I Was There – Damo Suzuki at Shoreditch 1-2-3-4, 09/07/11 & unseen video interview

A previously unpublished interview with the former Can frontman

Fortune favours the brave, they say. Although they also say that you should never meet your idols.

Luckily, in retrospect, when you’re a journalist scouring a backstage bar with your director and camera person in tow, and you bump into the lead singer of one of the most celebrated and influential bands that lived, there’s little time for nerves to settle in. You just go for it. Fail we may, as Andrew Weatherall’s famous tattoo almost put it, interview we must.

Amazingly, a sweet smile and an affirmative answer from Damo Suzuki – for it was he, frontman of the mightly Can during their 70s peak – means that within a few seconds we’ve found a quiet corner of the hospitality area and the camera is rolling. Yikes! List of questions? Strategy? Preparation? Erm….

Suzuki, who died at the weekend, was not to worry about such things. “The past is not worth thinking about,” he tells us about half way through the interview, an hour in total, but since edited to the 13 of the most audible and coheremt minutes, and here published for the first time. “The moment and the future is more important.”

Just as it was stunning news to discover – on the mainstream news, no less – that Damo had passed, it’s hard even now, looking at this footage, to take on board this is a man in his 60s. His impish smile and zen body language, as well as his disitinctly un-dogmatic approach, give him an air of the boyish and playful, his conversation peppered with laughs and smiles. Witness the way he generously brushes aside my schoolbioy error about his love of improvisation in the opening exchanges – he left Can because they wanted to break their 100% improvisation rule – where other luminaries of his renown would have got the hump.

His unwillingness to discuss Can is understandable – he left the band in 1973 after a relatively short if incredibly rich and seminal tenure during which many of their classic albums were produced and embarked on what he called his ‘unending world tour’, enrolling local musicians into ‘the network’ wherever he went rather, always working from scratch and without rehearshal.

At Shoreditch’s 1-2-3-4 Festival, that crew of musicians included Thomas Cohen – then of the band SCUM, later a solo artist of note and, in tabloid terms, the partner of the late Peaches Geldof. Later in the day, we crowded into one of the festival’s tents and watched Damo give an intense, all-or-nothing performance of cathartic, primal exhotations that totally electrified all present. I stood behind Geldof and – in true nosey journalist style – watched over her shoulder as she posted picture after picture on social media. When she died in 2014, the first image that came to mind was her tramping across the Shoreditch site lugging Cohen’s guitar case with her as they headed off after the gig.

Unlike her, Damo lived to the fairly ripe old age of 74 and spent most of those years doing precisely what he wanted, refusing to be overshadowed by his considerable legacy and spreading his positivity, energy and fearless creativity wherever he went. He will be missed, but his imopact will be felt by many generations to come.

Ben Willmott

Can’s Live In Paris 1973 album, featuring Damo Suzuki, is available to pre-order here

With thanks to Sam Chmaberlaine, my collaborator on the day