Kraftwerk co-founder inspired a musical revolution, spawning countless imitators
Florian Schneider, who has died of cancer aged 73, was a co-founder of Kraftwerk, who alongside the Beatles were one of the two most influential bands in the history of pop music; hip-hop, synthpop, house and techno would probably not have happened without them, and they were copied and sampled by hundreds of artists, from Madonna, Coldplay and New Order to every rapper worthy of the name.
They were in the vanguard of the musical movement, inspired by the revolutionary spirit of the late 1960s, in which young German musicians sought new forms of expression, drawing freely from the avant garde.
Kraftwerk, with their pure electronic sounds and their futuristic look of robotic cool, were by far the most successful, playing up to the stereotype of
German efficiency. In 1976, Britain’s New Musical Express declared: ‘‘They sound so detached, the kind of guys who could blow up the planet just to hear the noise it made.’’
Florian Schneider-Esleben was born into a monied family inthe small town of Oehningen near the German-Swiss border; his father was a notable architect who had designed Cologne airport. The family moved to Duesseldorf when Florian was 3.
He played the flute as a teenager, before studying at the Academy of Arts in Remscheid. There, in 1968, he met the keyboard player Ralf Huetter; they went on to a music college in Duesseldorf, the Robert Schumann Hochschule, and played in an experimental outfit named Organisation.
In 1970 Schneider bought a synthesiser, and with Huetter formed Kraftwerk – ‘‘power station’’ – who for the first few years had a shifting lineup. Inspired by a visit to a Gilbert and George art exhibition, they adopted a severe, clean-cut aesthetic far removed from the long hair and jeans of their contemporaries.
Musically they were similarly affectless, the vocals electronically processed and deadpan. Their first three albums used largely conventional instruments, albeit electronically manipulated, Schneider playing guitar and violin as well the flute. Huetter described him as ‘‘a sound perfectionist’’ and ‘‘a sound fetishist’’.
It was the fourth album, Autobahn, released in November 1974 – by which time Wolfgang Fluer and Karl Bartos had joined Schneider and Huetter in the band’s classic lineup – that established their signature sound.
A few months later they promoted it on the BBC – not on Top of the Pops but on the science show Tomorrow’s World. ‘‘Sounds are created in their sound laboratory in Duesseldorf, programmed, then recreated onstage with the minimum of fuss,’’ the announcer informed viewers as the band performed the album’s title track, an ode to the motorways of Germany.
They built their own studio, Kling Klang, in Duesseldorf, and a succession of hit records followed – including the singles The Model,
Computer Love (both of which went to No 1 in the UK), Trans-Europe Express and The
Robots – and albums that included Radio-Activity and The Man-Machine.
Early critics were not impressed. ‘‘For God’s sake, keep the robots out of music,’’ one wrote in Britain’s Melody Maker .A Rolling Stone reviewer called the group’s recordings ‘‘background music for watching tropical fish sleep’’.
In time, however, the band’s mid-70s albums came to be regarded as classics. Kraftwerk received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2014, and Pitchfork named Trans-Europe Express the sixth best album of the 1970s.
‘‘The cold, sleek synth textures, and disaffected vocals might seem robotic (and of course, Kraftwerk nurtured that image),’’ Dominique Leone wrote for the website, ‘‘but they are also perfect realisations of the same minimal, streamlined tension that coloured punk and new wave.’’
The band did little in the way of promotion, using mannequins and robots as photoshoot stand-ins and keeping the location of their studio secret. Schneider epitomised their enigmatic qualities, rarely granting interviews, and maintaining an almost comical reserve when he did, a faintly amused smile on his lips.
He did, though, tell Rolling Stone in 1975: ‘‘Kraftwerk is not a band. It’s a concept. We call it ‘Die Menschmachine’, which means ‘the human machine’. We are not the band. I am me. Ralf is Ralf. And Kraftwerk is a vehicle for our ideas.’’
After the band’s ninth studio album,
Electric Cafe, in 1986, there was a 17-year wait for the next collection of new material, Tour
de France Soundtracks. By then they had replaced their on-stage electronic equipment with laptops, and Schneider’s processed vocals had given way to a speech-synthesiser.
His last live appearances were in 2006, and he left the band two years later.
Florian Schneider is survived by a daughter.