Nüjje! by Trip Shrubb

This is a set of reworkings of my copy of the first Neu! album…one of the few truly psychedelic artefacts in our home.

My copy came to me around 90/91 when the older boyfriend of a friend lent it to me because i was into V.U. and he thought I may dig it. He was correct.

The album had obviously been used in many a ritual by the time I got it. Beer stains, blood stains and all sorts of other stains plastered the cover. I can`t remember what state the vinyl was in but now it has a ratio of around 50% surface noise to 50% music. It was about 18 years old at this point in time.

I guess my first round of “owning” and using my copy lasted from when i received it until around 1996/1997. This is when I lent it to a younger cosmic adventurer who was heavily into acid and Hawkwind.

He must have dug it, because that was the last i saw of it, whilst the last I saw of him was in some bushes in a park with a bow and arrow, on the hunt for whatever.

A few years later I heard a story that he had a big freak out whilst tripping and consequently burned all his vinyl. This I actually believed because at the time, it sadly made sense.

So I spent a whole lot of years thinking that my copy of Neu! had been sacrificed during a massive bummer of a psychedelic ritual gone wrong and no longer existed.

Thankfully, the story I had heard wasn`t true because many years, many kilometers and fatherhood later, I`m guessing around 2005 or so, the Hawkwind guy sends me a picture via MySpace of himself, dressed in full Taliban gear, holding my copy of Neu! with the words “Want Back?” written bellow.

A rare and fine specimen of our race indeed.

The things this very copy of this album must have seen in its 52 years of existence.

mbeckett.net
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