The Monks was a band comprised of five American GI’s in Cold War Germany who billed themselves as the anti-Beatles; they were heavy on feedback, nihilism and electric banjo. They had strange haircuts, dressed in black, mocked the military and rocked harder than any of their mid-sixties counterparts while managing to basically invent industrial, punk and techno music.
This genre-overlapping documentary film not only illustrates the pop music phenomenon in its political, social and cultural historic contexts, but also reveals the Monks project as the first marriage between art and popular music and all this months before Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.
For more than thirty years they remained obscure and unknown. They were not able to talk about their strange experience in possibly the oddest band of the era. In this stunning film they recount their bizarre adventure for the first time.
