So my wife decided to celebrate her birthday in suitably noisy fashion upstairs; according to our marriage contract this required me to stay downstairs with a pot of coffee, a pile of subediting and something Pretty Fucking Noisy And Abrasive, which is what I tend to do anyways so no problems there. However, tonight the noise from above was such that I turned aside the Richard Youngs I’ve been obsessed with, I switched off the gentle pickings of Jack Rose, I eschewed Juana Molina, White Magic and even (fuck knows what made me drag this one out of the vinyl box today, but forgive me lord, I did it, and it felt fine) the Stones’ Exile On Main Street, and I reached out, almost without thinking for the lovely pristine package that contains Kalte Sterne, early recordings by Einsturzende Neubauten, delicately repackaged, arrived in the post the other day and left completely unopened by me.

Contemplating the oeuvre of Neubauten feels to me something like staring into some huge abyss filled with leftover stock and buried treasure, like whe I was 16 and worked in Woolworths and out the back we had this abyss - no kidding, a fucking abyss - where all the out-of-date chocolate and broken Barbies waited before getting thrown away. You were under no circumstances allowed to take anything from the abyss or even go near it (this was my first job; they fired me for wearing black tights instead of flesh tone and having an ‘attitude problem’) and it was always dark, but glinting with the seductive shiny wrappers of old sweets and toys, and I always wanted to get down there and have a rummage, not because I wanted out-of-date M&Ms as such, but just because. Because it was an abyss. Because it was there. But it was too big, too dark, and too risky, and I wanted to keep the job - although, as I said, I got fired anyway, so I might as well as dived right into it on my first day and run out the door loaded down with damaged Lego Technics and dented cans of Irn Bru. But I never did.

My point being. It was probably about that time in my life that some boy, because it is always a boy, always, tried to get me into Neubauten, and I resisted. Because there was just too much of it. It was too heavily coded and hermetic. I could bluff my way through the boys’ worlds of Japanese noise and 60s psych and all that noisy American stuff we used to listen to back then, took to it like a frowning duck to water, but not the Neubauten. It would have been like pretending I knew about computer games or sports - I would have been so out of my depth and so caught out. Instantly. And so patronised too, let’s not forget. I got to thinking that Neubauten were exclusive to boys (or, at least, the sort of boys I knew), like punching walls, making lists of films they’ve seen (with ratings), having a Heavy Metal Phase, liking Butthole Surfers, reading Michael Moorcock, keeping a huge box of 2000AD in the cupboard and having bigger feet than me were also exclusive to boys.

And then I grew up and forgot all about the abyss and the differences between boys and girls. But I retained the abyss-like suspicion of Einsturzende Neubauten, while getting over my similar fears of the Residents and Nurse With Wound - and while developing exclusive geek-worlds of my own (test me on early Krautrock, fuckers! go on! and British Folk, while you’re at it). After it while it just became something I was never going to do. It was too late now. It would be, I don’t know, like suddenly taking up running. I would just look and feel like a complete twat.

Then Mute records sent me this CD, and when someone saw it the other day and expressed surprise that I hadn’t listened to it, I suddenly felt guilty. So I put it on the stuff-to-play pile, on top of the Mission of Burma album, which I didn’t like much actually, and underneath something else, what is it, a Murcof remixes thing, well, that isn’t gonna take me anywhere amazing, is it, but I think it will be nice ( it has Deathprod on it after all), and suddenly, at 1.22 am, I’m finally listening to the bastard thing. Yes, I put it on to drown out my wife’s festivities - she gets the boys, I get the noise; it’s a match made in heaven - but my goodness.

It’s great.