Original subtitles

In the late 1960s, a wave of German bands and musicians emerged intent on

creating new sounds and exploring new technologies.

As an artist, you have to create something new, your own will. You have

to create your own art.

We were pretty much aware that we weren't raised in the Mississippi Delta,

or we weren't raised in Liverpool.

Our generation had to come up.

with a counterpoint to that.

If you want to come up with a new sound, you want to touch new ground, you have

to use new material or at least change your perspective.

Using machines, open up another door for this new quality.

This film not only explores the various artists of this experimental movement,

but also focuses on the group whose music would influence so much of modern

electronica, Kraftwerk.

Obviously, the aesthetic investment was into something completely different from

what all the other bands were into. All the other bands were into, with the most

different means, but they were all into experience.

And Kraftwerk was not that. It was obviously about distance to music.

There was something conceptual, there was something humorous, there was irony.

The difference in Kraftwerk and the other bands, and the other bands wish to

totally disassociate themselves from the past, from the German history.

Carpet were different. They were willing to embrace the past.

In so doing, they actually, in the long term, they invented a new kind of

aesthetic that people around the world could really relate to by using humor

and experiment and brilliant understanding of electronic sound.

They basically remade German identity and made it something to actually look

at.

The Second World War left Germany in ruins.

Over 9 million German soldiers and civilians dead, numerous cities

destroyed, and the country split into zones occupied by both the Allied and

Soviet military.

By 1949, the country was divided into a Soviet East and a capitalist West

Germany. And where the East was a socialist state, the West adopted a

social market economy that by the 1950s would see the country enjoy a steady

period of growth.

Despite this economic stability, the youth of the country were born into a

ruptured world in which their elders were viewed with suspicion and in which

a guilt over the very fact of being a German was widespread.

And so by the late 1950s, this new generation began to embrace the youth

culture of their allied occupiers.

At that time, so in the 60s, he still had the decisive positions everywhere.

Not only at the top of society, as an entrepreneur, politician, but also

in the entire middle class as a teacher, professor, judge, civil servant.

Everywhere there was still the generation that had participated in

National Socialism.

to a not very large percentage.

For young workers, however, the new time that came with all their occupations in

the form of personal freedom, consumption, it was a very economically

prosperous time, was a great crime.

The example of this was America.

And we always, as young people in the 60s, with these old structures, this

authoritarianism, which brought us from the first day to subordination,

to subordination and, if necessary, to good soldiers or to good workers,

depending on how the times were.

Who was against it? For them it was this music that came from the USA and from

England.

And Germany would play a pivotal part in the early history of Western popular

music. A number of clubs began to appear in the major cities, and with UK bands

more adept at imitating American acts than the Germans, soon these clubs were

full of British rock and roll groups.

At the center of this was Hamburg, a major port with a large entertainment

district. Here, young rock bands played to an audience of both German teenagers

and Allied Navy crews.

and it was here that the Beatles learned their craft.

Yet the German groups who began to emerge were often simply imitating those

British beat bands, and this theme would have little in common with the movement

that would eventually emerge.

In terms of music, pop music, there was not much, there was of course the

Hamburg world, which was shaped by, which was a vibrant music scene, and one

that also would cross over to...

to other arts but that was based mainly on traveling British and American bands

like The Beatles and other famous but also like regulars were like bands like

Ian and the Zodiacs or something like that who were but then doing things like

accompanying poetry readings by very advanced poets so but it that's right

there were basically no Germans doing anything interesting musically with the

exception of free jazz.

Pre-jazz in Germany, I would go to the legacy of people like Peter Brötzmann,

who was involved with the Fluxus movement in the early 60s. And in

others, there was a free jazz movement in Berlin happening around people like

Alexander von Schlippenbach, Sven Arke Johansson, who came from Sweden. And

this was, of course, a completely unique musical movement, and it was based on

scenes in German cities.

And out of the Berlin features movement, for example, you had certain bands

coming out who were close to the later electronic scene.

Like Sven Acker-Johansson had this band Moderne Europäische Dorfmusik, Modern

European Village Music, which was kind of a...

electronic avant-garde rock, free jazz mixture, they recorded in the late 60s,

I think two albums, and they played at the same places where Early Tender and

Dream played.

And it was out of this new rock and jazz culture that German variations of the

Anglo-American musical model began to take shape.

By 1967, the German counterculture was emerging, with students demonstrating

and communes being formed.

With political tensions heightened by the death of student Benno Ohnesorg,

Berlin in particular was a center for unrest.

And at the same time as this youth movement was growing, new music from

America was influencing the bands of this scene.

In 67, it was for the Berlin scene, there was an ignition when the Mothers

of Invention came to play.

That was an interesting concert because, well, all the students, the SDS went

there, the pupils, all the political scene went there. Well, it was about 10

,000 people and I think most of the scene was there and people had

waited for a band like this to come to Berlin. So it was like a swing from the

nice...

Jerry and the Pacemakers and Equals and pop groups from Great Britain to the

flower power hippie thing.

And I think these are also the influences which helped the German

musicians develop their own style.

But while much of the German musical scene was simply intent on now mimicking

a new kind of American music, experimental musicians began to emerge

who would shape a unique sound.

Konrad Schnitzler, who had studied sculpture under radical German artist

Joseph Beuys in Dusseldorf, was central to this new movement.

Having relocated to Berlin in the mid-60s, he was a trained artist and not

a musician, but he began working with colleagues Hans-Hakim Rodelius and Boris

Schack on a new form of experimental music that would eventually embrace

electronics.

My dream was always to make sounds and music, but I couldn't because I wasn't a

musician and never learned.

And there were, you know, also before, all these young people making

this kind of hippie music with a drum and flute and all this, and I was hating

this.

Anyway, I was never liking melodies because a melody is like a worm in your

head. You hear this melody and the whole day it rattles in your head. I didn't

want it. I want to have something that goes in and you lost it already.

And Boris and Achim said, oh no, not this. I have another idea about

making music.

Only if you don't can play an instrument, you can make free sounds.

And I want to have, let's say, noise. Noise sounds composed together in a way

what is interesting.

Like if the steam hammer goes here and the bird pipes there and a car comes and

the airplane goes over.

If you are the director of it, then you say, hey, stop, don't come now, you

know. Now all together or whatever, you know. This is the only philosophy.

And the philosophy behind it, as an artist, you have to create something

new. It's a real beginning. I just wanted to try what's going on when I use

the flute or my voice or drums.

How do I react on what I'm doing with any sort of instrument or any sort of

noise?

So it was not music at all that influenced me or not any style or not

any trend.

I just was so curious to work with noise and sounds and tones

to become aware what's that, what's music, what has it, I

mean, what's the ground in it.

How should it be?

And needing a rehearsal and performance space, Schnitzler and Rodelius began to

rent part of a theatre.

This room eventually became the Zodiac Free Arts Lab.

We had this room and we made a lot of, Boris and Achim, they bought some new

instruments, you know, for now cashing, for cashing later, because it was all so

really fantastic.

Yeah, we played there two, three days. Nobody came.

Of course not. We made no advertising for nothing. Nobody knows us. Nobody

knows what was going on there.

So the first, what we, our group was called Geräusche, means noises.

And I had the small, tiny papers with a stamp.

And we, a hundred of... of these papers we stamped and we give them as flying

papers around and where was if there was somewhere a concert

of modern music like in the area of the television station is

it now yet radio SFB and the people coming out and give them the paper

or there was Emerson Lake in Palma somewhere playing we put this Papers

around, and it was really dark also there, and you saw the papers flying.

And so, afterwards, there was coming people.

And then we invite also other musicians, groups, but not normal groups. Sometimes

they want somebody who just played music from other groups.

We didn't want it. We wanted something that was experimental.

came like Schulze with his group came and of course Edgar came back and I was

with Edgar already in a connection you know and he came with his group and so

we had and it was full of equipment everything you know we didn't remove

this it was forever there and only the groups who was then on the end in

have the right to play there every evening but means after the theater was

to the end we because otherwise it was too loud you know and the zodiac became

a hive of activity where rock had previously been the typical music

emerging from the city now an underground began to form that would

draw the most daring musicians to it

because this free jazz scene was very influential and at the beginning it was

mixed up.

And that was expected in this club that Konrad opened.

People who played big names in improvised jazz today, such as

Brötzmann, Irene Schweitzer, Schlippenbach, were playing in the

Zodiac. Some people changed from one genre to another, like Uli Trepte,

everything was allowed even smoking joints so nobody was really free free

free atmosphere there were many projects but the zodiac were the first nucleus of

where everybody came together it was sort of

And out of the Zodiac, many, many different groups really became aware of

themselves. So all these guys, they studied themselves

in the Zodiac.

I think in every city, it is like you're always looking in a room where you can

make loud music. And the Zodiac, it was under a big theater.

And there was also a pub.

next to it.

And there was a big room where the owner said, you know, here you can play there,

you know.

And then we just, yeah, we played a couple of bands like Kluster and

Plus Minus was a big beginning where Schnitzler was also there.

And there was Tension Dream there, then I was with my band, with Psy 3.

But it was a nice kind of, let's say, kind of a factory for bands.

So then we got, let's say, a bit known through that in Berlin.

And then comes people from other clubs and they said, can you play?

The same thing in my club or in our club.

And so it started slowly, but we were really like totally

underground. Lowest underground, you say, like this, you know.

This experimentation was not only occurring in Berlin, however.

In Munich, radical art commune Amon Dool was established in 67, and it quickly

developed a reputation for its musical performances.

Like at the Zodiac, the emphasis was on free-form structures and improvisation,

and the Commune had a similar perspective on artistic freedom, valuing

enthusiasm and attitude over technical ability.

