The late 1960s and early 1970s saw in West Germany the formation of an extraordinary handful of experimental groups, including Amon Düül 2, Can, Kraftwerk, Neu! and Cluster. These groups were often misunderstood and even ignored, not least in their own country, and in the UK were banded together under the term ‘Krautrock’, which they understandably resented.

Today, the Krautrock groups are regarded as having exercised a huge influence on subsequent generations and genres including techno, post-punk, electropop, ambient and ‘post-rock’.

However, perhaps the strangest of all of these avant-garde outfits, certainly the one with the strangest back story, is Faust, who formed in Hamburg and released their debut album on the German Polydor label in 1971.

In the late 1960s, West Germany’s youth, in common with much of Europe and the USA, was at the barricades. A catalyst for protest had been the killing of a student, Benno Ohnesorg, by the police during a demonstration in West Berlin against the state visit of the Shah of Iran.

Rock provided the soundtrack to this mood of insurrection and visiting groups like Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and Pink Floyd were a touchstone and inspiration to emergent young German groups.

However, young West Germans had their own reason to experience a new dawn of anger – the first generation to come of age and be conscious of the crimes of their forefathers during the Third Reich, unmentioned for decades around the family table.

In his song Plastic People, Frank Zappa sneered, “Watch the Nazis run your town!” It was a hyperbolic line, with a young American audience in mind – however in West Germany, actual Nazis (or at least Altnazis, ex-Nazis) were running actual towns, having wisely shed their old beliefs but clung to power. A dull, amnesiac cloud of quiet authoritarianism hung over West Germany, materially but not yet morally revived.

Pact with the devil?

Born in 1940, Uwe Nettelbeck was a left wing journalist and critic who was one of the mouthpieces of this new mood of dissent – he had briefly worked on konkret, the same magazine for which future terrorist Ulrike Meinhof also wrote. He was also conscious of a new awakening in German underground music.

In liaison with an A&R man from the label Polydor, he persuaded the label that he was the man who could create for them a “German Beatles”, who could have the same cultural impact as the Fab Four, who themselves, it so happened, had stayed in Hamburg in their pre-fame days, earning their rock ’n’ roll spurs playing seedy dives in the red-light district around the Reeperbahn.

It was always an improbable idea – a major record label attempting to replicate a pop sensation that had arisen without planning permission from the music industry. However, Polydor agreed to fund the enterprise, in which Nettelbeck put together members of two groups, Nukleus and Campylognatus Citelli and merged them into one. The name Faust was a reference both to the pact-making Doctor and the German word for ‘fist’, as demonstrated on the extraordinary x-ray cover of their eponymous debut album.

The group, including Jean-Hervé Péron, Hans-Joachim Irmler, Werner Diermaier and Rudolf Sosna decamped to the remote village of Wümme where they set up studio at a disused school, with a skilled professional engineer, Kurt Graupner, to oversee their efforts.

Their brief was to come up with “something new” – however, Polydor got a great deal more “newness” than they bargained for.

This was evident from the album’s opening track, Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?, a spliced collage of piano flourishes, spoken-word segments, mock-marching music and blasts of primitive electronics. It also commences with what sounds like segments of The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and The Beatles’ All You Need Is Love going up in flames in a crackle of electronics.