‘Having limits is boring’: experimental survivor Damo Suzuki on Can, cancer and krautrock
In 2014 Damo Suzuki was diagnosed with colon cancer and given a 10% chance of survival. It was almost exactly 30 years earlier, when Suzuki was 33, that he was first diagnosed with the disease. The same cancer had killed his father when he was five.
When facing major surgery in 1983, his situation was made all the more life-threatening: due to Suzuki’s then faith as a Jehovah’s Witness, he couldn’t accept the blood transfusion he desperately required.
He survived both bouts of cancer. Now 72, he smiles warmly over Zoom from his home in Cologne, nonchalantly describing his situation. “Everything is OK,” he says. “I’m optimistic and if you have positive thoughts then everything will be good.”
Suzuki’s zen, positivity, dogged
