Faust: The Faust Tapes
Navel-Gazers #74 is an interview with Jean-Hervé Peron of Faust who is going to talk to us about The Faust Tapes. Released 5 decades ago on Virgin Records, it’s an album which sounds every bit as groundbreaking and inventive when we listen back today, if not moreso with each passing year as some of the weirdest tangents from the early 70s counterculture recede from collective memory. Although I’ve listened to it countless times, ‘The Faust Tapes’ always surprises me: I can never remember what happens next, which track titles correspond to which music, or which cheeky moment is lurking around the corner when. It’s much to do with how it was produced - instead of a unified, cohesive collection, the ‘tapes’ unravels as a series of fragments at completely different stages of development. There are some songs and song snippets among its 26 tracks, whereas other sections seem to transpire behind the curtain where Faust are to be found tinkering with effects, manipulating the titular tapes or just goofing around with ideas. And I think it’s that seductive element of surprise which has intrigued many listeners, particularly in the UK where it was - oddly - their best selling album. But ‘The Faust Tapes’ isn’t the only thing to discuss with Mr. Peron… where else will the topic lead us?
AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers! We’re going to talk about an album released in 1973, the same year that “The Exorcist” and Volkswagen currywurst were released to market. So what was going on in your life in 1973?
Jean-Hervé Peron: Salut Andrew, salut „Les Contemplateurs de Nombril « ! i love the name : Navel Gazers ..
1973 ? ouh la la, that is 52 years ago... 1973 is between 1972 where we left Polydor then recorded the album Faust IV for Virgin at their Manor Studios in Shipton-on-Cherwell / Oxfordshire, then the band returned to Germany…. and 1974 where we recorded another album at “Musicland Studio Munich” of Giorgio Moroder, Munich which would much later, 48 years later to be exact, be released as the album Punkt by Bureau B/Hamburg.
1973, while all members of the band had gone back to Germany, I stayed in the UK and lived in London, Constantine Road, right by the Hampstead Heath. I bought an old BRS (British Railway Services) truck. As I did not have a driving licence at the time, I bought an L ( for “Learner” ) - driving licence in the next tobacco shop and took off for rides in London and later travelled through Europe still with the L-driving licence and of course no insurance : careless and foolish I was !... but I had a good star above my head and never got controlled or had any accident.
Happy days by the Heath, living with Janet and her son James, going to concerts to see Kevin Ayres, Tubular Bells, Van Morrison, Stomu Yamash’ta and many others. I eventually left London and travelled to my hometown Cherbourg /France just across the Channel, got busted by the French customs as I was carrying some of the Faust gear without a Carnet ..i wonder how many of you remember the days where you had to have a Custom Carnet to tour Europe 😊 such a drag ! then came the EU, Europe United, what a relief …and now we are back to square one with Brexit ..such a drag again …we are a long way away from “no countries, no religions, no possessions”..
I then drove to Hamburg/Germany where I reconnected with some of the Faust people. I remember playing with Diermaier and Irmler again in some wharehouses …but it is a long time ago.. i don’t remember clearly..
AC: So had you guys only gone to the UK for the purpose of recording ‘Faust IV’, or were you playing shows in the UK as well? Did you know many people over there (here)?
Jean-Hervé Peron: The primary purpose of Faust travelling to the UK was to record an album for Virgin. They had just signed us after we had split from Polydor. Simon (Draper) came over to Hamburg where we played some music for him and apparently he found it interesting. His opinion about our music would change over the years.
But YES we did a UK tour in 1973 in May and June, Plymouth where Diermaier and me got arrested for “stealing” two bobbies paper-hats : we pleaded guilty ! ..then London at The Rainbow (‘London's Rainbow looked like a Berliner Ensemble production of a rock musical version of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5." The stage backdrop had been raised, revealing the grey back wall of the theatre, which had distinct prison-camp overtones in the subdued light. Faust's equipment was grouped mid-stage, an island of anonymous electronic gear huddling together, as if for comfort, in the centre of a vast emptiness.’ -Melody Maker June 73) and another 7 or so gigs which took us all the way up to Aberdeen and Leeds.
