"Krone" interview

Blixa Bargeld: “You age more slowly on the tour bus”

Dazzling and unique: Einstürzende Neubauten legend Blixa Bargeld at his concert in Vienna's WUK.

(Bild: Andreas Graf)

Einstürzende Neubauten, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds or now with Theo Teardo - Blixa Bargeld is what you call a living legend. During his recent performance at the WUK in Vienna, he spoke to the "Krone" about timeless songwriting, his song contest aspirations and why he doesn't enjoy hiking in the mountains on show days.

"Krone" : Blixa, the concert with Theo Teardo at Vienna's WUK was originally supposed to take place last year and has now finally been rescheduled. In between, you released the new joint album "Christian & Mauro", which you have now focused on.
Blixa Bargeld: We started it back in 2018, we finished it after the pandemic. I don't need to tell you why it took eight years between "Nerissimo" and the new album. When we started it, I still thought Brexit would be the biggest disaster. How small does it look now? Then came the pandemic, the Ukraine war, the Hamas attack. The full extent of the catastrophes could not have been foreseen in 2018 and naturally found their way into the music. The images became more warlike, you can read it in the metaphors. If you look at the cover artwork, you already know where the journey is heading.

In an interview about Einstürzende Neubauten's latest album, you were quoted as saying: "For me, songwriting is a constant evocation of problems". I found that interesting, because most songwriters write songs to get their problems off their chest.
Like most songwriters, I'm someone who writes the lyrics to the music and not the other way around. I always look for a lyrical answer in the music, so the first problem is the composition I have. There is something there that I have to deal with. What do I hear in it? What potential opens up for me? What can I possibly shape? "Starkregen" was the first single we recorded for the album and then "Dear Carlo", the homage to Carlo Rovelli. Both had similar lyrics and I had to search around for a long time until I came to a solution and a whole new door opened up.

That means there is never one solution, but several?
I always have to shake something off myself and get rid of what was there and what I was already sawing at. One of Theo's and my favorite songs is "I Shall Sleep Again". We played it in a loop in the studio and then I looked for lyrics in my computer. I have my own method and just look up what I wrote 25 years ago today. I only found this one sentence and immediately spoke it into my microphone. Then I knew - that's it. It's incredibly fun to sing this part over and over again. The verses came about when I knew where I wanted to go. It's these brain loops that I can fall back on. Once you find them, everything becomes easier. I don't know if it's the same for other songwriters, but a song is usually made up of two things that weren't connected before and open a door for me.

Would you also say that the catastrophes and problems in the world you mentioned lead directly or indirectly to songwriting?
Always indirectly. When I asked my old friend Amanda Ooms, the Swedish actress, if she could do the cover, I wrote her where the metaphors were for me for each song. She then knew where to go with her collage. I never write about anything, that's not my intention. A song is perhaps there to give you an insight, but that only comes to the listener in connection with the music and its personal relevance. It's not my intention to tempt someone into finding something good or bad. But that is also what distinguishes timeless music from transient music. If you write about the AFD being banned, for example, that's all well and good, but it won't live forever.

Weren't you working on the new Einstürzende Neubauten album, "Rampen", at the same time as this album?
Not only that. I was also working on an album with my Swiss band KiKu. I originally wanted to take it to the Song Contest for Switzerland - and not for Germany with Stefan Raab. When I first asked the band, they didn't even know what it was - so it probably wouldn't have happened anyway. I'm not represented at the ESC now, but I would have done it.

As long as Stefan Raab is involved in the Song Contest for Germany, you wouldn't enter for Germany?
No, but I didn't have any aspirations beforehand. In my opinion, the song with KiKu was too good not to do it for the ESC. We have an autistic composer, a gay drummer, a black trans man and me as a glam rock goth from a parallel universe. That fits the competition like a glove!

2024 will even go down in history as the year in which the oh-so-peaceful Song Contest lost its innocence and was divided by the Israel/Palestine issue.
In Switzerland, they even protested - which would have made me all the happier to do it.

(Bild: Andreas Graf)

This endeavor also arose from the product and coincidence, so to speak. So you're not pursuing this plan any further?
No, because it was never planned. I had written the song and thought it was a great idea. We have to do something with it, the record hasn't even been released yet. Maybe it will take on a life of its own. Completely different from what we thought and planned.

But the song contest idea is not buried forever?
No, but the idea depended very much on this piece.