As they began to tour the country, it became clear that Amandul were a very

different proposition than the Anglo-American-influenced pop bands.

Amandul was already this myth and legend, dairy

band, when they existed.

I mean, you had rumors all over Germany, because if they played somewhere, this

was so different. They came with their children, they came with their wives.

You never knew what the lineup is, if they played with four people or with 20.

They always had fights on stage, behind stage.

And this was nothing you really expected from a city like Munich.

The first music clubs...

after the war and in the 60s, even when already Armand Duhl started, have been

American GI clubs where they played soul and black

music. So in Munich you had a huge community of German musicians

interpreting American soul.

So, of course, this was a really break.

I'm going to do that was really completely different

For me, it was like now we were starting to build our own musical identity in

Germany, taking influences from all parts and also German influences.

And Mondews always had a strange affection to their Bavarian past to the

end that they released an album in 74, I think.

where they posed in King Ludwig's habit and things like that and sang about him

and about the Bavarian past as a kingdom. So in the late 60s, it was an

alternative scene because they mixed things and they did jazzy things, they

did very daring things, if I may say so.

They didn't just copy anymore.

Until 67 it was let's try to do a nice beat band sound. Let's try to copy the

the British band The

big magazines picked up on

them because of the wildness Yeah of the image.

It was really something very interesting exotic

And this new innovative approach to music would spread through Germany.

In the far west of the country, the Rhein-Ruhr area comprising cities

Cologne and Düsseldorf, yet another scene began to emerge.

Both cities had their fair share of beat bands and cover acts, but they also had

thriving artistic scenes.

In Cologne, Cannes formed, a group who would become one of the leading lights

of the German movement.

And in Dusseldorf, future Kraftwerk pioneers Ralph Hutter and Florian

Schneider founded the organization.

I think of Kraftwerk and organization and the whole scene around them, the

things that would come to my mind as forerunners would not be in the field of

music, but in the field of fine art, visual art.

I think the Dusseldorf scene at the 60s was a very vibrant scene based around

this. plays this club called Cream Cheese, which was very important, which

was a nightclub, a discotheque, decorated and organized by people from

the Zero Movement, which was a kind of very important movement, and other

artists around.

The District of Art Academy was there, where people like Joseph Beuys were

teaching at that time.

And this is far more, for me, the culturally important background.

Yet although there was a major influence from the world of the visual arts, there

was also a more academic element to these bands.

Unlike the various artists from the Zodiac scene or those in Amon Dool, the

organisations Florian Schneider and Ralph Hutter and Cannes' Holger Schuchai

and Ermin Schmidt were classically trained musicians.

And classical music itself had been going through some radical changes since

the 1930s, with various composers striving to introduce an electronic

component into it.

A major figure in the introduction of new sounds and electronic techniques in

this area was Frenchman Pierre Schaeffer.

Pierre Schaeffer was important in France because he had a studio in Radio France.

Most of the early electronic studios were in radio stations in the late

1940s, mid-1950s because they had the equipment. The equipment they were using

was... basically tone generators, oscillators, sine wave generators, very

basic sound equipment that produced, that changed sound waves.

And then they didn't have tape.

Pierre Schaeffer's early experiments with music were discs

from records.

What he did was he actually got records, 78 of say train sounds,

water sounds, crowd sounds.

marching band and mixed them together and invented this thing called music

concrete or real music.

The main instrument that he used in the beginning was a record player.

And then when he was given access to a tape recorder, it totally revolutionised

the way he worked.

And so he was one of the first people really to use technology within

a musical system, as a really major part of the musical system.

And obviously this influenced many students of his, such as Pierre Henry

and people like that.

and later on Stockhausen.

And it was this towering figure of experimental music operating out of the

Rhein-Ruhr area itself who would become a pivotal influence on emerging

electronic musicians.

Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, who had collaborated with Pierre Schaeffer in

the early 1950s, developed a music that would not only incorporate concrete

elements, but also pure electronics.

The groundbreaking compositions that he created while working at the WDR

Broadcasting Centre's electronic studio in Cologne during the 1950s and 60s

would dramatically change the shape of late 20th century music.

Stockhausen is by far the most important composer of the 20th century in regards

to electronic music because he invented electronic music.

Remember, before Stockhausen, there was no proper electronic music.

People did not think about making just music electronically as a composition,

writing it out, scoring it, then composing it in the studio and then

presenting it through loudspeakers.

Nobody had the gall to do that, but he did.

And he would spend up to six months, maybe a year, putting together a half-an

-hour piece or a 20-minute piece either in Paris with Pierre Schaeffer.

or in cologne where he worked in in this studio there and stock hasn't had to

start to get a lot of people following him and after 1956 when he did gazang

the union which is the song of the youth and that was a massive international

sensation because it was basically loudspeakers on stage and him just

playing a tape there was no there was no musician this was scandalous this was

ridiculous the class at the time said this is crazy but just really caused a

huge uproar

People were more interested, I think, than they are today.

In this, let's say, serious electronic music, people are interested in techno

and so on.

But I already had the feeling that nobody knows that there is so

-called serious electronic music, experimental music and so on.

Yes, there was at least, that was often a rejecting attitude.

And

at

the Robert Schumann Academy, where both Ralph Hutter and Florian Schneider were

students,

Stockhausen was a key part of the curriculum.

Future Kraftwerk member Karl Bartosz was also introduced to the composer's work

while a student here.

I started my musical studies at the Robert Schumann Institute in Düsseldorf,

and then I got acquainted to all the classical music.

The idea about the electronic movement was that the composer, and I was a

composer also in that time, a classical composer, as good as I could,

the idea was bypassing the instrumentalist, bypassing

the orchestra, and composing directly onto tape something.

And the other movement at that time was the so-called Musique Concrete.

coming from Pierre Schaeffer in Paris.

And he was using found sounds, like sounds of the environment,

sounds of a tree, if you rattle it, or anything that made

sound. And this is, it has always a lot to do with Kraftwerk, with the Kraftwerk

sounds, with the concrete and the electronic approach.

While this movement around Cologne and Düsseldorf was developing, in Berlin,

one of the key bands from the Zodiac scene was preparing to record their

first album.

Edgar Froese, the founder and only constant member of Tangerine Dream, had

been a prominent figure around West Berlin since the mid-60s.

And although he had decided upon his group's name, the line-up was an ever

-changing affair.

For the debut release, Froese enlisted Klaus Schulze from the band Psi Free as

his drummer.

And Konrad Schnitzler was also asked to join a group that he had originally

introduced to the Zodiac scene the previous year.

First they came because we asked them, coming back to us, because we need

special groups or special persons to have public.

And so they don't need me. But later on, when Edgar came and said, play with me,

then he has already seen in the club what...

I have done and so he was interested to have this noise to it instead

of having a normal pop group.

He was not always happy with this, what I did.

But on the end, he said, no, no, it's good. Do it. Don't ask me. Just do it,

you know.

And I was same loud like him.

And Schultz sometimes had problems because in this time we had no, in

Schultz's drum, we had no mics.

You know, he had not his own amp. He had no echoes on it. He just was drumming.

He was like a locomotion, you know, like, just set him on his ass, and then

he was drumming, you know. He was young, 18 or something like this. He had power

over and over, you know.

Released in 1970, electronic meditation was a coarse yet significant work, the

first artifact to emerge from the Zodiac scene.

at a sign of the experiment to come.

We didn't like the existing music at all, and we didn't want to copy English

or American music.

We wanted to do kind of, later on we would call it psychedelic music.

It should be not nice, but it should be special.

And that was the main thing.

Today when I listen to it, if I dare to listen to it, it's

rubbish. But it is important because

we...

We tried at least, you know, let's say as a take off, what comes out later on,

nobody knew of this, you know, Tangerine now went this way, I still went this

way, but for the breakthrough,

you know, it was very important, the album, and also very inspiring for other

musicians, even if they don't do this.

but at least they go another direction.

By the time of the album's release, however, the Zodiac Club was a distant

memory, and the album's contributors had gone their separate ways.

Where Froese had continued to develop Tangerine Dream, Konrad Schnitzler had

joined his original collaborator, Achim Rodelius, to form the group Cluster.

Originally a two-piece, they recruited Zodiac Club regular Dieter Mobius as the

third member of their experimental ensemble.

Again, Schnitzler's philosophy dominated.

Using conventional instruments filtered through various electronic devices, they

would strive to create something both unfamiliar and esoteric.

showed me the stuff they had everything for me ready for to be played and next

after day after two days i think we had our first show in the gallery we made

a 12 hours non-stop show and and two days later we left

berlin forever in a big yellow post truck and we tried to make our

living with the music which was in the beginning really very hard.

We went with the post bus from Berlin in 69 and stayed on the road

for about two years, wandering from one city to another, knocking at museum

stores and saying, here we are, we want to do something. Are you aware of us?

No. So you will be aware if you let us play.

And it worked.

In these years, it worked.

We just could survive.

That was all. But we had big fun. It was a great experience.

We met a lot of people, and we made our audience by this way, just traveling

from one city to another.

From the north, from Oslo down to Ljubljana, Cluster was really

lucky to be able to do this way, to work this way, even so we...

We were very much in our life.

We were not able to be a normal rock band, of course.

Couldn't play guitar riffs or real bass or play real

drum.

So we had to invent, if we want to realize that kind of music, we had to

invent a new kind of music in a way.

Or, because we were not able to make music, we

had to do what we did or we couldn't make music.

Once we had the start of this kind of music we did,

we couldn't stop anymore. We had to go on this way and we wanted to go on this

way. It was not really our philosophy to not make rock.

