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Dagmar Krause

A Hamburg-born singer who carried Slapp Happy, Henry Cow and Art Bears with an unmistakable voice, then turned to the songs of Brecht, Weill and Hanns Eisler.

Origin
Hamburg, Germany
Years active
1968-
Genres
avant-rock, art song, cabaret
Labels
Polydor, Virgin, Recommended Records, Hannibal, Antilles, Voiceprint

Hamburg and Slapp Happy

Dagmar Krause was born in Hamburg on 4 June 1950 and began singing professionally at 14, in clubs on the Reeperbahn. In 1968 she joined City Preachers, a folk and protest group, and sang on their album Der Kürbis, das Transportproblem und die Traumtänzer. In Hamburg she met the British composer Anthony Moore.

In 1972 Moore, Krause and the American Peter Blegvad formed Slapp Happy. Moore and Blegvad wrote the pop song Just a Conversation in twenty minutes, then found that their own singing did not work and asked Krause. She had wanted to stop singing but agreed. Polydor released it as a single in 1972, and the trio recorded their first album, Sort Of, with the German group Faust as their backing band. They moved to England in 1973 and signed to Virgin, which worried about Krause's German accent. Their rejected second album was re-recorded with session musicians and released in May 1974 as Slapp Happy.

Henry Cow and Art Bears

In November 1974 Slapp Happy recorded Desperate Straights with Henry Cow, and the two groups merged for In Praise of Learning, made in February and March 1975. Moore and Blegvad left that April, but Krause stayed with Henry Cow, whose long political piece Living in the Heart of the Beast she sang. Steve Lake of Melody Maker wrote that her voice grew harsher as the song moved toward its finish. She also sang Beautiful as the Moon, Terrible as an Army with Banners, with words by Chris Cutler.

She left the group in October 1977 but agreed to sing on its next album. At Sunrise Studio in Switzerland in January 1978 the members disagreed over how much of the material should be songs. The compromise was that Fred Frith, Cutler and Krause released the songs as Art Bears. Hopes and Fears came out in May 1978, with Henry Cow credited as guests and its longest track In Two Minds among the highlights. Winter Songs (1979) and The World as It Is Today (1981) followed. Cutler said that no one else could have done what Krause did on those records, and recalled that she refused to sing the last song of the final sessions because she found its text too violent.

Brecht, Weill and Eisler

Krause's love of Weimar-era cabaret and of Bertolt Brecht and his composers Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler produced some of her most satisfying work. In 1978 she starred in a London production of Brecht and Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and in 1985 she sang Surabaya Johnny on Hal Willner's Lost in the Stars, a Weill tribute. Hannibal released her first solo album, Supply and Demand, in 1986, with songs by Brecht, Weill and Eisler in English and a German twin, Angebot und Nachfrage.

Tank Battles: The Songs of Hanns Eisler appeared in 1988 on Antilles New Directions, with a German companion, Panzerschlacht. Eisler, who composed the national anthem of East Germany, worked closely with Brecht, and the CD holds 26 of his songs, with texts by Brecht except where stated. Greg Cohen produced it and Philip Clark credited him with the arrangements; the players included Lindsay Cooper, John Tilbury, John Harle and Danny Thompson. John Dougan of AllMusic called her vocals stunning, and Philip Clark of The Wire wrote that Cohen's arrangements winningly evoked 1920s Berlin. The album is in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and Voiceprint reissued it in 1994 with ten extra tracks. Krause took the Brecht and Eisler songs to the Edinburgh Festival, documented on Voiceprint Radio Sessions (1993).

Later work

In 1983 Krause joined News from Babel, a studio group with Cutler, Lindsay Cooper and Zeena Parkins, which made two albums. In 1991 she, Moore and Blegvad made the television opera Camera for Channel 4, based on her original idea, with Krause playing the lead, Melusina. In 2008 Cutler and Frith performed the Art Bears songs as the Art Bears Songbook without her, and in 2010 she came out of retirement to join a performance of it in Carmaux.

In November 2016 Slapp Happy played with Faust at the Week-End festival in Cologne, their first performance in sixteen years according to The Wire, and followed it with a residency at Cafe Oto in London in February 2017. The critic John Kelman has called her an undervalued and underrated singer in the history of modern music.

Records

Songs

Slapp Happy, Henry Cow, Art Bears, News from Babel, Robert Wyatt

Where to go next

Official

Reference

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

Sources

  1. Dagmar Krause, Wikipedia
  2. Profile: Dagmar Krause, Calyx, The Canterbury Website
  3. Art Bears, Wikipedia
  4. Slapp Happy, Wikipedia
  5. Henry Cow, Wikipedia
  6. An interview with Chris Cutler, Clouds and Clocks (2004-02-08)
  7. Slapp Happy perform with Faust at WEEK-END, The Wire (2017-02)