la! NEU? - Live At On Air West, Tokyo, 3 Dec 1996 (rel. 1998-9)

Continuing the la! NEU? posts from last week's feature of their debut release, today focuses on the three and a half hours of their second concert (the first, a day prior, remains unreleased; not sure if it was even recorded).  You'll notice the 'Vol. 2' in the artwork above; I'll be discussing these two albums in concert order, rather than release order.  Yep, 'Vol. 2' is the first half of the gig.

In a spectacular 'what could have been', this December 1996 trip to Japan was originally planned as a NEU! reunion, to which Michael Rother wouldn't commit.  Offering his new band instead, Dinger went to Osaka with Andreas Reihse, Viktoria Wehrmeister and the rest of the touring la! NEU? lineup he'd assembled, played the aforementioned first concert, then traveled to Tokyo the next day (the first 20 seconds of Disc 1 here) to set up at the On Air West venue (the following five minutes).

As with la! NEU?'s farewell performance in Düsseldorf, the introduction (here titled Tension) is a gentle ambient keyboard piece.  The calm is then blown away by the La Düsseldorf track Viva, in which lead guitarist Dirk Flader is particularly incendiary.  Dinger then asks if anyone knows Hero '96, presumably to check if anyone had bought the new album (that had only been out a couple days!), and a fine version of that track follows, with Wehrmeister finding a new confidence, even appearing to channel Patti Smith towards the end, swapping "piss on the industry"'s with Dinger.

On Disc 2, the concert progresses into an improvisational section for a total of 40 minutes, including Dinger playing a tape of music and talking that he'd received from a fan (a Brit-expat in the US), taking the democracy of his new group to an absurd conclusion.  la! NEU? return to their own music with the sweet, Dear Prudence-quoting Mayday, then the set looks backwards again - first to 1985 and America, and then...

Tokyo Disc 1 link
Tokyo Disc 2 link

...all the way back to 1978, where it began.  At this point, some further listening instructions are required to follow the concert order: play Disc 2 of 'Cha Cha 2000, Live in Tokyo Vol. 1' first, and Disc 1 afterwards.  Crap, just realised that sentence, and the artwork above, are huge spoilers for the last song in the set.  Yeah, the last song.  Which takes up two CDs.  Think this is a bit overkill, even for Dinger?  That it'll get a bit boring at, what, 104 minutes?  Well, it's not for nothing that this is la! NEU?'s bestselling release.

Cha Cha 2000 Tokyo '96 is nothing less than Klaus Dinger's most epic expression of his greatest composition, and for me is just endlessly inspirational.  Each section of the original 20-minute song gets fully turned inside and out, and rather than played to death, played into new life by a group who were all adept at long-form improvisation, and would remain so.  It builds up and falls back endlessly, features loads of odd little extras (i.e. dropped in tapes, and at one point inviting audience members on to the stage to sing along) and at the start of Disc 1 (remember, the final part of the song and concert) has a beautifully extended quiet improv before the final buildup starts at the halfway point of the disc.  Is this the greatest Cha Cha ever?  You decide.

Tokyo Cha Cha Disc 2 link
Tokyo Cha Cha Disc 1 link