This is my last week in Germany where in my mind it’s 1971 and Guru Guru have just released their second album, Hinten. Then I realize that time somehow made it to 2017 and some of us are still enthusiastically listening to these mad, brilliant German freak out albums of the early seventies.  Electric Junk was the opening track on the album and featured Mani Neumeier on drums, Uli Trepte on bass, and Ax Genrich on guitar. Included here is a live version and the studio version for your listening pleasure.

Guru Guru were another commune band that lived in the central Odenwald region, nearest cities being Darmstadt and Heidelberg. Only in Germany would they come up with this album cover and title, only in Germany did bands have this unique freak gene. A culture creates its own madness, post war, longing for an artistic identity free of the chains of the past, politically and most importantly shaking off the cultural invasion of cover versions of translated American and English Pop music or Schlager, cheesy easy listening. The underground began to bubble and exploded from the late sixties into the seventies with groundbreaking electronic bands, synthesizer innovation and scorching electric guitars. Add Conny Plank as recording engineer to the mix for guaranteed satisfaction. Hinten is a spewing forth of backwards space rock, German style, with the sounds of fuzz boxes and loud amps, free form jams and an affinity with Jazz – an uninhibited interpretation of their world by the innocent born in the late forties and fifties as Germany and Europe recovered from World War II.

Longstanding member, drummer, vocalist, Mani Neumeier continues to perform, but the band will most fondly be remembered for the seventies and inventing their own free boundless sound, their own politics and their own humour that may have had the most in common with the antics of Frank Zappa if he was Jimi Hendrix.

Essential listening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Guru

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Guru

http://mani-neumeier.de/guruguru/guru_09_discography.htm