The Heart is a Drum: "Absolutely Nothing".
Documentary is in the eye of the beholder or at the very least in the scissors of the editor. Director Jacob Frossen has framed The Heart is a Drum as an epic Romantic quest, and that's a description its protagonist would agree with. In 1971 Klaus Dinger returned to Dussledorf with a tape-recording of a rowing boat trip he made with his Swedish girlfriend. The girlfriend had dumped him and moved to Norway and a heart-broken Dinger decamped to Germany to bury himself in music. He formed the band Neu! with Micheal Rother as an invocation, a magic spell to win back her love and at the centre of this new music was his simple, driving, limitless drumming, as constant as his romantic obsession, as invincible as his own heartbeat.
Its a bit of a sausage-fest in Belfast's Black Box for this sold-out screening of the film, part of the Out To Lunch festival. The middle-aged men have gathered in their glasses and their once black clothes and once black hair. The smell of warm vinyl is a soupy fug in the room as they sip methodically on their pints of Guinness and lean back in their chairs, arms folded over bellies. Complete disclosure: I fit in very well here.
Kim Gordon does the film's the narration as a cool chick listening to Neu!. There are interviews with Iggy Pop, Gudrun Gut and the reliably dreadful Bobby Gillespie and the whole is a rather beautifully realised document of a knight errant, an obsessive Gawain on a Grail quest. Dinger's career is framed as auto-destructive self-abasement, and anecdotal evidence of him gashing his hand on the cymbals and continuing to play while rinsing the front row of the audience in arcs of blood is presented as some sort of ritualistic penance. And there is a telling moment early on where Klaus quotes the Neu! song Hero's lyrics: "Honey went to Norway, to Norway." and the interviewer, nonplussed by this apparent non-sequitur, is anxious to move on and talk about drumming but Klaus stops him and suggests "If we could just go back to talking about my honey".
This is interesting because a) it does support the idea that Dinger was obsessed with his Swedish girlfriend and, like Damien's nanny in the Omen "Its all for you", and b) I never realised that song was in English. This romantic obsessiveness feels like a peculiar fit for the twenty first century. In the age of nice guys and incels this level of objectification, of idealisation looks like a distinctly unhealthy manifestation of toxic masculinity.* This is not Dante's Beatrice: this was a twenty year old girl he hasn't seen for thirty years. When the film makers track her down her pragmatic Scandinavian response to their questions is bathetic in the extreme. Stand down, Parsifal. The drawbridge is up and the oil is on Regulo Mark 6.
The talking heads are good value. Bowie is on German television in the early 90s, judging by his awful beard, and he's talking about his German influences. "Does anyone here like Neu!?" he scans the crowd. "One person!" and Bowie grins like a shark. Of the others Stephen Morris is a charming nerd, Gudrun Gut a delight, Iggy Pop sage and professorial and Emma Gaze very Brighton.
And then there's Bobby Gillespie. Sigh. When Bobby Gillespie speaks parts of my body atrophy: it's like rock 'n' roll ricin entering the system. Surely even he is bored of listening to Bobby Gillespie by now? The sheer distance between him, looking like Lizzie Birdsworth from Prisoner Cell Block H, and the twinkly-eyed, wry Iggy Pop, as donnish a man as ever got his tits out, is higher than the sun. To coin a phrase.
The film is beautifully made, nicely shaped and the soundtrack is phenomenal. If the object of a film about a musician is to make you want to go home and dig out all their records then this film really succeeds. But then with a back catalogue as good as Neu! and La Dusseldorf how could you miss? The middle-aged men - myself included - certainly enjoyed it. There was even a smattering of embarrassed applause at the end, that petered out rather quickly as we all realised that Klaus couldn't actually hear us.
Klaus Dinger was only fifty two when he died. The film attempts to find a through-line for his life in a sentimental heartbreak and perhaps that's partly true. The footage of him traveling around Dusseldorf on a tricycle wearing ballet pumps and a golfing visor with a feather in the brim, and occasionally dismounting to graffiti a heart onto the pavement certainly seems to identify him as a lovelorn eccentric. But he lived a brilliant life doing what he wanted, traveling around, making wonderful records, being critically lauded, praised by his peers and taking loads of drugs. There have been worse lives. And always that drumming, that brilliant, simple, beautiful, powerful drumming. That was his through-line, that was the love of his life.