It was our philosophy to work with what we had and what we could do with

our hands.

And to, of course, to get better in

doing what we were doing.

And this is working automatically in a way.

Cluster with a K made what I would call early industrial music in a way. They

were very harsh.

The sounds were very metallic.

They were very ringing.

There was a lot of, there was the sounds of machinery, but they were also almost

like the sound of industrial equipment being heaved in and out of the studio.

You know, if they were sort of dragging concrete mixers in, revving them up, you

could kind of understand it. Kind of like Einstein's under Neubauten or

something.

But obviously much earlier.

And they were interested in noise, I think, more than anything else. The idea

of noise and how to manipulate noise.

noise would, you know, be ignored for quite a long time.

And, you know, it's just really resurfaced over the past few years with

the American noise scene, like Wolf Eyes and people like that, a whole load of

bands that are involved in just creating complete noise. And then there's the

Japanese noise scene with Mertzbo.

So they were sort of the precursors of this entire noise scene, in my opinion.

And I hear...

Clustered with a K, I hear noise, and beautiful noise, you know, noises that

are interesting, that are... that have been, you know, just to say, Schaefer

would or Stockhausen would have been composed and put together as a piece of

music. As the Berlin bands were beginning to branch out and the growth

of experimental German music started to appear more like a movement than a set

of isolated individuals and collectives, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, the

organisation,

recorded their first and only LP, Tone Float.

Behind the desk for the album was Connie Plank, a young producer and engineer who

had recently completed work with Cluster on their debut Klopp-Reichen and who had

set up his own company, Rainbow Productions, to record new German music.

Tone Float was for both the organisation and for Plank an experiment, a testing

ground for new ideas.

Tone Float is an album that is...

completely different from, say, what happened with Kraftwerk eventually,

mainly because it is more percussive-based.

There's a lot of percussion on it.

Percussion, flute, and sort of a lot of warbling in a way.

If it could be seen as a success, I don't know if it can be seen as a

success. I think it's more of an experimentation, really. It's a way of

them sort of like finding their own feet, really, in a way, you know,

finding what they could do.

as this band and trying to see where they could take it.

At that point, electronics played very little part in their sound.

It was mostly acoustical instruments, you know what I mean?

So it sounds a bit like a sort of ethnic recording in a way, believe it or not,

like a German ethnic recording.

But you hear it today, and it is an extraordinary sort of example of early

kraut rock.

Before there was Kraftwerk, there was the organisation, the album Tonefloat.

Now, they're really using synthesizers on that, and they're part of a sort of

larger ensemble, as it were.

But there are hints. First of all, in the very name, the organisation, with

that kind of obviously very pointed formality, indicates the kind of rather

conceptual, schematic way in which they would intend to work.

which is obviously very antithetical to far more informal things you get with

people like Alan Dool.

So there was that, and also I think there's a strong emphasis on a kind of,

there's a sort of strong sort of percussive, sort of minimal percussive

line to it, which clearly would then sort of, as it were, snake through the

rest of Kraftwerk's career.

The record was eventually taken by producer Connie Plank to Britain, where

he managed to secure it a release through RCA.

In Germany, however, the album was unavailable.

and thus failed to get Hutter and Schneider any real success in their own

country. Yet during 1970, the German scene significantly developed.

With their commune having now divided into two separate musical groups, the

more accomplished Amon Dool Mark II released their seminal double album

Yeti, Cannes completed the line-up that would cement their reputation with the

recruitment of singer Deimo Suzuki, and Klaus Schulze joined forces with

guitarist Manuel Gottsching to form Ashrar Temple.

Yet it was a release from an enigmatic band from Munich that pushed the musical

language of the new German scene towards pure electronics Popol Vuh were a trio

fronted by the reclusive Florian Fricke and their debut record Affenstund

introduced new technologies and extraterrestrial sounds Popol Vuh was

actually the band of Florian Fricke and he was

Not a close friend of mine, but he was a friend already.

And he lived outside of Munich in this little village, Miesbach.

And I got to know him through Eberhard Schöner, which was a classical

conductor and classical trained musician, which became as well an

electronic musician.

And their houses in the countryside in this village have been...

maybe five minutes from each other.

And it was 69 when I again visited Eberhard Schöner in

Miesbach. We very often met there at the weekends.

And the bus I took broke down, so I had to walk up this hill.

Miesbach is up on a hill, yeah?

Beautiful Bavarian landscape.

And I heard these strange sounds.

So strange.

I heard a lot of this experimental music on tapes.

Eberhard as well as Florian Fricke with Popol Vuh tried and he did all this with

flutes and acoustically things. But this was different.

I never heard a sound like this. I never heard sounds like this. It was like,

well...

somewhere out of space, from the moon.

I couldn't figure out what it was, and it was a bit spooky as well.

And I walked toward the house of Florian Fricke, and it became louder and louder,

and suddenly I knocked at the door, and his wife opened and she said, Psst!

He has a new instrument.

I said, Oh?

What is that called?

MOOC. I said, MOOC?

It's a synthesizer.

And this was in the house of Florian.

He had a shack behind the house filled with this MOOC synthesizer because the

first MOOC synthesizer was as big as a house.

And all these cables and all these...

strange knobs and it was staining there. It was like really

I saw a sorcerer from Mars or something like that.

He did the sounds with that.

I liked Florian Frick. I met him.

He lived near Munich.

He had his first MOOC synthesizer, this big thing.

Oh, he was part of the scene, but away from it as well, at the same time, I

think.

He behaved like this as well, I think. He didn't like too much people around

himself.

He was a real mystic, mystic people.

He was wealthy enough to be able to buy a Moog synthesizer in 1969.

I mean, a Moog synthesizer then would have cost a lot of money.

And he basically would have come in various modules being sent to him from

America, and he would have had to put it together at the cost of all this.

And he had 64 keys, his one, and he spent a lot of time working on it.

Remember that with a Moog, each key has to be tuned.

If you want to make a sound, you have to tune each key.

It's a very laborious process. There's an awful lot of wiring to be done.

I think he had this Moog synthesizer and they used it to get recognition.

But remember, the synthesizer was a key to the German scene.

They really seized on it, driven by Stockhausen and all the other people.

They seized on instruments in a way that, you know, other cultures didn't

seize on them.

I mean, in America, you had records coming out like Wendy Carlos and Morton

Sabotnick, which were driven by commercials.

Let's make it literally commercials.

You had Wendy Carlos playing back on, which was an enormous feat to do on an

early Moog, a prototype Moog.

But the Germans weren't interested in that. I mean, they could...

Electronic music is a music without tradition.

The things that were made there were only known to a very small audience in

the 60s.

You think of Stockhausen, that would be the great-grandfather or people like

Pierre Schäffer.

They were names that only very few people knew.

Or the early experiments with electronics by people like Luigi Nono.

That was a high culture avant

-garde insider group that knew that. For the 16 or 18-year-old

young people, access to electronic music was completely different.

The tradition that existed was that of the science fiction film.

I think in many music biographies of people, where the age roughly belongs,

one finds Forbidden Planet as the film that was the first to await a complete

electronic soundtrack.

It's not just that these film musics were something completely new all of a

sudden.

This film genre was rejoicing at that time.

and more than the film, the films, the corresponding literature.

Lars, the young worker, read science fiction novels and dreamed of another

and hopefully better world.

And the soundtrack for it, after seeing these films, like Forbidden Planet,

you also knew what this future would sound like.

The view went into the future and one chose a music

that sounded completely not only

not from this country, but also not from this world.

And at the same time when the need for it was there, the technical means

for it were also created.

In the 60s, exactly these means of sound design came,

which have something to do with space.

Resonance, echo, so everything that creates artificial spaces that sound to

you immediately says, here we are somewhere else.

And then this mood just fits.

And it was within this climate of a developing electronic music scene that

Kraftwerk appeared.

Having been dropped from their label after the failure of the organisation

record, Ralph Hutter and Florian Schneider regrouped and renamed their

outfit. Literally translated as Powerplant.

Kraftwerk were one of the few groups within the scene that had chosen a

German name, and it perfectly summed up their aesthetic goals.

A major city situated in the heart of Germany's main industrial area,

Dusseldorf itself provided a key influence for Hütte and Schneider.

Since the war, the area had been developed and renovated, and this

progressive, modern industrial world would be reflected in Kraftwerk's music.

Featuring the twin drumming of Andreas Hohmann and future Neue member Klaus

Dinger, Kraftwerk once again called on Conny Plank to record their self-titled

debut in August 1970, assisted by engineer Klaus Lohmer.

They had a drum set up, it was a children's drum set, where they played.

We did a soundcheck and tried it out. One day there was a grill in the studio,

it was a huge studio.

Then we drove up there with a big violin and made a song, I don't know if it's on

the CD or on the album, a song with a grill.

But it was live in the studio.

And that was always great, you always tried it out. Of course, it was a bit

like that, sometimes in a rush, that was part of it back then.

And that's how it all started.

He was open to everything. He also produced the Blackfields, a group of

people from Cologne who were doing carnival.

Gianna Nannini came here.

He was just a guy who could approach people, he could tick out what they had.

There was a specialist in it.

And the peace itself, if someone couldn't do it, it was completely in

peace, completely relaxed. Again and again, and then we do that again.

He really put a lot of effort into it.

They could play quite well, but they actually only tried.

That's how I remember it. That was a long time ago.

They couldn't play technically well, but they had great ideas. And with the few

of them, you can compare with the guitarist of Procol Harum. He had

nothing on it, but the few notes he played, they sat.

It was the same with them.

Kraftwerk's self-titled debut was issued in late 1970 on the Philips label, only

months after the release of Tone Float.

