Kraftwerk’s sound is still now – not in the past
Uwe Schütte’s book about Kraftwerk highlights just how innovative and influential they are, says Chris Harvey
In the 2019 film Yesterday, director Danny Boyle imagines a world in which The Beatles suddenly never existed, except in the memories of a tiny few, including a failed singersongwriter whose ability to recall all their songs brings him global adulation, plus an admission of defeat from Ed Sheeran.
No one has yet scripted a film about a world in which Kraftwerk have been erased from the collective consciousness – but that might be because it is almost impossible to imagine. All electronic dance music and modern pop would be different. “I program my home computer, beam myself into the future,” they sang in 1981 (long before we all had PCS) on the album Computer World. But Kraftwerk didn’t just beam themselves into the future, they invented it.
Much of Kraftwerk’s back catalogue sounds as if it could have been released in 2020. I went back to the beginning, flying to Düsseldorf, where Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider formed Kraftwerk 50 years ago, in search of the band’s origins.
In 1970, Hütter and Schneider were recently graduated art school students making experimental rock music in this large trading city on the Rhine. Düsseldorf had been bombed to bits in the Second World War, but as part of thriving West Germany, it was recovering rapidly.
Both men were from wealthy backgrounds. Hütter had trained in classical piano; Schneider, who played the flute, was the son of modernist architect Paul Schneideresleben, who designed Cologne Bonn Airport.
However, a generation of artists and musicians were finding there was no through road from Germany’s past after the shame of Nazism. They could either ape America – US troops were still stationed there – or start afresh.
Düsseldorf, as Uwe Schütte details in his fascinating new book Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany, was “a real hothouse of artistic innovation”. The influential Joseph Beuys taught at the Academy of Fine Arts and Gerhard Richter, now among the world’s most expensive living painters, worked out of the city.
I joined a tour exploring Düsseldorf’s musical heritage, which included a stop on the majestic Königsallee boulevard, where swanky discos were once frequented by Kraftwerk, as well as fashion designers and models.
Düsseldorf had been “Germany’s fashion capital” since the 50s. Our guide held up a speaker that boomed out “The Model”, which went to No 1 in the UK in 1981, three years after it was first recorded. It wasn’t possible to beam myself into the past, but it was clear that Kraftwerk emerged from a music scene that was breaking deep new ground.
You can trace Kraftwerk’s early progress through three Youtube videos. In the first – concert-length – from 1970, they are already a long way out there. A studious-looking Hütter, with long hair and spectacles, dressed in leather like The Beatles in their Hamburg days, sets up a drone that sounds like bombers passing overhead; he keeps it up for minutes on end. Someone fills a pipe in the audience. Eventually drummer Klaus Dinger starts thudding away remorselessly. Schneider, with building-site sideburns, joins in on flute; they make a holy racket. One woman watching, head on knees, waits – pleads – for it to stop.
In the second, filmed for television in 1973, Hütter still has long hair, and is playing pretty, serialist patterns on piano, Schneider is looking suave in an evening jacket, playing melodic airs on his flute. Dinger has long gone – to bang out his unstoppable beats for the great German band Neu! – but in his place is Wolfgang Flür, complete with 70s pornstar moustache, playing what looks like a looted kitchen hob covered in tin foil.
The third is a beautifully filmed clip from BBC1 science programme Tomorrow’s World in 1975. Kraftwerk, now a four-piece with the addition of gifted classical percussionist Karl Bartos, play a shonky version of “Autobahn”, their first hit in Britain and the US, on synthesisers and two of those kitchen-hob
drum machines, as the stentorian voiceover describes how the music is based on the rhythm of trucks, cars and passing bridges heard while driving through Germany. The classic line-up was now complete: Ralf, Florian, Wolfgang and Karl (note the slightly stilted nod to the Fab Four). They hadn’t yet adopted the red-shirt, black-tie look of The Man Machine (1978), but they had begun dressing in suits. Their hair was short.
In Düsseldorf, with Schütte, I visited their former “laboratory”, the fabled Kling Klang Studio, on the ground floor of a building that housed singleroom workshops in a scuffling, once industrial part of the city.
Kraftwerk moved there in 1970 and decamped a decade ago. It’s a tiny room, 60 sq ft, and all that remains of their imprint is a shiny aluminium entry phone. But, Schütte stresses, the group recognised the studio as “a musical instrument, even a band member, in its own right”.
It is hard to believe that the future of music was created within the walls of Kling Klang, where the four members of the group spent eight to 10 hours a day, fashioning new sounds, perfecting new rhythms. But if you want to know how revolutionary what emerged from Kling Klang was, put on the UK’S No 1 single in the month Radio-activity (1975) was released – “Hold Me Close” by David Essex – then play the synthesised “The Voice of Energy” from the album. It is mind-boggling.
All of Kraftwerk’s flawless run of studio albums postautobahn (1974) were created here: after Radio-activity came Trans-europe Express (1977), The Man-machine (1978), Computer World (1981) and Electric Café (1986), as well as the Tour de France single and album.
The electronic punk bands that came out of the Düsseldorf scene that followed them would never have played Kraftwerk at the clubs they frequented, attests Ralf Dörper of Die Krupps and Propaganda, when I meet up with him and fellow Die Krupps member Rudi Esch in the city, yet Kraftwerk were becoming international stars.
As well as a grasp of melody that reached back to Bach and Mozart, there was also that sophisticated rhythmic sense that having two percussionists gave. It was this that made dance floors in New York and Detroit fall in love with Kraftwerk’s electronic beats. Afrika Bambaataa and Arthur Baker melded them with hip-hop, while Detroit producers fused them with funk and begat techno. In the UK, Kraftwerk’s influence on synth-pop – Gary Numan, The Human League, Depeche Mode – was unmistakeable.
Ironically, the group themselves went into retrograde in response to synth-pop, as they abandoned analogue synthesisers and committed to digital methods of creating music. Analogue demos of an album titled Techno Pop exist from 1983, but the songs, which formed the core of Electric Café, would not be released for another three years. Kraftwerk’s creative momentum stalled.
Reduced to bit parts, individual robots began to rebel. Flür quit in 1987, Bartos in 1990. Hütter and Schneider lasted until 2008, before Schneider, the member most responsible for developing the synthesised voice on their tracks, left, too.
The enigmatic Hütter, who has not given an interview since 1986, has gone on alone, recruiting three new “musical workers” to bring the sound of Kraftwerk to vast auditoria, festivals and, momentously, art galleries including Moma in New York and Tate Modern in London.
That people still queue to see four old blokes bulging out of Tron suits to experience Kraftwerk before it is too late says much about this group. If your music doesn’t date, it’s because everything that came after it copied you.
The Beatles, however great they were, sound like “Yesterday”. Kraftwerk still sound like today. ‘Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany’ by Uwe Schütte is published by Penguin (£9.99)
“Kraftwerk didn’t just beam themselves into the future, they invented it. Much of their back catalogue sounds as if it could have been released in 2020.”