He died of a heart-attack, of course. What else could he have died from? But that's me framing the story just like the film-makers did. I'm English: I enjoy the irony.
*From the stand-point of the 21st Century all masculine behaviour from the past looks distinctly unhealthy, of course. It mainly was.
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| The Dinger, not the dong. |
Its a bit of a sausage-fest in Belfast's Black Box for this sold-out screening of the film, part of the Out To Lunch festival. The middle-aged men have gathered in their glasses and their once black clothes and once black hair. The smell of warm vinyl is a soupy fug in the room as they sip methodically on their pints of Guinness and lean back in their chairs, arms folded over bellies. Complete disclosure: I fit in very well here.
Kim Gordon does the film's the narration as a cool chick listening to Neu!. There are interviews with Iggy Pop, Gudrun Gut and the reliably dreadful Bobby Gillespie and the whole is a rather beautifully realised document of a knight errant, an obsessive Gawain on a Grail quest. Dinger's career is framed as auto-destructive self-abasement, and anecdotal evidence of him gashing his hand on the cymbals and continuing to play while rinsing the front row of the audience in arcs of blood is presented as some sort of ritualistic penance. And there is a telling moment early on where Klaus quotes the Neu! song Hero's lyrics: "Honey went to Norway, to Norway." and the interviewer, nonplussed by this apparent non-sequitur, is anxious to move on and talk about drumming but Klaus stops him and suggests "If we could just go back to talking about my honey".
This is interesting because a) it does support the idea that Dinger was obsessed with his Swedish girlfriend and, like Damien's nanny in the Omen "Its all for you", and b) I never realised that song was in English. This romantic obsessiveness feels like a peculiar fit for the twenty first century. In the age of nice guys and incels this level of objectification, of idealisation looks like a distinctly unhealthy manifestation of toxic masculinity.* This is not Dante's Beatrice: this was a twenty year old girl he hasn't seen for thirty years. When the film makers track her down her pragmatic Scandinavian response to their questions is bathetic in the extreme. Stand down, Parsifal. The drawbridge is up and the oil is on Regulo Mark 6.
The talking heads are good value. Bowie is on German television in the early 90s, judging by his awful beard, and he's talking about his German influences. "Does anyone here like Neu!?" he scans the crowd. "One person!" and Bowie grins like a shark. Of the others Stephen Morris is a charming nerd, Gudrun Gut a delight, Iggy Pop sage and professorial and Emma Gaze very Brighton.
And then there's Bobby Gillespie. Sigh. When Bobby Gillespie speaks parts of my body atrophy: it's like rock 'n' roll ricin entering the system. Surely even he is bored of listening to Bobby Gillespie by now? The sheer distance between him, looking like Lizzie Birdsworth from Prisoner Cell Block H, and the twinkly-eyed, wry Iggy Pop, as donnish a man as ever got his tits out, is higher than the sun. To coin a phrase.
 |
| Bobby Gillespie collects his thought |
The film is beautifully made, nicely shaped and the soundtrack is phenomenal. If the object of a film about a musician is to make you want to go home and dig out all their records then this film really succeeds. But then with a back catalogue as good as Neu! and La Dusseldorf how could you miss? The middle-aged men - myself included - certainly enjoyed it. There was even a smattering of embarrassed applause at the end, that petered out rather quickly as we all realised that Klaus couldn't actually hear us.
Klaus Dinger was only fifty two when he died. The film attempts to find a through-line for his life in a sentimental heartbreak and perhaps that's partly true. The footage of him traveling around Dusseldorf on a tricycle wearing ballet pumps and a golfing visor with a feather in the brim, and occasionally dismounting to graffiti a heart onto the pavement certainly seems to identify him as a lovelorn eccentric. But he lived a brilliant life doing what he wanted, traveling around, making wonderful records, being critically lauded, praised by his peers and taking loads of drugs. There have been worse lives. And always that drumming, that brilliant, simple, beautiful, powerful drumming. That was his through-line, that was the love of his life.
He died of a heart-attack, of course. What else could he have died from? But that's me framing the story just like the film-makers did. I'm English: I enjoy the irony.
*From the stand-point of the 21st Century all masculine behaviour from the past looks distinctly unhealthy, of course. It mainly was.
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