Make the connection?

Yep, this gent may live and work under the name of Holger Czukay but his features are a ringer for that pioneering time lord William Hartnell, the first Dr Who.

The comparison doesn't cease at the physical resemblance. Common concepts of time and space must be thrown to the void, for this man is surrounded by severe chronological disorder.

Firstly his interviewing sessions take place in the EMI building, and the employees who labour therein are deep into celebration following the re issue of a four-year-old Kraftwerk track scooping up the national chart honours.

Secondly, after our chat, Holger plays me an unreleased cassette recording of his old band, Can, a cultish but highly esteemed bunch of ageing, happy dabbling Deutsche men who once circumnavigated the fiery frontiers of rock experimentation.

The sounds springing off the tape feature a highly-energised rhythmic propulsion sprinkled with a layer of loosely free form guitar. It's a spine-shaking yet heady aural feast which most of the self-conscious, would-be barrier breakers around today would give their most costly synth array to achieve.

The shocking truth is that these noises were captured in a German cellar, directly onto a Revox, in 1968.

Effecting a swift Tardis-style leap through the decades, we find Holger having issued a solo album, 'Movies', in 1980. The follow up 'On The Way To The Peak Of Normal' has just appeared in this country having been available on import for some time.

The most obvious and striking facts concerning these items are their absorption of what for argument's sake we will call 'non musical' sounds (telephones, radios, animals etc) into the purely 'musical' (ie the tones generated by regular instruments).

In ‘Movies’ the disparity of these sources was fairly well evident. A dandy listen but the separate elements gave a definite kind of ping-pong effect on the overall character of a given piece. The unexpected squawking of a radio, for example, was often more of a crazy intrusion than a complementary sound.

Throughout the new collection and particularly on the first side (subtitled 'Ode To Perfume') the whole technique has been polished up and works with a greater harmony. The 'non-musical' ingredients fully blend into the textures.

Holger explains: " 'Movies' was significant because of the way it was textured. You could find a telephone or a sound of an animal but on 'Peak Of Normal' these things are still there but have become more integrated. 'Normal' is a good word. It just sounds like 'normal' music but if you look behind it you find many strange things going on."

The radio voices now seem much less of a novelty. Presumably this was always your intention?

“They are the centre point. When you make this kind of music and build it up, one day there comes an element that you don't know about. But if you see the radio as an effect you will switch it on and get one nuisance after another. I know, I've done it. It is amazing how you get a feeling for when the radio is right and when it is wrong. I don't search any more. I wait for weeks, months even, then I switch the radio on and there it is. It happened with 'Persian Love' and with 'Cool In The Pool' which had four radio stations.

“You wouldn't think so but the radio is a very important element in 'Peak Of Normal'. During the recording I treated the tape recorder like crazy, so much so that you barely recognise the radio afterwards. Then I punch it in and out, like making windows in the music. The radio should integrate into the music – it is important that it doesn't stand out as an effect otherwise it doesn't make sense to me.

"I'm interested in making music that people can listen to over and over again without getting bored. Usually that is what happens with short hits. You listen and love it for a short while and then you throw it away. I don't like that idea."

So you don't think there is a place for the use it up wear it-out instant disposable music philosophy?

“That doesn't fit in with the time any more. Records are becoming very expensive and people do not have much money so they should get something valuable. I worked on 'Peak Of Normal' for two years. I'm realistic enough to know that EMI could never pay the costs. They are unpayable! I am sure that after a while it will repay itself but I don't think of getting paid. I had a vision that it was possible so I thought 'put it out and see what is happening'. Can worked on exactly the same principle. When Can started thinking commercially somehow we were finished."

Obviously you don't sit around struggling to find chord patterns and agonising over melodies but there must be some initial idea or starting point that sets each piece off?

“I have no idea at all. A starting point, yes, but no idea (he laughs vigorously). Take the first thing you can get and make something of it. It is a momentary quality and eventually you begin to recognise what this quality is. This album was ready a year ago. The nearer you get to the end the more you listen as a whole. The edits I do are like bricks in a building. You take out one brick and twenty others fall, it is a balance thing.

"I play the piece to people I don't know, strangers I start talking to in the café, I'm very easy to talk to (true!). They listen to the music and if they don't like something I feel it immediately. I then go to work again until I feel I can play it to people without having to make any corrections. Then it rests for a while and reaches the point where the music steps out from privacy into public which means that a record company can listen to it for the first time. But I have that pre control just by having asked people about it.”

Can were one of the few pre-punk combos to be spared the fearsome sneer of '77. Johnny Lydon was noted as holding the teutonic quartet in high regard although Holger suspects the one time terror of Finsbury Park only became aware of their activities when he stumbled into like minded musical thinking with PIL.

"When I first heard the Sex Pistols I was shocked. I didn't like what I heard but at the same time I was fascinated. I followed as best I could what happened. I found Public Image to be very interesting. I like most of 'Metal Box' very much.”

The title track of ‘Peak’ is seven-and-a-half minutes of music condensed from a one hour recording by a four-piece group called S.Y.P.H.

Who are they?

“They are some very young musicians. I first met them when they were at school and they came down to the studio where Can was recording to write about us for their school magazine. They formed a group themselves and they are the only people I know of who stepped into exactly what Can were doing. Not thinking out a concept but making the music first and then thinking out the concept afterwards based on a spontaneous type of music making.

"Can were studied dilettantes. Experts on music, but when it came to rock music we played like pigs! We didn't know what rock music was. I had been teaching at a school, dealing with classical and modern composers but not what was actually going on musically at the time. The pupils taught me! They would visit me and play their records and at first I thought it was a bit of a joke: 'ah, the pupils are showing me what their taste is, I will show them what music really is' but it worked the other way.

“Some pupils invited me to join their band. They showed how to play this Jimi Hendrix stuff. We gave a three-song performance at the school and after that I thought maybe I would become a rock musician!" (Almost collapses with mirth.)

By virtue of being born in 1938 and not becoming a 'rock musician' until the comparatively decrepit age of thirty, Holger Czukay avoided the sometimes zombie-fying processes of a rock-filled adolescence and all the hard-to-avoid constrictions such a lifestyle generally entails.

It is usually easy to scoff when people talk about 'magic' and ‘momentary qualities' in their music but Holger communicates such ideals with a glowing, friendly radiance that inspires confidence and trust.

Not all his music is perfect. I find side two of 'Peak Of Normal' a trifle stodgy and hard going, but Holger plots his own course oblivious to such trivia as commercial trends and short term foppish fancies. He does what he believes in. Look, listen and learn.

"I hope I can keep each piece of music like a new birth, otherwise it gets to be a cliché, a calculated kind of music, the sort of thing you do just to get money. I've never worked that way and never will. That is a decision I made once.

"With Can in 1968 we had no money but decided to go on our own whether it was accepted or not. We had no money but an absolutely strong will. The magic in the music is a result of this will. If you are not aware of this magic you will have a different relationship to the music. You must be obsessed!”