In 1985 Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger entered a studio together for the first time in ten years, and started recording tracks for a proposed fourth album by Neu!. The music was recorded and mixed between October 1985 and April 1986 at Grundfunk Studio and Dingerland-Lilienthal Studio in Düsseldorf, and at the Michael Rother Studio in Forst, Germany, but the sessions were not completed and the planned album was abandoned. During the 90's, the first three Neu! albums were made available on CD by Germanofon Records, a dubious label allegedly based in Luxembourg who specialized in unauthorized and illegal reissues of otherwise unavailable krautrock albums, who somehow managed to get the Neu! albums into mainstream distribution. As a response to these bootlegs, Dinger released 'Neu! 4' "in an act of despair", and railed against them in the liner notes. 'Neu! 4' was issued by the Japanese label Captain Trip Records, without Rother's input, knowledge or consent, and he only learned what had happened in a telegram congratulating him on the release of the album. This action by Dinger exacerbated the disagreements between Rother and Dinger, preventing an official CD release of the first three Neu! albums until 2001, of which part of the agreement was that all copies of 'Neu! 4' on Astralwerks in the U.S. and Grönland Records in the UK were to be recalled, and it has been out of print ever since. Despite Rother's continued objection to Dinger's original decision to release 'Neu! 4' and his oft-stated opinion that it isn't a real Neu! album, Rother had no objection to fans buying the CD secondhand, and would always leave open the possibility that it could be reissued legally with his consent in the future. Rother and Dinger did attempt to negotiate such a release after the official reissue of the first three albums, but they failed to reach an agreement, and with Dinger's death in 2008, such an agreement seemed unlikely. In early 2010, Rother announced that he had arrived at an agreement arranged with Dinger's heir, Miki Yui, and had completely remastered the album from original multi-track and master tapes to produce 'Neu! '86', which he termed 'our fourth studio album'. The new album shared several tracks in common with the original release, some of which had been edited or remixed, while others had been removed and replaced with some new pieces which were not on the original release. Both versions have their moments, but the general opinion seems to be that Rother removed a couple of tracks which really should have stayed, and edited some which didn't need it, and so by taking the best tracks from each release and sequencing them following a guide from the HeadHeritage website, here is what I hope is the definitive version of Neu!'s fourth album. The only track I've edited myself is the first one, as Rother's edit cut it down so much that it hardly seemed worth including, while the original could afford to have a couple of minutes shaved off it, and it then makes a nice intro to the album. I've created new artwork based on the original cover, which was so close to what I've come up with that I can't believe that no-one saw it at the time.
Track listing
01 Intro (Nazionale)
02 Bush Drum
03 Crazy
04 Good Life
05 Schöne Welle (Nice Wave)
06 Wave Naturelle
07 La Bomba (Stop Aparthjid World-Wide)
08 Paradise Walk
09 Flying Dutchman
10 Danzing
11 Drive (Grundfunken)
Thanks to martinf for the suggestion
