Steve Hillage / John Martyn - Rockpalast

The Rockpalast series of live gigs has been a feature of German TV since around 1974 and the quality of the performances captured on it is just incredible. It is not unreasonable to say that the BBC ‘In Concert’ series was technically better than Rockpalast but the Germans managed to get the best performances from their artists. That the German shows were normally selected venues from a tour rather than being staged in their own right may have been the cause. The famously correct German audiences certainly helped as well.
That two such performances should be released almost simultaneously is fun, that they feature two entirely different but utterly British musicians is remarkable.

First up we have Steve Hillage recorded in Bensburg in March 1977. This featured what was probably his most coherent line-up with Miquette Giraudy, Clive Bunker, Colin Bass, Christian Boule and the keyboards and synths of Phil Hodge & Basil Brooks. We are in deep hippy territory here, all white suits and Tibetan Bells, but we are also in rock territory and Hillage is/was a great, if under-respected, rock guitarist in the Mike Oldfield vein rather than Tony Iommi.
The band are working as a team and although they are all superb musicians there is no sense of struggling to impose on the whole, just sublimation to it. Hillage’s reedy voice fits perfectly with the rest and a real sense of space is created by Giraudy’s synth and little girl exclamations. The music is almost jazz-like in its ability to stretch time and to create an platform for experiment and creativity around a central theme and the numbers develop almost without any conscious machinations on the part of the band – time expands and there is little sense of individual performance until the listener is snapped back into realtime by a change in the tempo or by a deliberate act – such as a ‘ting’ of the Tibetan bell. There is a rare feeling of total one-ness between the band and the audience, an understanding that neither exists without recourse to the other.
The whole concert is of a standard that cannot be captured from a one-off gig; to be this together the band needs to be touring and the Rockpalast crew capture a top performance without unnecessary visual frills or unusual angles that might detract from what the band was doing.


The second disc features John Martyn live from Germany but the town is not credited – I suspect Wiesbaden – and the performance could not be more different. Martyn is on his own and nervous as a cat in the doghouse. His initial attempts at humour fall flat as pfankuchen and he is doing the usual British thing of showing commonness to hide his fear – until he plugs in the guitar and starts into ‘One Day Without You’. Sheer bliss. For the first six songs he is playing an old acoustic guitar, seemingly held together with gaffer tape but he is using his familiar electronics boxes (1978 so no digital tools!) and producing sounds that an acoustic shouldn’t be capable of. His famous work with the Exhoplex is well shown here and he somehow plays the guitar and the foot boxes while drinking a can of lager and singing - some task! He rattles off a gorgeous version of ‘Bless The Weather’ and a seriously understated ‘Big Muff’ before switching to an electric for a couple of numbers where he actually plays more softly and sweetly than on the acoustic! The audience is absolutely rapt by this point, laughing at his jokes and warmly applauding the performance of a man totally in command of his music.
On the intro to ‘Solid Air’ he breaks a string – no problem today, just have a roadie wheel out the new, tuned and perfect guitar but not then: he calls for a new string, bites the broken one off the guitar and restrings the guitar in front of an entire audience, keeps them laughing and then delivers a perfect and soulful version of ‘Solid Air’ that leaves the audience gobsmacked. Oh for audiences today that would allow the musician the space and time to attend to such things.
All the favourites are here including a spaced version of ‘I’d Rather Be The Devil’ and ‘Singin’ In The Rain’ and it is easy to see why he has become so highly revered by those whose musical tastes were a little wider than pure rhythm or riff.
John Martyn at his best was always a magical performer and Rockpalast managed to catch him on a particularly good night. Wonderful.

There are many releases of the Rockpalast series but these two seem to beautifully represent what was happening in British rock & pop alongside and separate from the punk explosion that was just beginning to take a hold in the UK and that almost banished such experimentalism as this overnight. There are mistakes and incidents like the broken guitar string captured as part of the gig - no sanitisation or retakes - and it all adds to the performances rather than diminishing them.
There are many more performances of this ilk in the vaults - I can't wait!