Spoon

Can penned this song for the German TV detective series, Das Messer, which was based on the Tim Frazer novels of English crime writer Francis Durbridge. Released as a single, it reached #6 on the German charts.

Keyboardist Irmin Schmidt told Uncut magazine the story of the song: "We had done this music for a German television programme, Millionenspiel, and that was very successful," he said. "So we were asked to do the music to Das Messer. We accepted, of course, and started working and it was about the first thing we did in their new studio. We did our best, and then when I came with the music to the editing room, the director (Rolf von Sydow) flipped out – he didn't like the music at all. He said, 'I wanted commercial music and not some avant garde music.' He was totally against it. Big trouble – but the guys who actually commissioned the music loved it, and said, 'No matter what the director says, this music should remain – it's fabulous.' That was a few days of sleepless nights, because I thought we had done it all in vain." "The film itself got very bad critics," Schmidt continued, "and 100 different papers all over Germany, even the little provincial papers, all wrote, 'It's a very mediocre Durbridge this time, but the music is extraordinarily'. And we went into the charts with it."

The song marked Can's first recorded use of drum machine, an unusual feature in popular music at the time. Schmidt told Uncut magazine: "It was the first one, certainly in Germany, nobody had heard this kind of sound, that was one of the things that this funny director was so… For him that was so unusual, commercial, and yeah, I don't remember any peace at that time using a drum machine, especially using it rhythmically in this weird fashion." Drummer Jaki Liebezeit added: "I don't mind drum machines. To make a synthetic attempt to have a real drum there, that idea I don't like so much. 'Spoon' was the biggest hit we had in Germany, and that sound was one of the first rhythm boxes, a Farfisa rhythm box. It could play bossa nova, tango, jazz, waltz, all kinds of dance rhythms, and you could also press down all the buttons at the same time and get that mixture of everything. It was fun – we didn't take it too seriously."