Let's get back to your album "Christian & Mauro" are your real first names. So this album title points to a very special, personal touch.
The idea for it is already very old, it came to us when we pulled into a parking lot in Italy at some point. We already had it before "Nerissimo", but it didn't fit then. Not really this time either, but Theo wanted the title so much. I could never sign that those are our real names. My real name is Blixa Bargeld, but I found the conflict hidden in these two names interesting. Christian is Christian and Mauro is from North Africa. Theo hates this name and I don't turn around on the street when someone calls me Christian. These names are foreign to both of us, but I also found these poles interesting. We also deliberately used the ampersand with "&". We still learn linguistic anecdotes.

If we take this idea a step further - are there any parallels between Blixa Bargeld and Christian Emmerich, the pre-Blixa Bargeld?
There can't be any parallels because they happened one after the other. I was Christian Emmerich until 1977, but not after that. I started to cement that the moment I made it public and entered it on my ID. There's a funny story about this that a journalist told me in an interview in Berlin. He said that his son was born in the Vivantes hospital in Berlin and that they have their own registry office. He registered his son there as Blixa - and Blixa is not gender-defining. The registrar said to him: "Ah, we have a similar taste in music" and registered the name without hesitation, which is anything but normal in Germany. Normally you have to choose from a catalog with specifications, but the moment such a name is registered, it is official in Germany. So I managed to register Blixa in the German first name register during my lifetime. My wife changed her American name to Bargeld without any problems, and my daughter's surname is also Bargeld. So I also managed to have Bargeld as a surname for the first time. These are my extra-musical successes in naming rights.

That's something to be proud of. You don't normally clear away a country's traditions so easily.
No, I managed it in a roundabout way. If I were to marry my wife again in a civil ceremony in Germany, I could also take her name and Bargeld would be in the first line and not just where it says artist's name.

Your desire to break boundaries clearly shines through. Is that still very important to you today?
It doesn't go away. It starts at some point in your youth and then stays.

For many people, it fades as they get older. That's when the will to revolution comes to an end.
Maybe it's just buried.

Is there a secret to maintaining this spirit of rebellion?
Sorry, but people who drive around in a tour bus age much more slowly. They sit in there and play Xbox. Well, I don't do that myself, but rock stars age a lot slower.

That's correct. On the subject of ageing: finiteness is an overflowing theme on your new album.
Yes, but my wife has forbidden me to deal with it any further, so I can't give any more information. But the theme runs throughout and "Christian & Mauro" is not the first album to deal with it. It's been like that from the beginning and there's nothing wrong with it.

Why won't your wife let you talk about it?
Maybe the subject just gets on her nerves.

Is it more difficult to find new inspiration, ideas and lyrics when you've written so much over so many decades?
No. I rely on the fact that I write something every day. Sometimes it's just a few lines, sometimes just one, but I have tens of thousands of documents to fall back on. At the height of the pandemic, I holed up with my family in Portugal and went through my entire archive to analyze it. I connected everything and can now search not only for words, but also for topics. I don't think it's getting any harder because I've always written. That makes it easier for me. When I've found a line, like in "I Shall Sleep", then I know in which direction the tree has to spread. Then the lines in between are sometimes like pieces of a puzzle and fit perfectly.

There is a well-known saying: "The archive is the journalist's revenge". In your case, is the archive the musician's muse and source of inspiration?
I can understand that saying, because I'm often confronted with the fact that journalists don't bother and go to the archive, from where they copy all the nonsense that colleagues have written before them. There's always talk of jackhammers for the new buildings. We never had a jackhammer, it was an electric hammer - my goodness! For me, the archive is more of a stockpile. There are things in there that I don't know what to do with at first and where they should go, but then they often suddenly find a completely unexpected way. It's usually small things, but that can be very useful.

Is this research then also a confrontation and a reunion with your own self, because you remember in which states of mind and with which backgrounds the songs were written?
Yes, but that can usually be decoupled from it. There's nothing I dislike more than describing personal sensitivities. That's terrible and that's not my point at all. I always have to find something that makes sense without me personally. I don't know if that makes 100 percent sense, but I'll give it a try.

Doesn't this attitude go hand in hand with the desire to write timeless music? That you also search and compose in a way that is decoupled from time?
The time-bound always smells a bit harsh after a while, so I prefer the timeless.

Has your understanding of music changed over the years?
If I still pretended to be an amateur or dilettante after more than 45 years, I'd be a big liar. I can't pretend that I've been making music for 45 years and haven't learned anything in the process. I know a lot more about music today than I did in 1980 and I work hard for it, Theo is a student who has not only studied music but also film. That's where our combination comes from. A few days ago I had a short conversation with our bus driver. He said he had watched a lot of my music on YouTube and asked me what it was called. I had to think for myself. Because of Theo, we are very involved in the movie world and we communicate a lot about movies. There are also so many movie quotes and film plays an important role. An Italian journalist once told me that our music was "film noir". I can live with that. Movies are definitely a basis for our communication.

