There are many kinds of music that have influenced me in my youth. Naturally a lot of weird krautrock and, from the other side of the ocean, Springsteen’s Born to Run album with Jungleland and Meeting across the river which somewhat caught my real live experience at that time. Rush’s 2112 also deeply touched me.
When those albums were published, next to attending (or not) school, I was smuggling dope from Amsterdam to my home town in north Germany to sell it to GIs who were bored while pretending to guard a bunch of cold-war nukes. The Twilight zone coincided with a short h experience.
But in parallel to these ‘growing pains’ as my father thought of my tastes, there was a different strain of music I also fell to – Bach, Handel, Wagner and others. That ‘schizophrenic’ split, which I believe wasn’t and isn’t one, is still there.
When today I says "I’ll go to a Neumeier concert tonight" my friends wonder: Mani Neumeier at the Fabrik or John Neumeier at the Hamburg Opera?
Why not both?
Here is Alfred Deller singing Purcell: ‘Music for a while shall all your cares beguile …’
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