At the beginning of the seventies, the Krautrock boom in Germany was at its peak. In almost every city, bands sprang up from the ground, many of which made the then typically German heavy progressive sound. This is also the case in the city of Aachen in the west of the republic. At the beginning of the year, the three musicians bassist Harald Kaiser, drummer Reinhold Breuer and  the Cologne guitarist Udo Hager, who also played flute and saxophone, joined forces to form a band called Sperrmüll. They previously played in various Aachen bands. The vocals were shared  by Hager and Kaiser.

In the course of various line-up changes, guitarist Helmut Krieg joined the band  , who had previously played with Breuer in the band Oozy Brain.  Udo Hager and the  then organist left the band and after the addition of the seventeen-year-old student Peter Schneider on the keyboards, the final quartet line-up crystallized. Instead of Hager, Krieg took over  the vocal part. Sperrmüll was actively supported  by journalist Charles Zander-Dürr, who tried to place the band on a label. EMI  was initially interested and financed the band’s studio time to record two demo songs: “To be satisfied” and “Have to leave you”. However, EMI did  not sign the band.

In 1972 the band got a record deal on the newly founded Brain label of Günter Körber. Its plates were  distributed by Metronome. The album was recorded  in the studios of Dieter Dierks in  Stommeln near Cologne, one  of the two hottest recording engineers in Germany alongside Conny Plank at the time. Zander-Dürr, who was not involved in  the  recordings, immortalized himself on the cover as the self-proclaimed producer of the LP under the abbreviation Chazadü. The final product  was  given the catalogue number 1026 by Körber and was sold in stores in 1973.

The album showed a mixture of dark, hard riffs from the guitar and psychedelic solos from the guitar, which sometimes degenerated into excess, underlaid with heavy organ sounds. The album was enthusiastically received by the press. The record contains six songs.

Let’s start with “Me and my Girlfriend”, built on a somewhat choppy stamping rhythm, garnished with mandolin sounds and moog-like synthesizer sounds, which were played by the master Dierks himself. The second track “No freak out” is a psychedelic anthem that thrives on the interplay of two guitars. As a middle section, Schneider celebrates  an organ solo, which is replaced by the sprawling guitars. Only towards the end does the psychedelically flowing opening theme repeat itself and fade slowly. With drum drumming and heavy organ sounds, song number three begins, “Rising  up”, a mid-tempo number on which the guitar played solo piles up. Krautrock as its best. The longest song of the LP, the nine-minute “Right now” starts hard rocking. In the middle section, the drummer is allowed to show his solo skills for a good one and a half minutes. A quiet short part, which increases back to the hard until the end, brings the song to its climax. Heavily progressive with a Rory Gallagher-like blues touch, “Land of the  rocking Sun  ” forms  the penultimate track. Simple hard rock boogie structures form the main part of “Pat Casey”. This sounds partly like a mixture of the Australian band The Masters Apprentices  mixed with a pinch  of Status quo and forms the gaudy conclusion of the album.

The band was highly praised by the Journaille and booked as support for the band Birth Control for a German tour. Shortly after the recordings for the LP, keyboarder Peter Schneider left  the group to devote himself more to his school career. The tour had to be cancelled again, which led to some discussions within the band about the way forward. Due to these frictions, Helmut Kaiser also left the band in the summer of 73  and continued his law studies. A few months later, the bulky waste group officially disbanded  .  Helmut Breuer  then played both under his name and under  the moniker Man Breuer on various records by Franz-Josef Degenhardt, Wim de Craene, Maria Farantouri and Eckes, among others,  as  well as as a permanent member of the bands Headband and Sotto in Su.    After studying law, Harald Kaiser worked as a journalist for travel reports and photographer.  Helmut Krieg founded the hard rock band Winterkrieg and then worked as a music seller.

The unfortunately only release of the band Sperrmüll is today as an original a highly paid and much sought-after collector’s item. Original only appeared in Germany on the olive green Brain label, in the  fully laminated folding cover with the catalog number 1026. Meanwhile, various repressings are in circulation, some of which also achieve slightly higher prices with collectors.

Hint tip on my part in any case “No freak out”, a Krautrock anthem of the extra class.

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Sperrmüll – Same
1973 – Brain Records – 1026

Tracklisting:
A1 – Me and my Girlfriend
A2 – No freak out
A3 – Rising up
B1 – Right now
B2 – Land of the rocking Sun
B3 – Pat Casey