We had no experience of live-performance…quite exciting:
Plymouth, Guildhall, 19 May 1973.
London, BBC Topgear, 22 May 1973.
Cambridge: (with Nazareth), ? Jun 1973.
Manchester, Free Trade Hall, 6 Jun 1973.
Oxford, Polytechnic, 9 Jun 1973.
London, Rainbow, 10 Jun 1973.
Bristol, Boobs, 11 Jun 1973.
Birmingham, Town Hall, 13 Jun 1973.
Aberdeen, cancelled, 15 Jun 1973.
Newcastle, City Hall, 17 Jun 1973.
Glasgow, McLellan Gallery (cancelled), 18 Jun 1973.
Leeds, 22 Jun 1973.
At the end of this tour, we started recording at the Manor, the first residential studio in the UK, run by Branson. We shared studio times with Mike Oldfield as he recorded Tubular Bells. The vibes were not too good I must say. The technical crew and Oldfield obviously did not like German folks and showed it daily. We had difficulties using their equipment and if our genius sound engineer Kurt Graupner would not have been there, we would have been in deep shit.
AC: What about back in Hamburg, was there an active local scene where you would interact with other bands? Who are some other musicians and artists you remember crossing paths with, in that era?
Jean-Hervé Peron: Back in Germany I lived in my BRS truck, travelled to France and ultimately landed in south Germany near Ravensburg ..Irmler’s girlfriend found us a house in the countryside. From there we would organize crazy concerts with local artists. Nothing famous, plain anonymous fun. I cant remember any names anyway. Of course there were many groups active all over Germany. The Krautrock vibes were really high. Irmler then somehow organized the Giorgio Moroder Studio in Münich in May 1974 ..The rest is history 😊
AC: ‘The Faust Tapes’ has been described as everything from a “warped masterwork” to a “pure headache”. In my experience, it’s the most talked-about Faust album. How would you describe it? Tell us where it came from, and what you think of it.
Jean-Hervé Peron: The Faust tapes were a kind of a “present” to Virgin so that they could use it at almost no cost and get us started on the UK market. We used the tapes we had recorded in Wümme but yet not used …we had loads of them.. loads of audio-scribbles in a way.. this was our way to work : get in the studio anytime of day or night, wake up Kurt, our sound engineer who lived with us part of the time, and start jamming. We would eventually listen back to what we had done and “work” on it …or abandon the scribble for a possible later use. Some sketches were really good, others were crap ..we took all the tapes with us when we had to leave Wümme. Rudolf did a lot of work with them. I think he actually could be credited for side A of The Faust Tapes.
I like the Tapes a lot as it reminds me of all the moments we spent together in Wümme. Also I realize now it was quite a revolutionary method/technic of audio cut & paste … and the cover and the price were mind blowing too. When it was first released ( Virgin 1972? 1973? ) there were no proper names for each track ..maybe cool but I did not like it.
When we re-released the Tapes at Bureau B Records/Hamburg, we chose appropriate names.
AC: There are four track titles on ‘The Faust Tapes’ which reference “our piano”, only the first of which (Several Hands On Our Piano) ostensibly features a piano. What’s the story behind these titles, is the music on these tracks connected somehow?
Jean-Hervé Peron: Ha ! you got me here ! ...i had almost forgotten. I remember now ! we had a grand piano in our Wumme studio.
Now I remember ( hey man , this happened in 1971, that’s 54 years back ) that session where we all were busy with that poor piano ..some of us would play the keys, two hands, four hands, some would fool around with the strings, some would lie under the piano and strum fingers on its body …all kind of mischievous manoeuvres ..I guess we then split the session into 4 parts to make it more “ consumable “…
AC: …some of us in the London improv scene have been using power drills in performance. Do I hear a drill on Under Our Piano Again?
Jean-Hervé Peron: Mmmm, not sure. I don’t think we went that far as to attack the grand piano with a power drill…probably fingers strumming ?
AC: That must be it!
J’ai Mal Aux Dents is fun, what do you remember about that recording? For one thing, how improvised was it?
