Can the Can

Can's The Lost Tapes arrived in the bag today, a gorgeous 3CD + booklet in a 10" box, the type you'd see in old recording studios containing reel-to-reel tapes, exactly the sort of tapes that lay ignored in a cupboard in Can's Inner Space studios for 40 years. They cover 1968-77, pretty much Can's career (if you ignore the one-off album get-together in 1989), with a heavy emphasis on the early stuff. There are some great tracks and some not so great tracks but overall it hangs together very well. 

The best for me are those with Mooney, particularly Waiting for the Street Car which involves him, as usual, reciting the title over & over for 10 minutes against a hypnotic Can groove (it probably went on for an hour or more originally); he does the same with Deadly Doris. I'm less keen on the drifty mid-70s stuff.

Full marks to Irmin Schmidt and Jono Podmore for what must have been a mammoth job of sifting through 50 hours of stuff, choosing, editing and cleaning everything up. 

I never saw Can live and only ever met one of them, Irmin Schmidt, in 1982. I did a radio show interview with him with a friend Francois Grapard, funnily enough in recently visited Aix-en-Provence. He's lived in a nearby village for over 30 years. I still have a photo of the event.

I got so lost in listening that almost forgot about a gig tonight, so jumped on my bike to arrive halfway through an open-air set by Hanggai who play Mongolian-influenced world/folk or whatever you want to call it. A sort of cross between Huun-Huur-Tu (who specialise in Mongolian throat-singing but are actually Russian) and The Pogues?