With both accessible and highly experimental material contained across

its four tracks, it went on to sell 60,000 copies in Germany.

It was distinguished by the use of the flute. I mean, the flute and very light

keyboards and this lovely...

patina of percussion that they were generating from the bass keys of the

keyboard.

And there was a lightness to it.

And there was a clarity to it that was very different.

They were going for a much more minimalistic sound.

It wasn't a huge band improvising in a studio. It wasn't loud and noisy and

hitting you over the head. It was basically sound and

music that was very well organised.

Musically, that's still great.

With the ruck-zuck, when we recorded it, we were so excited that we had to listen

to it again and again and worked on it all the time. Then you knew, that's it,

you can feel it.

There are different situations in the studio, when you suddenly want to hear

it again and again, what you recorded, then there's something to it.

Rugbook was a track that was solidly based on building rhythms

and putting them together in a way that would become memorable and danceable to,

I should imagine.

So they were interested in compressing their sound in a way and

creating a rhythmic stride to it that would...

appeal, I should imagine. They were trying to be appealing as well as, you

know, revolutionary.

The thing about Kraftwerk 1 is that it ends with this track von Himmel hoch, or

coming down from the heavens.

And it just sounds like falling bombs coming down on top of you and exploding.

And that would be very pertinent to the German experience.

The difference in Kraftwerk and the other bands, and the other bands wished

to totally disassociate themselves from the past, from the German history.

And they also wished to actually make a totally new, using the hippie ideal of

free-form improvisation. But Kraftwerk were different. They were willing to

embrace the past.

And in so doing, they actually, in the long term, they invented a new kind of

aesthetic that people around the world could really relate to by using humour.

and experiment and brilliant understanding of electronic sound

they've made their own they made they were basically remade german identity

and made it something to actually look at and you can feel it in on carpet one

they're actually willing to embrace the fact that a lot of bombs were both

dropped on and by germany and this is an experience that let's say stockhausen

had gone through first hand being a stretcher bearer in the second world war

he a lot of bombs were dropped on him he escaped

And so this was a very brave thing to do in some ways.

And it was obviously going to, they weren't going to shun the path.

I missed the organisation record and I think whole Germany missed it because it

was not released here.

So it started really with the first Kraftwerk here.

Well, again, people made jokes and said,

it's like, well, are they with the tape?

in a noisy house, what do they do?

This is not music. Maybe it's experimental music, yes. We can accept

that. But it has nothing to do with the underground scene, with the alternative

scene, with the rock scene.

Okay,

it might be interesting, but it is something for a very limited audience.

For the art people or something.

Indeed, Kraftwerk promoted the album with a tour not of rock clubs, but of

universities, parties and art galleries.

A modest success, and released only domestically, it nevertheless introduced

the band to new listeners and placed them on the musical map.

During the first half of 1971, however, the band underwent many dramatic

changes. Ralph Hutter unexpectedly quit, leaving Florian Schneider to lead a

perpetually changing ensemble.

Eventually, guitarist Michael Rother joined the band, with Klaus Dinger the

lone drummer.

Although this line-up did record several tracks with Connie Plank and made a TV

appearance, it was not to last.

Yet the German scene itself was proving that it did have staying power, with

Ashraa Temple's groundbreaking self-titled debut Unleashed in June, and

both Cluster and Popple Voo's second albums faring well with the critics, and

ensuring that they kept their small but secure audiences.

Festivals and performances featuring the scene's leading lights continued to

introduce the various bands to new listeners, and the release of Cannes'

seminal Tego Mago proved that experimental German music was alive and

well in the new decade.

Many of these acts, including Kraftwerk, were now releasing music that was

totally unlike anything produced anywhere else in the world.

We were pretty much aware that we weren't raised in the Mississippi Delta,

or we weren't raised in Liverpool, and it was certainly not our identity.

And having an artistic mind somehow, probably I didn't know at that time,

I think our generation had to come up with a counterpoint to that.

It doesn't make sense really to

play the music you really love, you really like.

It's one thing, but coming up with an own genuine idea and

by defining your own your own

reality and your own culture, you have to come up with some other thing.

So it's not like you say, okay, we can't play rock'n'roll, so we'll invent

something else.

So it's as if there was a discussion and a plan.

It happened by itself.

I would compare it a little bit to the psychedelic explosion in San Francisco,

where it was just one area in America where suddenly, yeah, it was the scene,

yeah. And suddenly you had the feeling.

So many musicians, so many bands, so many influences.

This just can happen once, I think. It was the

blooming of German music at its peak.

By September 1971, work began on Kraftwerk's second album.

Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger had by now departed to form Neu.

who would become one of the most influential bands on the German scene,

and Hütter and Schneider were now reduced to a duo.

Having begun work on the construction of a personal studio the previous year, the

pair recorded their fresh compositions both at this newly built location in

Dusseldorf and at Connie Plank's studio in Hamburg.

The result of their labours was the album Craftwork II.

I think with each subsequent Craftwork album, they...

stripping back something a little bit more and more, but of course it's filled

with a stage of craftwork. They are still using what you might call

conventional instruments, but using them almost as if they were electronic

instruments in some ways, and they are experimenting with laying down different

configurations, different patterns, working with repetitions, almost using

instruments as a thing in itself, exploring textures, as it were, rather

than text, still reluctant to introduce.

vocals and so it is you know looking back at the time they disavowed those

albums of Kraftwerk they don't really want people to hear them they'd rather

that the year zero of Kraftwerk occurred a little bit further down the line in

the mid 70s somewhere but you can you know these albums are actually eminently

listenable in their own right and you can see the direction they're heading in

to be honest a lot of the tracks on Kraftwerk for one and two are basically

experiments there's not many

on those albums which are that melodic with the exception of Sing Clang on the

second record, which is a defining moment in Kraftwerk's where they

actually come up with this glacial motoric beat and then the glacial

keyboards and flutes over the top, which is their

their trademark and this is what happened on Tlingit land. I think they

probably came upon that and this would be the sound that would define them

because obviously they couldn't keep on just doing experiments.

The wonderful feature of that, and the things that you're just not hearing

anywhere else, first of all, the synthesizer, it synthesizes the

fountain, that form, the basis.

They're directing it, they're leading it, they're shaping it, and there are no

vocals.

You've got instruments like flute just playing a kind of very supplementary

role, kind of filling in, adding color here and there. And in fact, they would

use electronics to create that kind of effect later on.

They've got these wonderful little very speedy effects going on as well.

And in a sense, with that album, particularly that track, they are kind

of setting the tone for what they're going to do the rest of their career,

that kind of futuristic yet serene, you know, the equivalent of a painter like

Fernand Leger with his kind of friendly robots handing out flowers that, you

know, the future, new technology, need not be something that mankind would be

at odds with.

But the rest of the album doesn't really tie in with that. The rest of the album

is more kind of...

it's more kind of fragmented experimentation and ideas that they

would eventually dispense with.

There's a precision about Kraftwerk which is not really.

Their music is more about concision. Whereas the other albums where you get

these double Amundul and double Asherah Temple albums.

I used to pick up the needle in the record shop I worked in Dublin. I used

to put it down anywhere and it would be just like... Flip it over and put it

down the middle of the track and it would be just a load of stuff. Forget

it. But with Kraftwerk you wanted to listen to each track because it had some

kind of structure.

where there wasn't any structure on the early Armand II.

My favorite Kraftwerk track of all time is this piece called Strom, where

they were just demonstrating the electric guitar, an instrument that was

not very important for them.

That was already so obvious that they had a completely different attitude

towards...

The instruments were not instruments in the sense of instrumental for production

of something that has been conceived elsewhere, but they had a life of their

own. You put on an electric guitar, let's see what it does.

Obviously, the aesthetic investment was into something completely different from

what all the other bands were into. All the other bands were into, with the most

different means, but they were all into experience.

Everything was about having an experience with music.

And Kraftwerk was not that. It was obviously about distance to music. There

was something conceptual, there was something humorous, there was irony.

But on the other hand, it was not comedy. It was not openly ironic.

It was not the Bonsodog Duda band or something like that. So that was, even

for me as a search engineer, clearly different from anything else.

Yet during 1972, the scene continued to diversify.

Bands such as Cannes, who followed up the landmark Teg Omega with the equally

successful Yig Bamiyazi, persevered in their exploration of the extreme

possibilities of rock music while the electronic field continued to evolve.

Edgar Froese's Tangerine Dream had released the albums Alpha Centauri and

Light, in which the band had progressed from the experimental psychedelia of

electronic meditation into an atmospheric sound that Froese himself

termed cosmic music.

And former member Klaus Schulzler, who had also been testing the boundaries of

psychedelic rock with Ashra Temple, emerged as a prominent electronic

musician in his own right with his debut solo record, Ehrlich.

I want to do at this time 100% electronic music, not the compromise

with, let's say, conventional instruments creating new

sounds. I said, why don't we start with a synthesizer and make a new sound

instead of playing a guitar backwards or whatever.

But they still want to have it as an instrument.

important part of this music they want to have traditional drums and

traditional guitar okay they have some they give let's say in one hour they

give you five minutes to just freak out with this but then we have to come back

to this and this i was really fed up i said no i i do it alone because at this

time i was parallel also doing also during tangerine time

I was doing at home, experimenting with a tape recorder, a little bit like a

music concrete, but because at this time we had no synthesizer, because they came

quite late to Europe, and also they were incredibly expensive at this time.

Today you can have a studio for that, you know.

I didn't even know where I'm going alone.

