Free Apathy for the Devil by Nick Kent Page A

next two years, I’d come to know the members of Can quite well and can tell you from first-hand experience that they were scholarly types who also liked nothing more than to indulge in magic rituals and take drugs. But there was clearly some method to their collective madness because whatever they
were doing simply seeped into the music itself, to the point where it seemed to glisten before the listener like a snake hypnotising its prey as it coiled its way around the room. Miles Davis had been exploring similar other-worldly musical terrains of late on albums like Bitches Brew and Live-Evil but Miles’s new music had quickly proven itself too radical and abrasive-sounding for the UK prog bands and jazz-rock-fusion combos still in vogue to attempt to copy; only the German ‘underground rock’ bands of the late sixties had been affected by it, and from out of their ranks only Can had been able to take the basic ingredients-a James Brown funk rhythm and plenty of spacey dissonance from the keyboards and electric guitar - and create something genuinely awe-inspiring. What they were doing back then was never going to trouble the mainstream, but thirty-five years later Can’s musical influence on what passes today for contemporary rock is far easier to pinpoint than the paltry legacies left by Jethro Tull and Yes, that era’s most popular platinum-selling ‘cerebral rock’ entities. In this respect, the Cologne-based outfit played a similar role in the early seventies to the one the Velvet Underground played in the late sixties. When they were both actually in existence, only a few people bought their records or saw them live, but those same few were sufficiently moved by what they’d heard and seen to start their own groups as a direct consequence.
    Still, Can’s arrival on the London live music scene was something of a well-kept secret, attended by only a small smattering of ticket-holders and freeloaders and garnering little press coverage. All eyes were fixed instead on another act then working the same circuit to riotous acclaim. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars project was going through the roof. The record wasn’t even out yet but the hype was everywhere in the
press and on billboards, and Bowie was causing havoc throughout the country with his new live show.
    These days, when people talk about the end of the sixties they like to say that the decade didn’t actually die until 1974 or even 1976. They’re wrong: the seventies came into full effect in January of 1972 when David Bowie reinvented himself as Ziggy Stardust. The role made him an instant megastar and gave him the momentum to stamp his personality across the new decade in the all-imposing way the Beatles had managed in the sixties. He’d spent years marooned in the backwaters of the music industry but now - royally abetted by a cigar-chomping mega-manager named Tony Defries who modelled himself obsessively on Elvis Presley’s mentor Colonel Tom Parker and a pushy Yank wife named Angie - Bowie suddenly held the keys to the superhighway.
    It had started in early January when he appeared with freshly cropped red hair on the cover of Melody Maker trumpeting his bisexuality and generally being outrageous. A few short days after the paper’s publication, Bowie had performed his London debut concert as Ziggy Stardust, a show I managed to attend. As he and the Spiders from Mars were about to play their first song, the equipment malfunctioned and there was a sudden agonising silence that was instantly felt throughout the hall. If Bowie hadn’t reacted promptly, he would most likely have been laughed off the stage that night and Ziggy Stardust’s fate would have been seriously compromised. But - being a born trouper - he’d risen to the occasion by injecting just the right hint of self-mockery, pointing to each flamboyant article of clothing he was adorned in and reciting the name of its designer in an exaggerated camp