This is how CAN came into my life. When I was a kid, my nan and grandad lived next door. My mum’s younger and sister and brother were also both still at home. Since my old man was a bit of a tyrant, me and my own sister, Lizzie, spent a lot of time at nan’s. My uncle Norman, who everyone nicknamed Nobby (they don’t anymore) in the front room of the house had what would now be called a “man cave”. This is where me, Lizzie, and my cousin, Anthony, would hang out / hide. Norman was / is a clever chap. I might have been the first person in my family to ever go to university, but given the chance, Norman would have definitely beaten me to that. He got into home-computing right from the get go, and programming was how he eventually turned his life around, and climbed out of our south London hole. He’d create basic games for Lizzie and Anthony to play, and he’d also have them doing those early text-driven Dungeons & Dragons-like quests. Me, to be honest, I was quite content to sit there. Safe from harm.

Norman was also a music nut. He had boxes of punk 7s, and was mates with The Ruts. The drummer, Dave Ruffy, would often pop round. Norman, in addition, had shelves of LPs that we weren’t allowed to touch. We had no records back indoors, so this out of bounds thing clearly added even more mystique, and maybe goes some way toward explaining why I own so many now. Norm’d chose an album, put it on, and light his pipe. To be honest, I have no memory of the music he played, but I do remember one of the covers – surely because it was scary looking – that was the CAN comp, Cannibalism. I was probably around 9 or 10.

I didn’t really have any money for records until I left Uni and got a job, which coincided with acid house and the tail end of The Second Summer Of Love. In hindsight, I started collecting / hoarding vinyl, initially to amass memories of amazing nights out. To try to hold onto that feeling. Bring the rush back. That’s how I got hooked. At some point, on a Soho secondhand store run, I spotted a copy of Cannibalism. I’m pretty certain that I still had no idea who, or how important, CAN were. I bought it solely because it had been on Norman’s shelf, and had always wondered how it sounded. This was my introduction to the wonderful world of Holger Czukay, Michael Karoli, Jaki Leibzeit, Malcolm Mooney, Irmin Schmidt, and Damo Suzuki. I’ve written a before, a little bit, about CAN, when Holger passed, and when Damo was crowd-funding his documentary, Energy.

I’m no longer a completist, having sold off big parts of my collections, twice. Post- a rave-induced hospital stay, and then pre- the move to Japan. I have Future Days – `cos Weatherall played Spray on the wireless. I paid a pretty penny for a battered copy upstairs in the Ladbrook Grove Music & Video Exchange.

I tracked down Tago Mago, for Halleluwah, since it supposedly inspired the Happy Mondays.

I have a 45 of the jazzy, Shikako Maru Ten, and a 12 of the bad b-boy break, Vitamin C. But no Ege Bam Yasi.

I bought Soundtracks for the full fourteen minute version of Mother Sky. It’s guitar shredding, screaming, above cycles of locked circular repetition. Drums and bass locked in a relentless rhythm. A grind / groove of drones, distorted metallic fuzz, psyche organ, and tumbling Tom toms. Raising an incredible intensity that never drops. That only sneaky studio edits sometimes suddenly stop. I think Damo’s sections were actually spliced in post the OG jam. On record his mantra provides moments of relative calm. Live, though, the words become possessed shrieks and shouts. Accompanied by bare-chested, shamanic hair-shaking / dancing. Amplifying, increasing the insanity. Forcing it far beyond. When I played this song to my sons, last weekend, the day after Damo died, they really didn`t know what to make of it. They sat in slience, staring at me as if I was barmy, while I up-ed the volume and headbanged. Mind you, I was driving. 

“I say madness is too pure like mother sky… Tell me what’s the price of your life.”