Johnny ‘Oracle’ Daniels became Lustfaust’s fifth member late in the summer of 1978. “A very weird but a totally enlightening experience” he laughs from a phone deep in the heart of Texas at the second-hand vinyl boutique that he has managed since the mid-nineties. Oracle’s first performance with Lustfaust was at the band’s spiritual home Der Blaue Auster on the 22 of September – a gig remembered fondly by devotees of the band as the beginning the group’s second – and to most fans – most significant phase. Oracle explains: “I was literally shitting myself. I’d bummed around in bands back in the States but had never faced a crowd like that. And I knew what they were like as I’d stood amongst them many times before!”

The band at the time of Oracle’s introduction was, by their own (and anyone else’s) admission, a splintered mess. Recovering from the UK tour of 1978 which had seen the departure of van Baelen (at the time thought to be permanent) and each member declaring the next album Fortschritt gehen durch Zurück a ‘last dance’. The band was, by even the kindest of assessments, very much over. Few members were actually speaking to one another, and one or two certainly wished each other dead. There was a distinct feeling that the band’s cumulative desires had become estranged from the ephemeral beginnings of the band. All in all things had got too serious. The band returned to obscurity with a whimper as of July ’78, when the wreck of an album that was Fortschritt… crept out to no supplementary advertising.

Lustfaust’s renaissance was due primarily to luck rather than an abiding desire for the band to reform. A chance encounter between Kruger and Berger provided the stimulus, and the two reconvened along with Kazuki to jam and attempt to recapture that early spirit so lacking from the band’s most previous congregations. It was also made explicit that van Baelen was to be kept out of the fold and that his position was not necessarily one that needed to be filled. The band was happy as a three-piece.