As a kid growing up in Leeds, I was a Germanophile. I was entranced by the football team and, as a seven-year-old, I even cheered on West Germany in the 1970 World Cup, when they beat England 3-2. I was mesmerised by the wail of air horns at European Cup games on TV – my first experience of European avant garde noise. Hearing Kraftwerk’s single Autobahn in 1975 impressed on me an idea of German superiority.
I first visited Cologne in August 1998, and I wasn’t immediately enchanted. I was interviewing the protest-driven UK group Asian Dub Foundation for Uncut magazine, and we hung out a lot in the mostly Turkish Mülheim district, on the east bank of the Rhine. I was conscious of how excluded and ghettoised Germany’s ethnic minorities were. The city felt tense and standoffish, and those problems have yet to disperse fully.
I returned in May 2012 to a much happier Cologne, not least because everyone, but everyone, was drunk. It was the first of a number of trips to research Future Days, my book on the 1970s Krautrock movement, and it was carnival season, when the citizens traditionally pour on to the streets in masques, led by a riotous, gold-chained, peacock-tailed creation known as His Madness, whose float leads the annual parade.
In Cologne they drink Kölsch beer. It’s served in small (20ml) glasses – but lots of them. I recommend Päffgen, a classic Brauhaus in the Altstadt, or Lapidarium on Eigelstein, where my contact Professor Podmore and I watched Chelsea beat Bayern Munich in the 2012 Champions League final, to our chagrin but to the indifferent amusement of anti-Bayern locals.
Cologne is twinned with Liverpool and the cities share certain characteristics. Both are proud, Catholic strongholds with a history of dissent. Cologne was relatively, if unsuccessfully, resistant to Nazism. The EL-DE Haus, the museum on the site of the old Gestapo HQ, tells the city’s wartime story. For light relief, look underneath the statue of Konrad von Hochstaden, 13th-century archbishop of Cologne, at City Hall for an extremely rude engraved image, with bare buttocks and more.
The city rivals nearby Düsseldorf the way extravagant Liverpool rivals its more deadpan neighbour Manchester. Düsseldorf is all straight lines and spare, sleek, minimal architecture, and is the city of Kraftwerk. The spirit of Cologne is symbolised by its Gothic cathedral – voluptuous, sprawling upwards, teeming with tracery and gargoyles – and is the city of 70s Krautrock rivals Can, who recorded crazed, looping, jam-driven masterpieces like Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi.
Cologne is a great museum city but has a 21st-century pulse. I’ll head to Zum Scheuen Reh, where the DJs are students from the Hochschule Für Musik, nip next door to techno-oriented Gewölbe, or funk it up at Club Bahnhof Ehrenfeld.
Cologne hosted some of the great artistic upheavals of the 20th century. Max Ernst was at the forefront of the Dada movement. Examples of his work, such as the Elephant Celebes and Young Virgin Spanking the Infant Jesus In Front of Three Witnesses, can be seen in the Museum Ludwig. Electronic music pioneer Stockhausen studied at the Hochschule Für Musik. It repays multiple visits.
Some of the instruments on which Stockhausen produced the founding electronic music of the early 1950s are on display there. Like Can, one of whose members studied under him, Stockhausen was moved by the spectacle of war-devastated cities like Cologne to conceive a form of music that started from scratch, untouched by the dead and tragic past, unencumbered by nostalgia and convention, and German in origin.
The world’s first motorway (autobahn) was built in 1932, between Cologne and Bonn. It’s more fun, though, to hire a bike and ride towards Bonn along the river. It’s typically German – seemingly infinite forest, suddenly juxtaposed with heavy industrial plants such as the vast Bayer chemical works, which is awe-inspiring to a visitor from postindustrial Britain.
Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit has influenced generation after generation of musicians with his ultra-disciplined, hypnotic percussion. Now in his mid-70s, he pootles modestly around the city in a small car, unrecognised. There ought to be a statue of him in the town square. Maybe some day there will be.
• David Stubbs’s book Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany, is published by Faber, at £20. To buy a copy for £16.40 with free UK p&p, visit bookshop.theguardian.com
