Can | Halleluwah | Live | 1971 [50th Anniversary Restoration]

My restoration of this early live video of Can, performing Halleluwah, a track originally from their album Tago Mago, which was released 50 years ago this month, August 1971. • Moon shadow coming down... Can’s Tago Mago is a masterpiece, and Halleluwah, which at 18 minutes long, took up the entirety of side two of the original vinyl release, always feels to me like the centrepiece of the album. Halleluwah is (Wiki:) characteristic of the band’s sound around 1971 in that it features a vast array of improvised guitars and keyboards, tape editing, and the rhythm section “pounding out a monster trance/funk beat“. The drum beat for which the song is famous is repeated almost continuously by Jaki Liebezeit, with only minor variations, throughout the course of the 18-minute jam. In one line of the song, Damo Suzuki’s lyrics mention all the songs from side one of Tago Mago: “mushroom head, oh yeah, paper house.“ This early live version of Halleluwah is played faster and is more concise than the studio version, at only about 6 minutes long. Neither sound or visual quality of the original clip is really great, but it’s all we’ve got of Halleluwah from the era. • Can came to me in the mid-80’s. My colleague at Virgin Records High Street Croydon, Richard Bentley, from the band Circus Circus Circus, had made me a compilation tape, and featured on it was Moonshake by Can, from their 1973 Future Days album. I was blown away by Future Days. It and Soon Over Babaluma soon became a mainstay of many smashed out of my brain post-rave all-nighters, throughout the late-80’s and early-90’s. The extraordinary music of Can is so profoundly etched into my subconscious from those deep, deep listening sessions. I met Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt once. It was in the early 90’s at Midem, the annual music industry convention in Cannes. I was buying vinyl from Can’s label, Spoon Records, for the music distributor I worked for. My boss knew I was a huge Can fan. He sprung a surprise on me... and suddenly I’m shaking hands with the guy who had contributed such an important part of the soundtrack of my life with his euphoric music. I did what I always do when I meet a personal hero: I was dumbstruck, and mumbled something to Mr. Schmidt that was probably quite incoherent. A little later, I was lucky enough to see one of the Can-Solo-Projects shows, at the Barbican in London in ’99. Michael Karoli, Irmin Schmidt, and Jaki Liebezeit played separate sets. Two years after that show, Michael Karoli passed away, and last year we lost both Jaki Liebezeit, and Holger Czukay, leaving Irmin Schmidt as the only surviving long-term member of Can. • To my knowledge, in recent times, there has only been one broadcast of the live ’71 Halleluwah footage - in 2006 as part of a series of shows called Die Deutschrock Nacht, on the German TV station WDR. YouTube contains several versions of the clip, taken from that show. All the ones I am aware of, uploaded over the years, are of quite poor quality. It’s understandable - the source material is not great to begin with – the picture is grainy, flat and colorless and it contains a lot of scratches and blemishes. The audio is mono and flat and is running out of sync with the video. For my fix, I went through the original footage, frame by frame and “removed” the most distracting of the blemishes. Then I separated the two camera angles and rebalanced and filtered them separately. Some of the previous YouTube uploaders have created quite imaginative versions of the clip, rearranging the two camera sources and adding various digital effects. When I was recombining the two camera angles, I tried several creative things myself, but I couldn’t come up with anything that satisfied me. And so I settled on a relatively straightforward enhanced version of the original. On the audio side, I properly synced the track to the video and EQ’d it, significantly enhancing the lower frequencies and added subtle fake stereo. Thanks for watching, hope you dig it! • Credits Audio and video: Can • Halleluwah • Live 1971 • Unknown concert • Shown as part of Die Deutschrock Nacht, on WDR in 2006 Original studio version of Halleluwah from the Can album Tago Mago • Recorded November 1970 to February 1971. Originally released in Germany in August 1971 Musicians: Jaki Liebezeit • drums Holger Czukay • bass Michael Karoli • guitar Irmin Schmidt • organ Damo Suzuki • vocals • Always more videos to follow, so please keep your electric eye on me babe! I don’t own the rights, and I don’t monetise the videos on this channel. Just a fan making videos for other fans. Please Share, Like, Comment, Subscribe TheNachoVideos@ I edit, therefore I am #Can #TagoMago