The singer embodied the experimental German band’s adventurous spirit throughout his career
The German band Can, whose former singer Damo Suzuki has died at the age of 74, were innovators in many ways, but particularly because the group harboured two of the most original rock vocalists who ever lived. While their 1969 debut album, Monster Movie, featured the machine-gun poetic stylings of American expat Malcolm Mooney, it was Japanese free spirit Kenji “Damo” Suzuki, who appeared on three stunning studio albums between 1971 and 1973, who most completely embodied their adventurous ethos.
A 1971 TV clip from the long-running German series Beat Club shows guitarist Michael Karoli, drummer Jaki Liebezeit, bassist Holger Czukay and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt – all in luminous psychedelic colour – methodically coalescing around the abstract groove of the song Paperhouse. After about a minute of jazzy extemporisation, the camera cuts suddenly to the extraordinary figure of Suzuki, stick-thin with cascading hair and naked to the waist. He sings in blank verse with no rhyme scheme, often hard to decipher and gliding freely between soundalike words – but the gentle, reflective longing is unmistakable. Towards the end, you finally catch one line clearly: “You can make everything what you want with the head”. The sense of infinite possibility that suffused Suzuki’s lyrics resonated perfectly with the adventurous spirit of Can – whose genesis in part was through the West German art scene – and his fluid wordplay was at the heart of some of the strangest and most exotic rock of the 1970s.
Derek Walmsley is a music writer based in London and the former editor of the Wire