But like in the beginning with Electronic Meditation or with First

Ashram, if it would not work, I would probably be a painter or a teacher or

whatever. But it worked relatively fast because when

I released Ehrlich, it was, I think half a year later, it was kind of a top ten

album in France.

Clive Schulzer is an interesting case, and Elif is, again, an album which not

only connects with some of the sort of, like, minimalist things, you know,

people like, in some ways, Bill Nivlock to a certain extent, although it's much

more accessible than his work, and to the kind of more sort of drone-based

experimental electronica of the 21st century.

So, yes, he peels away from Tangerine Dream, as it were, and he does establish

this kind of very individual furrow.

Klaus Schulz's Airlift is a sort of precursor to drone music.

It sort of straddles what Sun Ra was doing and, say, what the

drone rock bands like Sun and people like that are doing in the 90s and

onwards. But it has a very cosmic feel to it.

but a very dark edge cosmic field. You're on the dark side of the moon, if

you know what I mean.

You're in dark space.

It's pretty bleak out there.

Illich is also a kind of early minimalism as well.

It's stripping everything down to the bare essentials of what the entire crap

rock movement, particularly what Tangerine Dream were doing and what

Ashwar Temple were doing, down to the very minimum. I think he's sort of honed

it right down so that you're hearing the very essence of what...

he was trying to do within those two groups.

He was this Einzelgänger, this solo person.

Not really introvert like Florian Fricke, much more open-minded,

but I think he was a person who had to do everything under control.

There was a part of journalists and media who took him very serious from the

beginning. It was mostly from the classical department.

The classical departments in radio and media found this

is new classic.

And I think they are right.

He still is.

I know myself that it's a very simple structured album, Ehrlich.

But it is a groundbreaking album in terms of

aesthetic. not from playing and all this.

And this has an importance.

And then I said, oh yeah, it worked.

And then I made one record after another, nearly hundreds till now.

While artists such as Schulze and Neu were establishing their reputation as

key figures in the German movement, Kraftwerk laid low during 1972.

performing few concert dates and working further on developing their studio.

Their first two albums were repackaged as a double LP in the UK, but the

release did little to spread awareness of the duo outside of their homeland.

After performing their first concerts outside of Germany in early 1973, two

French shows which were very favourably reviewed by the local press, they once

again enlisted Connie Plank to engineer the sessions for their next album, Ralph

& Florian.

Released at the end of the year, It was a notable progression from their

previous two records.

Ralph and Florian, I think, is a breakthrough album for Kraftwerk. It's a

1973 album.

It's extremely melodic, it's extremely confident, it has wonderful tracks on

it. Some of the tracks could be electronic classical music.

There's a track called Dance With It, which if you put it on now, it sounds

like it was made yesterday.

There's a thickness to the percussion sounds, which gives it that depth, that

real depth.

And there's a crisp clarity to the keyboard sounds and the flute sounds.

But also this strong, wistful romanticism is coming in, the kind of

Malarian, Wagnerian thing is coming in. And they're bringing that into the

music. And there's this kind of...

strange kind of nostalgia even. I think Eno called it a strange nostalgia for

the future.

There's a strange nostalgia in that for a future, but also that reflects the

past. And then there's the humour, of course, calling something a pineapple

symphony.

As an album, it's a wonderful album. Also, it's a very ambient album in

parts. Some parts are very quiet.

And none of it has any noise or loudness to it. And there's no...

There's no like screaming rock guitars on it.

But there's elements of psychedelia there. There's treated guitars, but

there isn't like... There is a wonderful record. It's a beautiful record

actually.

I do like Ruff and Flora, and Alan O'Simpson in particular is a track which

could have easily been made in the last 10 years.

You could have been made by something like The Orb or whatever, something like

that. It's quite astonishingly ahead of its time, and it's exploring quite a lot

of ideas, which in fact Kraftwerk themselves eventually dispensed with.

But again, it has this kind of...

Things like those Hawaiian guitars and waves gently crashing against the sea. I

suppose what they're doing there is they're establishing this aspect of

serenity, which I think is key to Kraftwerk, which they use in a slightly

different way later on.

But it actually isn't just a stepping stone on the way to Autobahn and Man

Machine. It is a wonderfully listenable album in its own right.

As well as introducing more serene elements into the album's musical

content, With Ralph and Florian, Kraftwerk began to assume a very

particular visual identity.

In 1973, Schneider and Hutter had met violinist and artist Emil Schultz.

Initially simply a musical collaborator, Schultz's extensive studies in the arts

at Dusseldorf Academy would lead him to become a pivotal background figure in

the overall Kraftwerk setup.

The album not only included a bizarre comic book conceived and illustrated by

Schultz, but he also played a key part in the overall cover design.

in which the names Ralph and Florian were written in a distinctively German

typeface, and which featured a photo of the pair looking less like rock

musicians and more like scientists.

Here, Ralph and Florian were not only the musicians, but also the very

abstracted subject of the record, and this development of a unique and clearly

German visual identity would play a vital role in the future of the band.

The idea they had of themselves was much more of being kind of an artist in a

sense. a type of artist that emerged in the visual art world at that time

after Warhol and Gilbert and George, who were also very important, I think, for

Graf Berg. This kind of artist that was not longer just working in one field or

around one problem or one question, but tried to produce an entire artificial

character that would be changeable between different worlds, that could be

used on a records cover as well as on a...

as in an exhibition place or on a stage. This kind of mobility of an image is

something that comes from pop music and it has been adopted by the visual arts

in a more professional or in a more conceptual way in the 60s. And I think

that was something that Kraftwerk adopted.

That was one thing. I think one thing was the camp aspect that we are not...

saying explicitly what we want, but we are leaving it up to you and we give you

all kind of material to project on. The second was this idea of an artist that

they had basically taken from the visual arts.

And the third thing was that they at one point discovered this idea of German

-ness as some kind of artificial idea that was not connected to some kind of

German nationalism or ideas of German-ness that that existed

historically, and they've all been tainted, of course, by National

Socialism or by the Nazis. So it was something new, and I think these three

ideas came together, and that made this uniqueness.

Because all the subjects after Ralph and Florian were somehow coded as German.

While Ralph and Florian were busy developing their own unique brand in

Dusseldorf, 1973 was a breakthrough year for many of the German bands.

In England, Richard Branson's Virgin Records, a newly established independent

label, was on the lookout for new signings after the worldwide success of

Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, their first release.

Virgin had originally been a small record shop specialising in prog rock

and imports from the German scene, and Branson decided to bring some of the

more prominent artists to a UK audience.

The first thing where we, let's say, made some money, which was nearly

nothing, was in France over a couple of years.

And then Richard Branson there liked it, this kind of German music he liked. He

signed Cairn, he signed Faust, he signed Tension Dream, Asher Temple, myself.

And so, and through that, I think through Virgin Records in the beginning,

this kind of...

Music was really successful.

He must have a special feeling for it.

Or maybe he just said it's such a freaky music that nobody would dare to do such

shit. I don't know what he was thinking at this time.

The only thing which I know is that definitely he never listened to the

music.

By far the most noteworthy of his findings was Tangerine Dream.

With the release of their 1973 LP Atom, they had already gained essential

publicity in the UK when the record was championed by pioneering DJ John Peel,

who went on to name it his album of the year.

In their native Germany and in France, Frozer's group had been both

commercially and critically successful, and their signing to Virgin propelled

them onto the global stage.

Their debut Virgin release, Phaedra, hit the UK top 20 in 1974 and achieved six

-figure sales.

It also departed from the more experimental sound of their previous

records and introduced what would become their trademark sequencer-driven

soundscapes.

Edgar Froese did approach Branson and he had a very good deal.

for Branson. He said that we make a lot of music so you can put out music by

Tangerine Dream and music by us the solo musicians as well. You can put out two

or three albums a year and we can give you this for you know very little money

as long as you get the mogs over and you help us with it. And they were getting a

lot of demand for a performance.

They had a massive reputation as a great live act and that live they were

awesome.

And they built a great reputation from touring endlessly in Germany. I think

probably those kind of things would have been just different. He would have seen

the figures, seen the amount of people. So obviously there's an audience here.

And he wasn't wrong. I mean, because their albums were a massive hit in the

UK.

The thing about Tangerine Dream, unlike other German bands, was that when you

heard the records, you did not feel that human beings were playing them.

You didn't feel that these records were being kind of pushed forward by human

beings. It was as if the actual instruments had a life of their own. The

instruments were actually playing themselves.

And they were making all these incredible sounds. And they were very

good at texture.

Everything to meld into each other. And it also had a very strong rhythmic

content.

And it was different. It didn't have the random sounds of a lot of the

experimental music.

And it didn't have the kind of noise side of, say, Noi or those bands or

even Kraftwerk. It was very melodic and very, very...

continent very complete but it was as if the instrument was playing itself and he

had these wonderful burbling bubbling seasons bubbling music coming over and

of course you know richard branson sees that they bring them over to england and

they can record it here and it was a huge huge hit and it was enormously

influential so i don't think tangerine dream because they took their name from

a beatles song um they were um lucy and skyward diamond i think

In a lot of ways, they weren't actually even seen as a German band.

And when they'd play, of course, you couldn't see them. You didn't know what

they looked like. There were no pictures on the album. They were just psychedelic

-looking covers or a blue cover with something melting in it.

And when you went to a Times Between concert, all you got was these banks of

flickering lights and there were three people in front of them with their backs

to the audience playing them.

But you never saw their faces. He didn't care about it because the music was just

pouring out and it was very, very influential.

Phaedra was the first record that they released on Virgin and in a way Phaedra

is the last great Tangerine Dream record.

It's kind of boring in a way what he did after Phaedra. He just made the whole

thing kind of sound like hard work really.

