Enigmatic German musician who changed the face of pop
Florian Schneider 1947-2020
Florian Schneider, who has died aged 73, was the co-founder of Kraftwerk – one of the most important bands in the history of pop music. At the vanguard of the experimental West German “Krautrock” movement, Kraftwerk was founded in 1970, and went on to use some of the earliest synthesisers to produce pure electronic sounds – presaging “a shift from the age of analogue instruments, blues rhythms and melodic harmony to synthetic mechanised grooves”, said Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. Kraftwerk influenced everyone from David Bowie (whose 1977 album
“Heroes” has a track called V-2 Schneider), Ultravox and Gary Numan to the hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa; by the end of the 1980s, “a whole new dance scene was emerging that mimicked Kraftwerk’s hypnotic synth beats of escalating intensity”. Since then, countless artists have sampled its music, including Coldplay, New Order, Aphex Twin, Dr Dre and Jay Z.
Schneider and Kraftwerk co-founder Ralf Hütter adopted a cleancut, non-rock’n’roll image, which was said to have been inspired by a visit to an exhibition by Gilbert & George; and they cultivated an air of deadpan mystique, using mannequins as stands-ins during photo shoots, occasionally walking off stage mid-concert, and keeping the location of their studio, Kling Klang, a secret. Schneider himself was almost “comically reserved”, said The Daily Telegraph: in their rare interviews, he would stand next to the more talkative Hütter, a small enigmatic smile hovering around his lips. “Kraftwerk is not a band,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975. “It’s a concept. We call it ‘Die Mensch-Maschine’, which means ‘The Human-machine’. We are not the band. I am me. Ralf is Ralf. And Kraftwerk is a vehicle for our ideas.”
Florian Schneider-Esleben was born in 1947, and brought up in Düsseldorf in a well-off family (his father was a modernist architect). As a teenager, he played the flute in a band called Pissoff, said The New York Times. He met Hütter in 1968 and they both enrolled at the Conservatory in Düsseldorf. Two years later, they formed Kraftwerk (power station) – and started to devise ever more futuristic, synthetic sounds. “I found that the flute was too limiting,” Schneider said. “Soon I bought a microphone, then loudspeakers, then an echo, then a synthesiser. Much later I threw the flute away; it was a sort of process.” Hütter described him as a “sound fetishist”.
Kraftwerk had its breakthrough with its fourth album, Autobahn, in 1974. The title track, a sonic celebration of the German motorway, was 22 minutes long. They toured the UK for the first time in 1975. Andy McCluskey, later of the 1980s band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, saw Kraftwerk play in Liverpool, its four members dressed in suits and standing immobile at technology stations. “It was the height of long hair, flared denim and lead guitar solos, and they came out looking like four bank clerks with electronic knitting needles and tea trays,” he told Neil McCormick. “It was like an alien spaceship had landed.” When Kraftwerk made their UK TV debut, it was not on Top of the Pops, but Tomorrow’s World. Several acclaimed albums followed, including Radio-Activity, Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine and Computer World, and they had a UK number one single: The Model. They produced their last album in 2003; Schneider left five years later. In 2015, however, he briefly re-emerged to collaborate with Dan Lacksman of Telex on a track called Stop Plastic Pollution, in aid of a marine conservation group. He is survived by his daughter, Lisa.