Cul de Sac, and once again in Bristol with Makoto Kawabata and a local rhythm section. This was in the nineties or early 2000s, and you always had the feeling that finally he had found his musical niche — and that health and God willing, he would continue until he dropped.

This book, instigated by Paul Woods, must have taken a lot of his time and feels like a real labour of love. Not only is most of it direct quotes from central protagonists in Damo’s personal and musical lives, it is interspersed with sections where Damo discusses his discovery of God and how he has worked towards the ethical decisions that have brought him this far. At times, it feels as though Paul is following him with a microscope, as if he has discovered a species of human with which we are unfamiliar and to a certain extent, he has a point.

Leaving Japan a day after his eighteenth birthday, after a little meandering he finds himself in a remote Swedish village where he chooses to stay with some kindly souls who clearly have never seen a Japanese person before. The same thing happens on a farm in Ireland. He seems to want to live as these people do and to assimilate what they have learnt, as if building his persona piece by piece, country by country. Paul manages to uncover people who remember him from these bizarre sojourns decades previously and we learn a little of the young wanderer from their recollections.

Hearing from his siblings, wives and children is quite fascinating, and there are two chapters which are essentially diaries of him riffing his way across Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali and parts of the Sahara as if he were James Bond, hanging around in a central location waiting to be abducted (I’m being a little facetious, but that is what he does, hoping for people to put him up and show him how they live, be it in a dirt floor shack or a crumbling hotel). It is a fascinating insight into a psyche that appears to know no fear and assumes only the best in people. When we descend into accounts of his illness, the accounts become a little lachrymose and that is unsurprising; his second wife assumed he would die, and it is partly their shared belief in God and his teachings that kept them going. For the atheists or agnostics amongst us, this is where the going becomes heavy, but it is worth pursuing.

Things also become a little tricky when discussing certain personal attitudes towards immigration and European governmental policy. You do have to bite your tongue a little, and realise that this is a man about whom we would know nothing if it weren’t for his chance encounter with Holger Czukay. He is essentially an adventurous everyman who through rigorous discipline has found himself in a totally unexpected position. I keep thinking of the character played by Peter Sellers in Being There, but with a little more nous and an absolute love of people.

Of the characters interviewed for the book, besides his family, it is interesting and rather touching to hear so much affection from Jaki Liebezeit, and there are a lot of really beneficial insights from Dominik von Senger of Guru Guru and the Damo Suzuki Band, but really if you are in any way a fan of Damo rather than Can, then this is the book for you. His recollections on his time in Can are interesting, but hold no more import than the Dunkelziffer albums and the Damo Suzuki Band albums. If anything, these hold more joy for him because he was more integral to their construction; and as to the Sound Carriers, this is where his heart truly lies.

I Am Damo Suzuki is a bit of a rollercoaster emotionally, particularly when he dwells on those comrades that have passed on, but it is all integral to the story. By Paul allowing the protagonists to tell the story and just gently guiding the focus as it progresses, he has done a sensitive job of editing and he stays quite well back. There is an exhaustive discography at the end, covering anything in which Damo has been musically involved, but I have to admit it turned out to be a really entertaining and at times surprising read. Anyone who has seen Damo Suzuki live and maybe wonders what it is that makes him tick would do well to give this a go, and if you are a music fan in general, you will see a whole other approach to how a live tour can be conducted.

-Mr Olivetti-