But I think he was more and more interested in the commercial aspects of

his sound than

experimentation anymore.

I think he was interested in perfection and cleaning it up to the point where

all the guts had been washed out of it.

Tantrum and Dream, that kind of inflection, really,

genuinely, a very interesting proposition in that music has this kind

of very rich, very sort of roiling quality. You never know quite what it's

going to become, what it's in the process of becoming, where they might

take it.

In the end, I find Tangerine Dream in a kind of mid-period rather disappointing.

You go back and listen to some of those albums, while they might well have

seemed tremendously impressive at times, especially with the latest stereophonic

equipment or whatever, they really don't sound all that hot. I mean, they remind

you of, like, I don't know, the sort of soundtrack, TV soundtrack music we get

to kind of horses, helicopter shots of horses running along the cliff edges and

things like that. They're kind of scampering sequences of a quality.

I always think it's a tremendous shame, and I think they are one of the examples

of, like, Krautrock's kind of sort of curiosity, its phonic curiosity, its

embracing of, like, electronics and the science or whatever, being taken up a

rather sort of disproportionately orthodox and functional path, which is

mostly, you know, a kind of mock-grandiose sort of quality or simply

music that's just good soundtrack music.

While Tangerine Dream were busy making their presence felt in the UK, Kraftwerk

were preparing to make their own impression on the international market.

Having pared down their operations for the past two albums, Ralph and Florian

decided to introduce new musicians to the mix when they began recording at

their studios in the summer of 1974.

They drafted in percussionist Wolfgang Flöhr and multi-instrumentalist Klaus

Röder to add new elements to the Kraftwerk sound.

And the two... Ralf and Florian will definitely do something.

We often didn't know what was going on. Wolfgang didn't either.

Kraftwerk is Ralf and Florian. The other was always just additional.

They then hired people almost like paid musicians.

These musicians didn't always like that.

But I personally thought it was okay.

Hutter and Schneider's studio in Düsseldorf, now named Klingklang, was

the locus of Kraftwerk's operations.

And since its inception, the pair had been continually developing it, adding

new instruments and designing new equipment that would help them realize

their sound.

In the backyard, a larger room, maybe once a factory room, I think.

It was completely covered with a roll door.

The famous roll door, I think, when I came there for the first time, there was

suddenly, I rang and then a very heavy roll door opened.

Then you went in through such a corridor and then you came into this room, it was

pretty big.

It was not tinkered.

And then there was a huge horn speaker.

It was self-built.

I think Florian did that once.

Or they let themselves be built. They let themselves be built a lot by

friends.

Then there were these electronic drums. There weren't any yet, but there were

different ones.

different devices that were self-made and then also these simple synthesizers

that you had back then, the Synth-EA was there and then there was Ralf and

Florian with neon, that was all nicely built up, that's pretty well known, I

think, this writing made of neon, they also had a company that did it for them.

Ralf and Florian always had the right friends who knew exactly how

who mastered the technique.

Conny was also part of that. Conny was important in the studio and to make

everything perfect.

I assume that later it was done just as well, but at that time Conny was very

important for the recordings.

And Ralf and Florian always had these acquaintances or studio people and also

craftsmen who made this technique the way they needed it. That went so far.

The result of their labours was the album Autobahn.

Released in Germany and the UK at the tail end of 1974, it was the last LP

that Ralph and Florian would record with producer Conny Plank.

and it was the album that catapulted them onto the international stage.

At its center was the title track, a 20-minute opus that took up the whole of

the record's first side.

The duo would eventually dismiss their first three albums, and they chose to

reimagine this record as Kraftwerk Year Zero.

The ideal thing was that in Autobahn, it really had a subject matter that

combined all the ideas they were thinking of.

That was the genius thing about it, that all of a sudden they had a subject

matter. So far, these conceptualists were thinking about ideas of how to be

an artist or how to be a musician in the pop world with all these visual artist

concepts around, but they didn't have a concept matter. They didn't have a

subject matter.

And then the idea of the German-ness was the next thing, but it was still

something that had to be concretized every time in a specific way.

And here they had everything together. They had a highly musical subject

matter, the road.

Then the specific German version of it, with the problematic thing, you know,

the proverbial achievement of the fascists, that is always this kind of

proverbial talk.

The Germans after the Second World War said, yeah, Hitler wasn't so bad after

all. I mean, he shouldn't have done this with the Jews.

At least he built the Autobahn. So Autobahn means this too.

And then, of course, it's the musical aesthetic of that.

Something that takes from minimalism the unfinishedness of music. Music that has

a structure that's not saying there's a climax, at one point we come to an end,

but it's possibly endless.

All this together was a great moment.

Out of Barn is, I think Ralph Butcher has said, that he was very much

influenced by the Beach Boys, and in this particular case, he said that the

Beach Boys, to him, made music that sounded like America, and he wanted a

music that sounded like Germany, that he was going to make, and it's a kind of

tone poem, and it's a very sort of picturesque piece of music, and there is

this kind of conscious homage to the Beach Boys, Farn, Farn, Farn.

It's like... which we travel, travel, travel, you know, slightly awkward

German, like fun, fun, fun, until Daddy takes the T-Bird away. So there's that

kind of conscious allusion to the Beach Boys.

But what's wonderful about the main piece, and I think that really is the

essence of the album, the 17, 18 minutes or whatever, is that you just get this,

it's like a sonic transcription of a car journey, from the kind of ignition and

setting off, and then kind of bowling sort of nicely along the road, then

hitting heavy traffic.

It would have seemed perhaps a very odd subject matter to some of the people

that had maybe followed sort of Kraftwerk generally or sort of the

alternative German rock scene for somebody to be kind of offering a hymn

of praise to something like a motorway.

But Kraftwerk...

They do these things with a very wry smile.

They're probably kind of aware of the kind of hackles they're raising when

they do these things and they kind of pose. They're looking slightly

effeminate and very un-rock and roll.

But as well as being an exquisite piece of music, it's very cleverly provocative

as well.

What was happening with all the bands was that the actual... Before, when you

heard the sounds, you knew it was coming from a source.

And that somebody was trying to make a sound coming from a source. And that's a

tree, a guitar, or that's an oscillator, or that's a keyboard.

With Autobahn, you sort of forgot about what the instruments sound like. I just

sort of more, just completely caught up in this motoric melody and this

driving motoric rhythm and then this melody and then the voice going Autobahn

over. And the whole thing gelled into what you call music, where you actually

forget about the instruments and you just listen to the music itself and

you're brought along with the music. I think certainly the first side of

Autobahn, they become really great musicians.

But then the second side of all the bad, for some reason, they go back to

experiment. Whether these experiments were experiments that were lying around

or stuff that was old stuff that they hadn't finished.

But really the second side is probably a side that people don't listen to.

Because it's going back to the Kraftwerk one and two experiments.

But certainly the first side made them international at the time, pop stars.

The main point was played by Conny Plank.

The main role was that he actually mixed everything and really put individual

parts together.

And afterwards the piece was made.

And I think that was even the last time that Conny did that. And he also said to

me, he doesn't know exactly what a Kraftwerk sounds like if he doesn't do

it anymore.

That was also very important.

I'm quite sure that the idea was making a

statement on the realm of pop music, but with our German identity.

And if you listen closely to the first two records of Ralph and Florian, they

really came from this classical angle.

That's how I see it.

And then they moved towards pop music, of course, by adding lyrics.

There's no pop music without lyrics, apparently.

And by using the German lyrics and using this word fun, which could be

understood in the English language as fun, and you had this connection to the

Beach Boys, to fun on the Autobahn, and using some of these German idioms

like... Autobahn and stuff like that, using the picture of the Volkswagen and

the Mercedes-Benz, that opened up a door, a new door.

And I think that's part of the success of Autobahn,

of the first worldwide-selling Kraftwerk record, actually.

This articulation of German identity was not only a key ingredient of the track's

success abroad, but also restated Kraftwerk's difference to their

contemporaries. While the other German bands were keen to distance themselves

from their homeland, Kraftwerk's use of lyrics sung in their native tongue would

be a real rarity not only on the UK and US charts.

even worse than right-wing partly. It was definitely reactionary. So singing

in German was politically impossible.

These clichés that German pop music has, that is, the drummer has, that has a

very formalized language, in which in very clear formulas about love, home,

such things are discussed.

There is talk about love, but in such a cold, fixed

form that it has nothing to do with any real people and a real love.

That's why Kraftwerk caricatured, or that's how they were heard here in

Germany, their obviously senseless texts,

which didn't make the attempt to be somehow

profound.

And so obviously that it was again an artistic statement.

It was a caricature of

Despite such culturally specific elements, the record became a massive

hit in the US and the UK.

After being picked up by a radio station in Chicago, the Autobahn single hit the

top 30 in the US and the album reached the top five on both sides of the

Atlantic. It was a huge record and it allowed them to then tour, you know,

America and so on. For the first time they could actually go and tour in the

States, which was like a huge breakthrough, yes, of course.

And I think for the first time Americans and British could see that some German

music was really, really fantastic to hear and friendly and warm and wasn't,

as Ian MacDonald had said many years later, cold and unemotional. It was very

emotional and it was very funny as well.

Before departing for the tour, the structure of the group changed once

more. Keen on the more expansive sound as well as the image of a four-piece,

when Klaus Ruder quit the group, he was instantly replaced with another

percussionist, music student Karl Bartosz.

Well, my professor said, hey Karl, it was 75, I've got this

telephone call now, there's this band called Kraftwerk, they need a classical

trained percussionist.

here's the number, call them.

And I called back, and actually it was Florian Schneider on the phone, and at

that time we were all very casual, so I got phone calls every day, playing

there, playing there, playing there.

