“You're a monk, I'm a monk, we're all monks! Dave, Larry, Eddie, Roger, everybody, let's go! It's beat time, it's hop time, it's monk time!”
The Transatlantic Feedback is the story of one of the most fascinating, groundbreaking and straight up bizarre bands to have emerged during the 1960s: The Monks. Stationed out in Germany were five US Troops, all with varying yet equally unmilitant reasons to be in the army. They formed The Torquays, a rock 'n' roll band, playing rock 'n' roll classics along with popular British music such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks that would play GI bars around town, and come Christmas they would even transform into Jingle Bells, touring the hospitals of Germany to play to the sick.
All this changed when they met Walther Niemann and Karl-H Remy, two design students who approached the band with an idea, a concept that would transform the band, their image and their sound to become The Monks. The idea, approach and execution was revolutionary and way beyond its time, even this idea of a conceptual art project manifesting itself in a living breathing band pre-dated Warhol and The Velvet Underground. The idea was simple; be the anti-Beatles, instead of singing ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, sing ‘I Hate You’. A manifesto was created and had to be adhered to at all times, they shaved their heads monk-style, wore black and created distorted, rhythmically electrifying garage-rock-pop music. Playing up to forty hours a week in beat bars in Germany as The Torquays had meant the band, while being externally shaped and moulded, had the goods musically - the results were Black Monk Time, a debut album that, forty-plus years down the line, still sounds invigorating.
The trouble was, they were frighteningly ahead of their time, audiences were bemused and never gained momentum in size. A realisation that their music was not of the time came when they shared a bill with Jimi Hendrix, who was all melody and blues-flair whilst The Monks were all energy, rhythm and oddness. Where every other band sang in delicate harmonies, The Monks used their backing vocals like another other instrument in the band, being loud, abrasive and out of shape. It may have taken the music world ten years to catch up to The Monks, but sadly they didn’t have that long to wait around and, after a failed attempt at going commercial via a rather lame single after their debut LP, they gave up and disbanded on the eve of an Asian tour – never once playing a show on US soil.
As the band are all interviewed in hindsight they have varying opinions and states of interest on the band itself, some embracing the band with honour and others shrugging off the significance and avoiding the anti-Vietnam political associations. This makes the film a diverse and intriguing look into the minds of the creators (sadly Walther and Karl, the creative managers, declined to be featured here, stating that "all good managers take a back seat").
Thirty years later they return heroes, playing a reformation show for the first time ever in the US, packed with celebrity fans and, along with this DVD release, a tribute album, Silver Monk Time, featuring The Fall, The Raincoats, Silver Apples, John Spencer Blues Explosion, Faust and many more darlings of the alternative world. This is where the film becomes something more than just a rock-doc and turns into something sincerely touching. Banjo player Dave Day spent a year and a half on the streets of Germany after the band split up, and his sheer elation at playing together and expressing how happy he is in his life after basically having a very difficult one is touching to encounter. It makes one redress the nature of reformations of this kind, while many would have happily had the band remain in the '60s underground, forever a cult group untouched or tainted by a modern day get-together, the thought of denying those men the adulation and happiness they experience and deserve when they got back together is a distressing one - five people completely believed in the music they were creating but had to wait thirty years before they got validation for their accomplishments. This documentary resonates even deeper after you learn that five core members of the film (including two actual band members) have all now passed away, meaning that this really is the last living document of the band in a collective form.