Beyond The Grave

We began life in Krefeld, in what was then West Germany, and soon developed a local following, thanks to a combination of rock and classical influences. Our weird musical hybrid sound has, over the years, been credited with founding several entire genres in Germany, including Acoustic Rock, Krautrock and Prog Rock.

I doubt we were ever that influential, but being signed to Harvest in 1971 was a terrific moment — the party we held to celebrate it might well have earned a more legendary status than our first EMI-released LP, an album called Gravedigger. We went into the EMI studios in Cologne, knowing that we were the first rock band to use what was then a state-of-the-art 16-track studio, with engineers in lab coats. We knew nothing about recording, so took in our full stage rig, and soon discovered that we were completely overwhelming the studio monitoring system. The album had to be completed (including mixing and orchestral parts) in 24 hours, so at one stage I was trying to play an overdub solo through a 200 Watt rig with two 4x12 cabinets, singer Bruno Lord standing behind me, hands clamping headphones to my ears, while drummer Keith Bonthrone clapped time at the other end of the studio. My amazing timing on the track ‘Red Sun’ is actually what happens when you have to guess whereabouts in the track you are. For the track ‘I Wanna Scream’, we had to concede defeat, as it wasn’t possible to get the timing right under those circumstances.

We took up residence in a commune in the town of Krefeld, peopled by various crazies, including German Army deserters, heroin addicts and East German revolutionaries determined to teach us the necessary urban guerrilla warfare skills needed to survive the coming revolution. This led to yet another somewhat confrontational discussion with police and fire brigade when we inadvertently burned down an outbuilding while learning how to make anti-tank Molotov cocktails. Inevitably, there came a point at which our attempts to influence future population growth, and a national shortage of hallucinogenic medicines being blamed on the group, led to our being thrown out of the country, and EMI tore up our record contract. We had a brief career extension back in England, but after becoming probably the only band in history to have been turfed out of the Cavern Club in Liverpool because of our volume and behaviour, that was the end of Janus. Part One.