Tangerine Dream: '70-'80

I had mixed feelings when the random number generator threw up this selection. Yes, I'm delighted to have the excuse to re-experience my first 'contact' with TD. But did it have to come at the end of a week, when I'm already feeling knackered: how to find time to squeeze in listening to eight sides of vinyl? I managed it, partly by sacrificing my usual dose of Gideon Coe on Thursday evening. Then, yesterday, I cheated a little by listening to the tracks on Sides 7 & 8 at my computer via Spotify.

This was the first boxed set I ever bought. They were rare things in Spring 1981, catalogue number VBox2, when I got it (in the same as the Dual turntable that I'm still playing the records on now). A big risk, too, since I'd only read about Tangerine Dream at the time, and not heard any of their music. But where to start with a band that had done thirteen albums by this stage. Thirteen! Jeremy and I used to look down the list and say, "Do you think there's anyone out there who's got them all?" "I bet there is." Ha, look at the list of albums now. We expected any group to evolve significantly from album to album. Oasis-style regurgitation was unheard of then. That's why I got the boxed set — to try and get an overview of a large body of work.

It was the later (end of the '70s, beginning of the '80s) stuff that I liked first. Johannes Schmoelling brought an extra melodic talent to the sound, which had only been indulged in little flickers previously. The compositions were more structured, perhaps more traditional. But gradually, after many headphone sessions like Thursday night's, the accessible material led me to the more dense, earlier work. Phaedra now sounds pretty good; it didn't always.

TD rarely featured in the music press of the 1980s. (Their moment had passed: the audience at their gigs included the guys in Afghan coats and long greasy hair who were still stuck in 1975; their reappraisal and re-appropriation by the Orb generation was still a decade away.) But, when they did crop up in the music weeklies, I cut out the clippings and put them in this box with the records. It's interesting to revisit the two-page story in Sounds of TD's Concert for Peace in a still-divided Berlin in August 1981 (and always amusing to see what's on the back of the page: reviews of Denim and Leather by Saxon, 3 stars, and of the Angelic Upstarts' Live, 5 stars). From an NME interview by the late Richard Cook with TD's Christoph Franke (14 Nov 1981 issue):

Do you see yourselves as elder statesmen of electronics?
"Well, we didn't start yesterday," he chuckles. "But it's still stone age development. We can go on now for many more years. We're not a pop group, maybe we'll bever do Top 40 music, but we always want to do something new."

Pretty accurate. TD are playing London in a fortnight, promising three hours of the old favourites. I saw them four and a half years ago doing new material, loosely related to Dante's Inferno, at the Royal Festival Hall. It was terrible. So I think they're responding to fan pressure. But I still won't be going. Apart from anything else, I've lost track of who 'they' are these days — and so has Wikipedia at the time of writing. Even Edgar Froese's own son has been and gone.

If I were 16 and coming to the music for the first time, I'd go. But that's the thing about records and memory. Playing the records I listened to when I was 16 somehow makes the memory better, richer. Going to see the vestiges of a group I saw when I was 16 is no way going to emulate my memories of that experience (blimey, 27 years and one day ago), and is quite likely to turn them sour.

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Comments

[Ashley Pomeroy]

This was my introduction to the band, or at least their earlier work, although I came to them as a direct result of their "re-appropriation by the Orb generation". Perhaps because of that I preferred the early and mid-period stuff, because the structured later works sounded a bit too close to Knight Rider for comfort.

The sad thing is that they never seemed to capitalise on their latter-day fame. Can and Faust and Kraftwerk all seemed to have a second wind (even Mike Oldfield, who was VBOX1), with remix albums and reformations etc, but Tangerine Dream were still churning out dreck.

I wonder if there was a VBOX3. The Human League?

[andy]

I'm still a fan of the group (the boxset being the second thing I bought by them). Any chance of a scan of the Richard Cook article?

Can, second wind? dead by late 1977 mate.

[David]

I've sent Andy a scan of the article. If anyone else wants one, just drop a comment (with valid email address) here.