Before he was a year old, his parents moved from the town, which had been badly damaged by an Allied siege at the end of World War II, to Düsseldorf.

[2] Schneider was at that time part of a free jazz ensemble called Pissoff fronted by another future collaborator Eberhard Kranemann.

After touring extensively with the band, Ralf Hütter suddenly decided that "he couldn't play anymore" and left the group.

Kranemann's talents as a bass player were not always needed and in 1972 the trio of Dinger, Schneider and Rother appeared on German TV show Beat Club.

by Dinger (Rother had been against the name, preferring a more "organic" title) and a pop-art style logo was created, featuring italic capitals: NEU!

were not a touring band and that he and Dinger were at loggerheads over performance style: At some shows blood splashed, when Klaus hurt himself with a broken cymbal.

So I sat behind my few effect devices and pedals and focused on the developing music and not so much on the audience.In summer 1972 Dinger and Rother went to Conny Plank's studios in Köln to record a single.

Far more heavily produced than their debut, the first side was recorded relatively slowly in the first and second months of 1973, and was aimed more specifically at foreign markets—the opening track "Fũr Immer" was subtitled "Forever", an English translation.

There have been several conflicting explanations as to why this was done, the most quoted being Dinger's assertion that: "When the money ran out, I got the idea of taking the single, play around with it and put the results on side 2 of the album."

However, this has recently been contested by Rother, who claims that the second side was made to aggravate their record label, who they felt had insufficiently promoted the original release of the Super/Neuschnee single, and not as a result of financial problems.

Despite this they achieved, in Dinger's words, "nothing," having met both John Peel and Karen Townshend (wife of Pete) and presented them with copies of Neu!

's debut, but - in spite of receiving an enthusiastic response from Peel, who played several tracks from the album on his BBC Radio 1 show - failed to drum up any commercial interest in the band.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Michael Rother had travelled to the famous Forst Commune, in an attempt to recruit Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Cluster to play in an extended Neu!

In anticipation of this new line-up, the Dinger brothers and Lampe played several small concerts under the name La Düsseldorf whilst Rother remained at Forst.

Finding him entrenched in the recording of Musik von Harmonia and the Cluster album Zuckerzeit, Dinger attempted to convince his ex-bandmate of a Harmonia-La Düsseldorf supergroup which would include himself, Rother, Moebius, Roedelius, Lampe and Thomas Dinger, but this suggestion was rebuked by Rother, who no longer wished to have any involvement with Neu!.

2 the album has a definite binary nature, with the first side recorded by the original duo of Dinger and Rother, the second by the expanded four-part Neu!-La Düsseldorf supergroup.

Dinger recognised this duality, admitting that "me and Michael drift[ed] apart," but Rother maintains that "it was the combination of our two strengths which made the magic."

Hero displays her loss ("Honey went to Norway"), and Dinger's anger at the music industry following the failure of Dingerland and the insufficient promotion by their record label ("Fuck the company, Your only friend is money"), whilst After Eight's lyrics feature the repeated refrain "Help me through the night".

Dinger spent the summer of 1975 improving his guitar playing and writing lyrics, intending to turn La Düsseldorf into a viable pop group.

In September 1975, La Düsseldorf entered the studio to begin recording their debut album, retaining Conny Plank as producer and featuring the same line-up as played on Neu!

Whilst the latter can be described as proto-punk, tracks like Düsseldorf and Silver Cloud lean further towards the sound of post-punk and is greatly influenced by Kraftwerk's album Autobahn which had achieved commercial success worldwide in 1974.

La Düsseldorf's lead single — Silver Cloud — reached number 2 on the German hit parade on its release in early 1976, an achievement all the more striking given that the song was instrumental.

They had to be based on cheap things, everyday things.La Düsseldorf also maintained a feeling of unity and coherence as a band which had been visibly lacking in Neu!

Like Silver Cloud, it was an instrumental, dominated by rhapsodic melodies played in diatonic thirds, which would become a familiar mode in Dinger's music from then on.

In 1979 the "maxi-single" version of Rheinita was released, attracting the attention of EMI, who made the group a 1 million mark offer, which they subsequently refused.

The latter two tracks are abstract tape collages, and given that much of the album's second side was given over to overtly humorous and playful faux-oompah pieces, the content of Individuellos is often seen as slim.

Stylistically similar to the Thomas Dinger-written tracks on Individuellos, it exhibits the electronic sound the band would adopt more and more in their final years.

With the studio being built and preparations being made for a fourth La Düsseldorf album (which had been announced the previous year, in accordance with a renewal of the band's contract with Teldec) Hans Lampe began to take part less and less in sessions.

In the wake of Thomas' departure, Dinger fled to Zeeland, where he began recording what he envisaged to be a fourth La Düsseldorf album alone.

The album was partly finished, with the songs "Good Life", "Crazy", "Dänzing" and "La Bomba (Stop Apartheid World Wide!)"