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One of the influences most regularly cited in press releases touting today’s up-and-coming bands is ‘Krautrock’. The term gives instant cachet to their music, implying originality, experimentation, integrity and, more likely than not, mesmeric – or motorik – grooves. And of all the groups from the past referenced, the most usual is Can.
Yet back in the early 1970s, ‘Krautrock’, with its World War Two connotations, was at best a snappy, albeit crass, piece of journalese. At worst, it was a somewhat dismissive consolidation of Germany’s new music. One assumes it came from the same mindset that saw a subeditor headline NME journalist Ian McDonald’s perceptive 1974 piece on Can with the words, ‘We Have Ways Of Making You Listen’, presumably…