The cinematic connects you and leads you to music?
We have a similar education and a similar background, so it's easy to communicate with a common vocabulary. I'm not an academic musician, of course, but I'm not as stupid as I used to be. Theo used to be very good friends with Ennio Morricone. They often had lunch together and were in the studio together. He was also the one who told him to compose a passacaglia - a piece of street music. My suggestion was to record this passacaglia. That was also in Portugal, where I was hiding from Corona.

(Bild: Andreas Graf)

The album is also very international. There are many references and homages.
There are around 30 verses in the original and we left the best of the original and replaced the rest with German verses. "Bisognia Morire" means "We will all die". But the piece is not sad, it's egalitarian. We are all going to die and death makes everyone the same. I then packed the song full of modern professions such as Uber driver or famous YouTuber. The only difficult thing was that everything had to rhyme with "Morire" at the end. The game of continuing the song in German was great fun. A few verses in Italian, then a few in German.

Is the great egalitarianism at the end of life the only fair moment in our existence?
I don't know, but the image is definitely old. We're playing a passacaglia from the 17th century. One of my favorite books was this collection of woodcuts by Wolfgang Hohlbein. It was the model for our last album cover. Anyway, there's also the Dance of Death in this collection. The skeleton is Death and then there's Death and the Pope, Death and the King, Death and the Advocate, Death and the Child and so on. Sometimes he plays the xylophone or zither and leads them to the grave, sometimes they cling to pieces of money and are snatched away. I have mixed this old idea with new job titles, such as the Uber driver.

The imbalance in society is also a very old phenomenon, but it seems to be getting more and more divergent.
I don't know if that's the case. At least it's not for me to know.

Does it make a difference whether you sing in German, English or Italian?
This poly-lingualism has almost become my trademark. I've been doing it since the early 90s. It started back then with the small Canadian dance company "La La La Human Steps", which wanted music from us, the Neubauten. The question was whether they could do it in German and so I started writing in several languages. It went on and on. I'm not so good at Italian, but it's not difficult to pronounce. It's not like Polish or Finnish. At a performance in Poland, I didn't manage to say more than one or two sentences in Polish - it's just too difficult.

But I would also find a Blixa composition performed by you in Viennese dialect very interesting.
Hm, we played in the arena in 2022 as part of the Neubauten tour and I sang in Berlin dialect especially for the Viennese. And we actually put that on the record.

Does your audience actually differ according to location?
It's always difficult for me to talk about the audience because it's made up of lots of different people and individuals. It would be unfair to generalize. We get a lot of enthusiasm on tour with Theo. After 15 years, many songs have entered people's heads and play a role in their lives. They know the lyrics and sing along. They are happy to hear the songs. That is wonderful feedback. At the last three concerts, we had a couple who were always in the front row and seemed to sing along at every performance.

 You can't expect anything better from sung music. I grew up with the canon of rock music. I experienced the Beatles when they were still the Beatles and not when they had already broken up. There are songs that can be important for your life and give you an incredible amount of strength. I don't believe in music that is there to change people's minds or opinions and beliefs. I believe in music that is able to confirm people in who they are. That's how I felt and it's nice that I can do it too.

As a listener, you don't want to let music talk you into anything or impose anything on you. Can you feel it when someone does that?
You can usually feel it. I openly admit that I've always been a big fan of Ton Steine Scherben. They were often put in the political corner, but for me they were first and foremost a rock band and secondly a rock band that sang German. That was very important to me.

I would also describe Ton Steine Scherben more as a band that described its own sociotope. Where the political resonated, but was never the principle. It was about Rio Reiser's life, environment and experiences.
Later, Rio and I were friends. The rest of the Scherben and I still are. It's nice to get out of such an oscillating field. I was born in 1959, I not only experienced the Beatles, but also the Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, Can, Neu! and Ton Steine Scherben in the flesh. These were important building blocks for getting somewhere myself. I'm not a bit ashamed of it and would always sign all of that 100 percent.

On the subject of Krautrock bands. Are you actually in contact with Hans-Joachim Roedelius from Cluster and Harmonia, who has been living in Baden near Vienna for some time?
I'm in loose contact. He once got in touch with me on the same day that we were playing a concert in Vienna and wanted to go on a hike. Somehow I'm not really up for that because, sorry, it's soundcheck and then a concert - I don't necessarily go hiking in the mountains.