With a little help from the fans

• Published date: 30 June 2022

The esteemed German musician finally gets around to performing a repeatedly rescheduled tour this summer, which is due to call to the National Concert Hall next month. Bargeld was Nick Cave's German sidekick in The Bad Seeds, serving as guitarist and backing vocalist for the multinational band of brothers from 1983 to 2003

Born in West Berlin in 1959 as Christian Emmerich, he chose his pseudonym after the German artist and poet Johannes Theodor Baargeld, who established the Cologne Dada group with Max Ernst.

Before his stint as a Bad Seed, Bargeld founded Einstürzende Neubauten (translated as Collapsing New Buildings) in Berlin, an avant-rock collective who turned modern music completely on its head with some of the most extreme performances in history. In their early years, Neubauten played pneumatic drills, heavy machinery, or whatever would emit some kind of noise or sound. Nick Cave once very accurately described Blixa's screams as "a sound you would expect to hear from strangled cats or dying children." The late writer and cultural critic Mark Fisher once singled them out for purveying "genuine experimentalism".

The collective played their first show in Berlin's Moon Club on April Fool's Day, 1980. "The promoters were looking for a name to advertise it as, so I suggested Einstürzende Neubauten," Bargeld says. "It certainly didn't occur to me that we'd be still doing it over 40 years later."

In 2003, Bargeld left The Bad Seeds, citing issues with the band's management and sheer exhaustion from trying to maintain "a marriage with two bands". In addition to inspiring a generation of musicians, Einstürzende Neubauten initiated a novel approach to operating outside the conventional business models and boundaries of the mainstream music industry.

"We invented crowdfunding in 2002 but we didn't call it that back then," Bargeld explains. "We called it a supporter system. My wife wrote the code and built the website. Once 200 supporters signed up, we realised it was working and we could raise the money necessary to make an album. Nowadays, we don't even have to write the code anymore. We can use one of the existing platforms like Patreon."

In recent years, Bargeld's cooking demonstrations have become a viral hit on Instagram. "I've never actually seen my Instagram account," he reveals. "The cooking was done for the supporters of my website, but my wife sometimes takes a clip and puts it up on Instagram. Every time she does so, a hundred new supporters sign...