Jean-Hervé Peron: The story is simple and clear in my head: Rudolf (Sosna, rip) came up with this sort of funky pattern ..i could not get my bass on it at first (too much haschich I suppose) ..then Diermaier added a fantastic drum beat on it… I got even more confused …then the others moved in with crazy sounds and off-beats accentuations… I was helplessly lost. So I thought of “singing“ the pattern of the bass so my fingers would follow my voice : and here we go: “j ai mal aux dents, j ai mal aux pieds aussi”.
After a while the pattern was solidly established and the machine started churning and pumping so solid that Rudolf started to improvise some lyrics. We enjoyed that session till we had enough and then re-recorded it. Rudolf had then completed the lyrics. So we did first the instrumental part, dubbed the lyrics etc … Later, I performed that piece many, many, many times on stage. The best versions were when female voices would deliver the lyrics ( Geraldine Swayne of… Bad Servant or Ann Matthews of Ectogram ). Ectogram did a cover version in their own language (welsh) and it is a WOW version !! better than the original.
AC: Also, has anyone ever remarked on a sonic similarity between this track and “Spill The Wine” by Eric Burdon & War?
Jean-Hervé Peron: “Spill the Wine“ Eric Burdon. Great song ..but I wonder where you see a sonic similarity? you must explain that to me some day when we meet over a glass of wine.
AC: Regarding Chère Chambre, what is the voice narrating in French? I don’t speak French ...obviously I could just ask around about this or nowadays, chuck it into some dictation/translation app to answer the question but I thought it would be more interesting to ask you. Also, who is it talking?
Jean-Hervé Peron: I am the one doing the spoken voice in there.
In the lyrics (here) I am actually talking about my bedrooms in the Wümme studio where we used to live and work for two years. In one I left a window cracked open so swallows would fly in and out .. they made a nest over my bed and happily shat like swallows do. On that bed I used to daydream about all kind of things like past lovers, car accidents, grocery list, helplessness and the feeling of recurring situations ..finally asking “shall we tune our pasts ?”
I had discovered (very simple) patterns on my guitar, had them recorded and then improvised the spoken words…
I hope this helps 😊
AC: Because the material we encounter on ‘The Faust Tapes’ is so fragmented, it leaves an impression of having been cut from longer source recordings. Are there more “faust tapes” from the same sessions, either unreleased or featured on one of the later retrospective releases?
Jean-Hervé Peron: I am not sure but I think there are still tapes of the Wümme times still “hidden/kept safe and dry“. I was in charge of a whole lot of them, also of some later recordings 1974 in Munich. Luckily I managed to keep them in good shape so I could digitalize all of them. Only few new fragments of Wümme recordings were found to be usable on the box Faust 1971-74 issued by Bureau B /Hamburg.
Who knows what will show up one of those days ?
AC: I’m aware of no fewer than five different cover images for ’The Faust Tapes’. Is there any one image that you regard as the true cover? Does it matter? How did there come to be so many floating around?
Jean-Hervé Peron: All 5 cover images of The Faust Tapes are good. The original one, a drawing from Bridget Riley, is the one I would prefer …it is in a way the “true” one. The reason that other versions appear is most probably the price of the copyrights of that drawing. All reissues were made by smaller labels and they just could not afford that kind of money. Thanks to them btw for keeping the Faust music up and flaming !
AC: To fast-forward 52 years, what are you up to nowadays? I know you are running the Avantgarde Festival in Schiphorst, tell us about that. Are there any other current projects you’d like to mention? Any closing thoughts for our readers?
Jean-Hervé Peron: Considering that Faust started say roughly May 1971, that would throw me 54.5 years back. What’s up now ? yes, the Avantgarde Festival Schiphorst curated by our daughter JMccV and managed by my wife Carina Varain. We will be celebrating our 30th anniversary on June 19-21st 2026 !
Apart from taming that AGF monster, I will record a new Album in Schiphorst in January 2026. It will be a “solo” album backed up by musicians I played with during the past 20 years or so. Out on Bureau B Records/ Hamburg 2026. Concerts are also scheduled for 2026, some solo and some with band. All in all, tout est pour le mieux dans le Meilleur des mondes 😊 .
Thank you for your interest in Faust /FaUSt and cheers to all Navel gazers !
jhp/Art-Errorist