And I got there, and I just, as far as I remember, I took my

vibraphone, I had a vibraphone, and Florian came to my flat.

And we were carrying this vibraphone to the Klingsham studio.

They put some sheet music in front of me, and it was a song, as far as I

remember, it was a Kometen melody.

So it was basically a major scale.

I was playing this from the sheet music, and a little riff here, a little riff

there. And we were laughing, had some fun, and that was it. I was in the band.

Kraftwerk arrived in the U.S. in April for the 22-day tour.

And now performing as a four-piece, the band all adopted short hair and dressed

in suits, a collective ensemble for the first time, and an antithesis of

everything rock was about in America.

Yet many in the audience viewed them very much as a passing musical fad.

I think at that time we were some sort, received as some sort of gimmick group.

Only very few people could foresee what...

what potential was in Kraftwerk.

I think they, even though we played in Detroit, we played almost everywhere.

At that time, it was too far out, too strange.

We were playing in suits.

Suits, short hair.

I was playing electronic drums.

We had a mini-moog. Ralph was playing a mini-moog.

A Fafisa organ.

I still have it.

I nicked it off him.

So it's in my basement collecting dust.

And Florian was playing an Arp Odyssey synthesizer.

And Wolfgang and me were playing electronic drums. And my vibraphone, of

course.

And it was a very odd performance.

Very, very odd, I think.

Despite the strangeness of the experience, the single, the album and

the tour were highly lucrative for Hutter and Schneider, and they

reinvested their profits back into Kling Klang Studios.

Here they returned to work on a new album, and as with Autobahn, it would

again centre on a single concept.

You know, after Sgt Pepper, everybody was doing concept records, and it became

a little bit out of fashion then. And I think...

Looking at the classical composers, like Cage, Stockhausen, there was always a

strong concept behind their work.

It's impossible to make really good music without a concept, even if you go

to strong music coming from other cultures, like Indian music or

whatever. There's always a strong concept behind it, which is deeply based

in their ethnic background.

And being part of, we always felt really as Germans, later really more

as Europeans. And of course, coming also from the classical background, you have

to come up with a thought, with a theme.

We always went into a production of a record and we put pictures on the

console. We always had some pictures around.

And, you know, if you...

even if you improvise music, if you sing a track, if you make some lalas, it's

always good if your mind is in a direction.

It's much better if you look metaphorically in one direction instead

of being nowhere.

It's always good being somewhere if you play music.

And that was one of the strongest parts of Kraftwerk, and that's why I really

felt

felt very good being part of this movement and being part of Kraftwerk,

actually, yes.

Working solely out of the improved Klingklang, the context in which the

band would now function had changed.

Having negotiated a new deal with EMI, Hutter and Schneider took over

production duties on their records.

Although both Fleur and Bartosz were brought on board the sessions for the

new album, The control over Kraftwerk product was now entirely in the hands of

Ralph and Florian. From radioactivity on, Ralph and Florian became the

producer of Kraftwerk. So they took this part.

And it felt very natural because it was not at that time,

I hadn't really the feeling it was teamwork.

It was just Ralph and Florian's record.

Kraftwerk was just, I would say,

Part-time Kraftwerker.

Although it opened up really a possibility for the future, but I didn't

know at that time.

Released at the close of 1975, Radioactivity was a very different

record from Autobahn. Around a concept combining both the themes of nuclear

energy and the radio itself, Kraftwerk delivered an album of shorter tracks

with a more accomplished and polished use of the new technology available to

them.

Certainly with radioactivity, you get to the point where Clapworth are operating

in, as it were, smaller found units.

It's a very sort of conceptually very self-contained album.

It's dispensed entirely with the early krautrock habit of going off on sort of

lengthy meandering jams.

They're working in a sort of almost, you know, I wouldn't say proto-pop format,

but proto, the kind of pop that they help give rise to.

And I think that has to do with the fact that they're kind of, as it were,

they've brought the whole thing in-house. They're working on it

themselves.

In terms of the personnel working there, they've got the kind of four-way

division of labour, anything like that, even though Rolf Hutter and Florian

Schneider are obviously very much to the fore.

And yes, it does feel as if it's produced under some sort of aesthetic

factory conditions.

It's a very poetic record.

A very poetic record using...

utilizing the art form of a radio play, actually.

It's sort of a radio play.

And listening to pieces like Antenna

or Home Sweet Home, it's really, really very much

on the surface.

It has got this German soul.

And the album also pushed Kraftwerk's sound into new areas, with the

conventional instrumentation of their earlier records discarded.

Like Stockhausen before them, the band were moving into entirely electronic

territory.

The pure electronic element on radioactivity is pretty

discernible right from the very beginning because of the reason they

were using all this electronic equipment and had sort of totally done away with

orthodox.

instrumentation like the flute and the drums and everything else like that

everything had been turned electronic so this was a new turning

point for them really they were interested in purely machine-made

music and this is where the bare bones of the next stage

of the Kraftwerk sound would begin

A key instrument in their evolving sound was the Vaco Orchestron, a 1975

synthesizer that was never mass-produced and which broadened Kraftwerk's sound

palette. Basically, the orchestra, to me, it sounds like the Mellotron, but it

has got these infinite loops.

You know, Mellotron had just a finite... The loop stopped after 20 seconds, so

you had to only play just short notes.

Listen to the strawberry fields.

But...

I remember Florian, or Ralph and Florian, they went to this music fair in

Frankfurt, and there was suddenly just one of the, a part

of the exhibition there, and she just immediately bought it, because it had

just this strange, old-fashioned gramophone sound of recordings, Edison

type of 1867.

Yeah.

To me, it was always sort of Mellotron.

And it was functioning on... They had just acetate disks or plastic disks,

and they had different loops, infinite loops going on.

But the best were apparently strings, which went on to Trans-Europe Express,

and choir, which went on to radioactivity.

And as with Autobahn... This title track was both accessible and melodic and

proved the Kraftwerk were able to produce commercial material.

It's sung in English for the first time, and they start singing in English, and

it sounds like a pop track.

It's so constant. It glides along, bops along very well, they say,

radioactivity.

But remember, the radio was such an important part of German culture,

particularly, see this again, they're addressing the war. People used to

cluster around the radio in Germany, and every day, every night, to hear what

Hitler was going to say. That's the way they clustered around the radio.

in the UK to hear what Churchill was going to say. There was a part of that

as well in the concert. You're looking backwards to look forwards kind of

thing. And the whole thing is a concert. In some ways they use oscillators and

they use a lot of electronic devices.

In some ways it's quite an austere record.

The title track may be melodic and hummable but the rest of it isn't.

And it's very much a brave thing to do after Autobahn because some of it isn't

even constant, some of it is just experimental.

But there is a wistfulness to it and also a certain humour that the actual

album cover looks like a radio and the whole thing has a concept.

And they're honing it. They're now getting that each album is about

something modern but different. You've got an album about driving, and they've

got an album about radios, and what's next to come. So there is that feeling

that they're actually doing something else here. This is Banders just doing

something totally different.

And just as Kraftwerk were now operating outside of any school or movement, the

German scene itself had essentially disintegrated.

I think by the mid-70s, the idea of talking about this kind of, as it were,

almost autonomous thing called krautrock has become less and less valid. Some of

the early groups had just fallen away by the wayside. They were just very much

off their time.

Then other groups have kind of gone on to...

forward as it were careers themselves again some sort of measure of

international recognition um they've achieved what was probably the initial

dream of getting the hell out of germany and each is a kind of recognizable

entity going from a different direction in their own in their own right i mean

groups like i mean noi are probably the height of their powers in 1975 with a

music i mean although they were always a slightly combustible affair um craft

worker very much kind of you know, very much set out on the road, can actually,

or in fact, they'd only got sort of a couple more years left in them, although

they were enjoying a sort of quite significant measure of success at that

time.

So, yes, I think by that point it would be completely inappropriate to talk of

all the kind of krautrockers down in the old krautrock scene, krautrocking

together. It really wasn't like that.

Yet it was just at this point that the scene received its most emphatic

endorsement. Both ex-Roxy music member Brian Eno and the chameleonic pop icon

David Bowie had been drawn to the distinctive sounds emerging from

Germany, and that interest would in part lead them to begin working together in

late 1976 on a series of albums that would bring this experimentalism to the

mainstream.

In the mid-1970s and late 70s, both... Eno and Brian and David Bowie came to a

kind of crisis in their lives.

Eno was making records in the UK that people weren't really interested in and

he wasn't getting much recognition.

Even though he was doing a lot of production work and working with a lot

of other bands, he felt he needed to do something that would have a

wider audience.

David Bowie for his part was just was out at the lab, was floundering in the U

.S. of A.

He had made Young Americans and was then making Station to Station.

At the time of Station to Station, he was basically drowning in a sea of drugs

and decadence there, so he decided to move to Switzerland first.

And there he met Eno, and Eno came to see him.

The most important thing about that meeting was they both had similar

listening tastes. They were both listening to noise, they were both

listening, they were both very fond of Rodelius and Mobius and that cluster

thing. But also they were listening to Kraftwerk and they felt that there was

more happening in the German thing for new music and new possibilities were

opening up much wider there than anywhere else in the world. So they

decided that they would do something.

in 1977 in Germany.

Whereas Bowie was in part escaping from his excesses, Eno had already been

making his mark in experimental music, and the move to Germany seemed like a

natural progression.

Having created the album No Pussyfooting with guitarist Robert Fripp in 1973,

which incorporated tape delay techniques similar to those used by the Germans, he

set up the Obscure Records label in 75 to release both his and other composers'

experimental works.

