How football shaped the musical outlook of Damo Suzuki: “Music is the most beautiful thing”
Your football team scoring a last-minute winner. Your favourite band striking up your favourite song in concert. There is a rush when you’re in the audience witnessing both of these things happen. And the parallels don’t end there. You save up your money all week to go and watch your team or band of choice live out their – and your – childhood fantasy.
Unchained from desks and e-mails, they live a life the rest of us can only dream of. Getting paid to do for a living what the rest of us would give up everything to do for free. They practise together all week behind the scenes to then put on a show for the paying public all over the country and, if they’re good enough, the world.
When you head into those heavenly stadia on a Saturday afternoon, you have a pretty good idea of how the score will look after 90 minutes. You suspect you know how your team will line up and how your opposition will play, but once the whistle goes, every moment is unpredictable. You don’t know what’s going to come next. You don’t know who’s going to score or who’s going to win. Who’s going to be sent off or belt in a wonder goal from 35 yards out?
As much as we’d like to feel the same about going to a concert, the result is often not the same. When you go and see The Rolling Stones, you can be sure they’re going to open with ‘Start Me Up’, close with ‘Satisfaction’ and in between they are going to play pretty much all the songs you want them to in versions that sound as close to their album counterparts as they can manage these days.
When you go and see Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour, then you know not only which songs she is going to sing, but which outfit she’s going to sing them in and how they are going to sound. At both shows, keen fans will have the time of their lives. You’re seeing your favourite artist do what you love them for doing, but there can be a sense of spontaneity missing from the shows.
Some artists live for that feeling of spontaneity. It’s what drives their craft and their music. For Can frontman Damo Suzuki, not knowing what is going to happen next is as exciting in music as it is in football. “That’s why you go to see Liverpool play football, to hope that they score goals and win”, he told Rob Hughes for Prog in 2016, “but if you know the result already, then it’s quite boring. For me, music is also like this. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t go into a studio, then go out and play the same thing 200 or 300 times. That’s more like business. It’s really hard for me to act like that.”
Suzuki referred to his style of improvisation and spontaneity as “instant compositions”, and knew that these moments of expression can create an even stronger bond with an audience than just playing exactly what they came to hear. In those moments of creation, he was sharing something bigger than the song itself with his audience. “It can be a very intense, special moment with an audience, where music is the most beautiful thing”, he explained in his Prog interview. “Every day, I can express how I’m feeling about living.”
Even from the very start of his career, Suzuki was drawn to improvisation. Having travelled from his birthplace of Japan to Munich in West Germany, he would regularly busk on street corners to earn some money. Undeterred by only being able to play two or three chords on the guitar at the time, Suzuki would improvise his way around the fretboard. At the same time, he sang and would often build up such an audience that he would be moved along or even arrested by the police for causing traffic.
While busking in Munich in the late 1960s, two of the people who stopped to watch him were Can bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit, who, with a vacancy in the band following the departure of former vocalist Malcolm Moloney, asked Suzuki to join as their new frontman. Just imagine how different his life might have been if he’d been spotted playing football on the streets by talent scouts from FC Bayern Munich instead.
