Kraftwerk by Danny Eccleston

Florian Schneider, Ralf Hütter, Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür in the 1970s.
© Everett Collection Historical / Alamy
Kraftwerk
by Danny Eccleston
It is April 1978, and journalists and music executives attending the Paris launch party
of Kraftwerk’s seventh album, The Man-Machine, are in for a surprise.
Climbing to the top of the recently-completed Tour Montparnasse, the showbiz große
Käse expect to encounter Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür
- the musicians of Krafwerk. Instead they are faced with four synthetic substitutes.
With red shirts, black trousers, black ties and Subbuteo hair, the figures eerily
approximate those of the group’s human members, occupying the stage as the real
band would: ‘Ralf’ to the left in three-quarter profile; ‘Florian’, cradling a flute, to the
right; ‘Karl’ and ‘Wolfgang’ in the middle, face-on, ‘playing’ synth and electronic drums.
As one of the band’s new songs beeps and shimmers over the PA a vocodered voice
intones: ‘We are the robots.’
‘It was totally Kraftwerk,’ one of the guests, Capitol Records A&R Rupert Perry, later
told me. ‘They’d always talked about becoming one with their machines. It looked like
it had finally happened.’
© Kilgour 2014
Autobahn, the band’s first commercially successful
album, was released in 1974.
© Clynt Garnham Business / Alamy
In any list of the top five most influential
pop music acts ever to have existed,
Kraftwerk ride high. Up there with Elvis
and The Beatles, they are more or less
single-handedly responsible for the
electronic music legacy that permeates
pop culture like a computer virus.
Synth pop, Berlin Bowie, electro, house
and techno: all were given life by
Kraftwerk. Afrika Bambaaataa’s hip-hop
classic Planet Rock, released in 1982,
grew from the rhythm track of
Kraftwerk’s Computer World track
‘Numbers’, overlaid with a melody from
‘Trans-Europe Express’, while in Detroit
the holy trinity of techno pioneers
- Juan Atkins, Carl Craig and Derrick
May - ransacked Kraftwerk’s backcatalogue (May would later describe
his music as ‘George Clinton and
Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator’).
You can be a hipster aficionado of the most cutting-edge bass music or a casual fan of
Coldplay (their 2005 single, ‘Talk’, was built on the melody of Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer
Love’): you don’t even have to have heard a Kraftwerk album, let alone own one, to have
been touched or shaped by them.
Children of Germany’s post-war reconstruction, Kraftwerk were creatures of
Düsseldorf – defibrillated heart the nation’s communications industry. Florian
Schneider, though born in the Bodensee area of the south in 1947, had lived in
Düsseldorf since he was three, his father a modernist architect renowned for the
city’s beautiful glass-fronted Haniel-Garage. Florian learned the flute, played in jazz
bands and was admitted to Düsseldorf Conservatory, where he met doctor’s son
and organ student Ralf Hütter. Together, they became Kraftwerk, or ‘Power Station’.
Originally fellow-travellers with the hippy ‘kosmische’ groups – so-called
‘Krautrockers’ such as Can and Neu! – Kraftwerk’s approach would be transformed
by the electronic instrumentation they increasingly employed. The pre-war ideals of
the Bauhaus – its emphasis on function over decoration, its belief in the reconcilability
of art and mass-production, its technological utopianism – reflected in the group’s
developing aesthetic. ‘We broke down the barrier between craftsmen and artist,’
Hütter told MOJO magazine in 2005. ‘We were music workers.’
In their records, robotic discipline and elegant minimalism replaced spacey rambling and
whimsical improv. ‘We were driving around Düsseldorf, and everything was very black
and white to us, very industrial,’ explains Hütter. ‘So we were terrestrial, not cosmic.’
Their visual style, too, was original and rigorous. Driven by Hütter’s growing distaste
for rock’s pseudo-rebellious clichés, Kraftwerk wore their hair short, kept their
statements to a minimum, had a rule about staying sober at parties and, wherever
possible, presented themselves as solemn, bland automata. After 1975’s ‘Autobahn’
single signalled their final break from Germany’s hippy rock scene and their arrival as
an international cause célèbre, they would play up their enigmatic severity, seeing it for
what it was: a USP. Walking into a party thrown by David Bowie at L’Ange Bleu in Paris
in 1976, Hütter and Schneider received a five-minute standing ovation as Bowie
exclaimed to Iggy Pop, ‘Look how they are! They are fantastic!’
While making music, Hütter and Schneider made art of themselves, like a Germanic
Gilbert & George. Photographed around the time of Trans Europe Express (1977), they
are dapperly double-breasted – sophisticated world travellers in a mythic Thirties. A
year later, in their most iconic incarnation, they were technicians in uniform red and
black, a touch of silent movie make-up hinting at overtones of android and Fritz Lang’s
© Kilgour 2014
Metropolis. Meanwhile, their albums pursued a sophisticated commentary on the
relationship of man and technology – a parallel exploration of Marshall McLuhan’s
thesis that we are rewired by the media we invent – a pre-cyberpunk vision of hacked
humanity. ‘We are playing the machines,’ Hütter explained in 1992, ‘and the machines
play us.’
In the gorgeous electro-baroque matrix of Computer World (1981), the last of
Kraftwerk’s flawless five-album run of stone classics, Hütter foresaw the digital fifth
dimension of today: an extra-sensory existence in which privacy is impossible and
loneliness endemic, cyber-romance the counterpart of cyber-surveillance. Like
ourselves, perhaps, he was more amused than appalled: in 2014 we are all the
man-machine and, on balance, we seem to like it.
After Computer World and standalone 1983 single ‘Tour De France’, Kraftwerk
releases tailed off. Irresistible rumours filled the gaps in the narrative: Kraftwerk
would produce Michael Jackson; Hütter had nearly died in a bicycle crash; Hütter and
Schneider observed an unvarying nine-to-five workday at their Kling Klang studio, with
a timetabled break for ice-cream.
But even as Kraftwerk’s output slowed to a virtual standstill, Hütter’s uncompromising
curation of the Kraftwerk aesthetic has extended the group’s cultural credit line. 1997’s
live set at Luton Hoo’s Tribal Gathering underlined their presiding status in the dance
music pantheon, while recent shows at New York’s MOMA (2012) and the Tate
Modern in London (2013) – augmented by cutting-edge 3D visuals – have been
strategised to make a point about Kraftwerk’s premium art value.
Arrayed as ever as an immobile quartet in unbroken line – the 67-year-old Hütter
abetted by touring musicians Fritz Hilpert, Henning Schmitz and Falk Grieffenhagen
(now that Schneider has retired from the fray) – they are an appliance whose
components can be replaced, endlessly, without altering its purpose or its integrity.
Man or machine? Why choose when you can have both? Kraftwerk saw the future,
and it works.
Danny Eccleston is Senior Editor of Mojo Magazine.
© Kilgour 2014