Ever since the age of about 2 or 3, I have been entirely immersed (some may say obsessed) with pop music. As a child, I voraciously scoured all the books and magazines I could possibly lay my hands on, desperate to feed my addiction to discovering new, potentially life-changing musical treasure. As a teenager, as is common with the particularly susceptible adolescent mind, certain selected musical finds bearing mysterious and potent criteria held the ability to inspire such joy and excitement in me with ever increasing power and intensity. Encountering an album such as Todd Rundgren's 'Something/Anything', for example, elicited emotional palpitations of such astonishing strength that I have known no other recipe for an equivalent sensual state. Others found similarly intoxicating states in the discovery of drugs, sex and alcohol - all three of which can provide significant excitement when applied correctly - as well as in wholesome sporting activities as well as and other ordinary and perfectly agreeable teenage pastimes, however I had discovered nothing that came close to the emotional and visceral response inspired by my favourite records. As a pre-teen I'd thoroughly excavated my dad's record collection and found particular interest in the early Alice Cooper records, Frank Zappa's 'Overnite Sensation', Steely Dan, Faust, Led Zeppelin - records which remain favourites even today. I recall hearing 'Paranoid' by Black Sabbath for the first time and playing air drums with a pair of plastic chopsticks along to it and instantly feeling touched by the sheer fucking gnarly attitude of it, even as a child of four or five years. My dad had a few of those label samplers that were popular in the early 70's - The Vertigo Annual, Nice Enough to Eat, All Good Clean Fun, Greasy Truckers Party...I pored through these records and quickly identified a taste for the heavier and darker sounds present on these records. Mysterious and obscure bands with distinctly heavy-sounding names like Affinity, Groundhogs, Man that I tried to locate in the local Our Price whilst allowed in to browse for five minutes during shopping trips in town with my mum, alas to no avail. I remember 'Race from Here to your Ears' by Amon Duul II, which was included on United Artists' 'All Good Clean Fun' 2-LP sampler and it sounding so exciting and like nothing else I had ever heard before. It was heavy but it was a different kind of heavy than Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin - what was wrong with the guitar?! And the guy's voice??! Why did the singer seem to be going out of his way to render himself largely unintelligible to the listener? These are the same questions often asked by adults when hearing Amon Duul II for the first time, along with 'Are they deliberately trying to sound bad?' and the old faithful 'How on earth did they convince anyone to let them put a record out?!' (usually asked with equal measures of indignation and insult). I was probably about 7 or 8 when I first heard Amon Duul II and there was something instantly appealing about the apparent mystique of the band conveyed by the band shot and bio in the accompanying booklet as well as the enigmatic, psychedelic ambiguity of the titles and lyrics. Although I knew nothing about the overall aesthetics of the band and their records or the musical climate from which they emerged, I knew that it DIDN'T sound like George Michael, and that this was definitely a plus point.
As time passed, I continued to discover other music and have love affairs with particular genres, cults, and historic periods and regional pop music trends but I returned to the music of Amon Duul II in my mid-teens - or rather, they were returned to me by reading Julian Cope's definitive account of West German experimental music of the 1960s and 70s, Krautrocksampler - and I began to investigate their albums via my new addiction of spending my free time and limited funds in 2nd hand record shops. Their mystique and enigmatic qualities were reinforced by the historical account included in the book although it must be said that the discovery of the band having actually existed and been comprised of human beings who made actual records caused the romantic idea of the band to dissipate somewhat.
