His student band was a catastrophe but the Turner prize-winning artist decided to release his music after Frank Ocean appropriated one of his experimental songs. So is his uplifting new album pop – or art?
Wolfgang Tillmans never had any intention of releasing music and certainly no intention of playing it live. This is an intriguing thing for the noted German photographer to say given that he’s on a Zoom call from his Berlin home to discuss his second album, Build from Here, which moreover includes a track called Grüne Linien that was recorded live on stage with his band Fragile, at a festival in Fire Island in 2018. Equally, you can see why Tillmans’ musical history may give him pause about, as he puts it, making music “with a direct public intent”. His head was turned by encountering the new romantic scene while on a trip to the UK to improve his English. “British pop music at the time offered such a kaleidoscope,” he enthuses, “combining things that didn’t belong together, from completely different origins: so many things going on at the same time, it was freeing; just the sense that you were allowed to think like this, this is possible, you can do this.”
On his return to Germany, he formed a synth duo in his hometown of Remscheid. But his partner in the duo “disappeared overnight”, leaving town in the aftermath of a troubled relationship. Then, in 1991, he offered to sing with a band while a student in Bournemouth. “A catastrophic failure,” Tillmans says of their solitary gig. “Under-rehearsed, the monitors failed, I couldn’t hear myself and I was out of pitch, out of tune, out of sync, just terrible. A never-again situation.”
