In 1968, while on the Oberhausen festival jury, he praised a film his wife had produced, Of Particular Merit which starred a talking penis.

[1] Nettelbeck's left-wing inclination emerged a year later when he published an article in Die Zeit about the trial of Red Army Faction leader Andreas Baader, which earned him a stern warning from the magazine's editor.

[4] In 1969 Nettelbeck was approached by a Polydor Germany A&R man with a request to put together an underground band that would tap into the then burgeoning "German rock" scene.

[5] Nettelbeck found two small rock groups, Nukleus and Campylognatus Citelli which he merged into one, and with funding from Polydor, converted an old school-house near the village of Wümme, between Hamburg and Bremen into a studio.

[6][7] During the same period Nettelbeck also produced two albums for Anthony Moore on Polydor, which led to the formation, with Peter Blegvad and Dagmar Krause, of Slapp Happy.

[4] The result was The Faust Tapes (1973) which cost 49 pence (the price of a single), and sold 100,000 copies in a few weeks,[4] putting the unknown band into the British album charts.

Besides being a sharp-witted but yet charming and loving husband / father / grandfather, he was an outstanding cook, a writer who always generated deep emotions and interest and a genius selfless music producer.

In 1992, "dismayed by the triumphalism and racism of post-unification Germany",[1] they relocated to France and moved into an isolated farmhouse in the Gironde.