Two recent books, Imogen Willetts' Up All Night and Grant McPhee's Scene Within A Scene, served as a reminder that bands and musical/artistic scenes are always a product of their circumstances and environment. Rarely can that have been more evident than with Einsturzende Neubauten.
Debut album Kollaps has just turned 45, and in a Quietus piece originally published to mark the record's 40th birthday, Jeremy Allen explored the context of its creation. Like New York in the latter half of the 1970s, West Berlin in the early 1980s "provided a perfect storm for creativity". Not only did Blixa Bargeld and accomplices make music in the city's ruins, benefitting from the availability of cheap/free space (warehouses, squats, squares) in which to live, practise and perform; they actually made music out of the city's ruins, scavenging for scrap that could be repurposed as some kind of rudimentary instrument.
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