His albums Another Green World and Discrete Music both developed a sound

that would eventually be labelled electronic ambient music, and this

interest in new experimental forms brought him into contact with Cluster

and their collaboration with ex-Craftwork guitarist Michael Roffer,

named Harmonia.

Having lost Konrad Schnitzler and altered the spelling of their name in

the early 70s, Cluster had persevered in their unique noise experiments through

the first half of the decade.

After moving to the rural village of Forst in 1973, they teamed up with

Rother to record two albums of Harmonia, both of which introduced a more

structured, rhythmical and melodic element into the trademark Cluster

sound.

Drawn to the output of both ensembles, Eno travelled to Germany before Bowie,

first to work with Harmonia and later with Cluster, and although initially he

was looking to produce the bands, it soon became a more organic,

collaborative process.

He found out that we can't produce harmonia, neither harmonia or cluster,

because it was not possible.

He tried to do it. He tried to guide us in his direction, of course, because

he's a great producer.

But he always said, please stay in your way. Do what you want to do.

Don't listen to producers.

Produce yourself.

Produce your music yourself. It's the best thing you can do, and you will be

successful with it.

And that's what I learned from him, especially from my own, my solo music.

He made our living because Cluster didn't sell, never came to break even

with their products.

And a sudden, with these two products, with Brian, we got

more attention, of course, and we got some money for it

because we sold about 50,000 from each.

That's a lot. At the time, it was a lot. I mean, not in one year.

But where Cluster and Harmonia had been keen on collaboration,

Kraftwerk were less forthcoming.

Bowie had initially asked them to join him for his station-to-station tour as a

support act.

but they declined the offer, and although they were scheduled to record

together, it never materialized.

Nevertheless, released in January 1977, the first of Bowie and Eno's

collaborations, Low, would bring experimental electronic music to a wider

audience.

What's incredible about Low is the second side. I think the second side of

Low is probably responsible for my sitting here.

It's certainly responsible for an enormous amount of people starting to

listen to experimental music.

I would say without the second side of the load, the vast rock audience, the

vast amount of people who are interested in rock music would never have heard

Steve Reich, Terry Riley or even some of this German electronica because it was

basically a portal, basically like a portal into all of this world.

And it was such a brave thing to do because it was basically extremely, it

had this coldness to it as well and this kind of, you know, aridness to it. And

it seemed to be devoid of something.

Some of it was a deathly sound, but it was fascinating because it was such a

brave thing to do.

Tony was going to produce, let's get this straight, and Eno was there

assisting and stuff.

If Eno wasn't there, I don't think Bowie would have been able to get away with

putting this on the second side. Because Eno was there, it changed the whole

dynamics of the thing.

And it certainly put him more in the same

frame as Kraftwerk and those bands.

He then seemed to be the one trumpeting this music worldwide.

And with the release of the second of Bowie's trilogy later in 1977,

the singer managed to capture the totally alien world of the divided

Berlin. While in the UK, punk music laid waste to the dominant rock scene that

had been becoming progressively overblown throughout the decade, with

heroes not only did Bowie raise the profiles of the musicians of Germany,

but also of lives outside of the typical Anglo-American experience.

And this, in turn, would influence a new generation of musicians.

Bowie went to Berlin to hide, but of course, that, that, German war,

that, you couldn't, you couldn't, a city divided

by a wall, I mean a city, not even a country. Actually, a city in the middle

of an entire country you couldn't even go to. This is what's so weird, it's

like an island.

And then only half of that you could walk around, the Kafustan Dam, etc.

So, I'm sure sitting in that flat, You know, going out to get the milk and just

being David Jones again, for David Bowie, was him being reborn.

And there, that city, that Berlin city, even though an island in the middle of

nowhere, surrounded by people who had nothing, you know, rebuilding their

lives, who can you relate to? Jump on a train, go to Dusseldorf, meet with

Kraftwerk, yeah? These guys were also not pop stars, not going anywhere, but

doing something brilliant.

And again, that creativity, Bowie, Kraftwerk, Iggy, Hansa by the Wall, the

environment.

I mean, heroes of the song, with Brian Eno's tapestry background,

with Carlos Alomar on that guitar.

I mean, that, that, that. And then to do it in German. Ich bin dein König, und

du, du Königin.

I think, just for one day, I mean, in that song, that song

became now, for me, exactly what we were, i.e., we could be

heroes for one night. We could dress up, get out of that grey, horrible, no

future, Thatcherite Britain, and we could...

be somebody. We could look good. We could sit in that cafe.

We could have a jeton.

We could listen to beautiful music and we could forget that really we've got to

sign on tomorrow.

We've got no job. We've got no future.

Bowie's gone.

Roxy has split up.

We've got no heroes.

The Sex Pistols have just said to everything, let's do it ourselves.

Let's make our own music.

Certainly the Edo Bowie thing was basically the green light for German

musicians to really go for it, and they did in 1977 with Trans Europe Express.

And it was with this album that Kraftwerk offered their creative input

into what would become a classic year in electronic music.

With a new concept and a still more technically accomplished sound, the

German four-piece continued to tread their own unique path through the 70s.

Yet this album was less anticipated than their last two records, simply because

of the commercial disappointment of radioactivity.

Of course, apparently, if you had a hit record, you need a follow-up.

And this is true, I agree to that, you need a follow-up which could be played

in the radio.

Unfortunately, the single of radioactivity wasn't a hit.

It wasn't a hit worldwide, it became a hit in France.

And that's why we play friends.

And I think that's where the idea of Trans-Europe Express came, really, from

that angle.

Of course, the first thing was the German identity.

And then pretty much aware of the European identity, which includes,

of course, all the other European nations. And this idea was really much

coming up at that time.

It's a very European theme again.

It's really something from the historical point where I thought, great,

they are really able to find things which are not connected to

Anglo-American or international or whatever and still...

It is in a way very campy.

The idea is like a film.

You start in Paris, you go in a train and you

end up in Düsseldorf.

I think that was the concept.

Someone who is traveling through Europe. Because at that time when Trans Europa

Express was released,

I think it was perfectly planned with Kraftwerk.

Everybody was discussing about the European Union.

Yeah, that was the new thing.

Well, Trans Europe Express has to be one of the greatest albums ever made.

I mean, it's certainly one of the most beautiful records.

I mean, it's so beautiful.

It has this concept about trains. But then if you look at the album cover, it

has four guys.

is the classic, er, Kraftwerk of Florian Schneider, Ralph Futter, and then Karl

Barthos and Wolfgang Fleur, who were doing percussion and other stuff in the

background. All dressed in suits, looking wistfully, in this kind of sepia

cover. And then the writing is in this kind of Art Deco script.

And then you took out the inner sleeve. And on the inner sleeve, which is

printed... is this photograph of them sitting around an outdoors dinner table

like you would see in most Hitler Youth films or whatever of them in Bavaria

having their tea.

And you realize that this is probably, this is a nostalgia for Germany that

could have been that never happened but now hopefully can happen again because

they're dressed in 1930s clothes.

But that's nothing compared to the music. You put on the music and there's

this really thick motor beat and then this...

The sounds of it, the whole record flows from beginning to end. It's not like

there's a few interesting tracks and then there's a lot of experiment.

There's no experiment on this. This is completely conceptual.

The whole thing flows through.

I was not involved in the concept.

The concept was done.

But I think all of this was written very fast.

I just remember during the night there was an engineer, Peter Bollig at that

time, and they went to a bridge and they listened actually

how a train would sound.

Actually, I think it's not right how a train sounds. A train sound, if you

listen to the rhythm, it has to do with the wheels

and with the track.

When two pieces of track are getting together and you have two wheels, what

you hear is the rhythm.

But this is a three-quarter.

But to come up with a danceable beat, you have to use four, four to the beat.

So that's why I think it's just a metaphorical beat.

It's not right, though.

But I think it's a damn good beat, actually.

on the Champs-Élysées, leave Paris in the morning with TEE.

France, Europe, express.

France, Europe, express.

France, Europe, express.

France, Europe, express.

The two things that are very interesting about that, I think that Trans Europe

Express really is the beginning of the electro-bop movement in the UK, I think,

because you can hear the same dunking and dishing kind of drumming, drum

machine sound on that that you hear down in the records of Depeche Mode, Gary

Newman, Soft Cell, and all of those kind of bands in the UK.

And the second thing about Tangier, which is wonderful, is that it was

recorded in three languages.

It was recorded in French and English and German.

So they were even recording, if they could have recorded a Japanese version,

they would. These guys are not just able to make records. They're able to speak

in different languages.

These guys are not. This is the new Germany. The new Germans are

international. They want the world to know. They want positive things. They

want to give positive feelings and not go back to the past.

The most bizarre thing about T.E., basically it had something futuristic

wrapped in something old.

It was the most bizarre record and still it stands out as being a classic record.

Definitely, I think, you know, for me, my favourite record.

Definitely my number one cover record.

There's a wonderful track about every person discovers themselves in the

looking glass and this Hall of Mirrors track.

Again, that harks back to the great stars of Hollywood, the Marlene Dietrich

and Rita Hayward. It harks back to the 1930s period.

Even the greatest stars Discover themselves

in the looking glass Even the greatest stars

Discover themselves in the looking glass

But it also reflects, it somehow is saying all the ways to

discover themselves in the looking glass, that also there's a slight

reference there to Bowie, to the fact that Bowie was so transfixed with his

image and would often be seen in films, particularly with the cracked actor, for

most of the film it's him looking at himself in the looking glass, changing

his image, doing his hair.

The artist is living in the mirror.

with the echoes of themselves.

Even the greatest stars Live their

life in the looking glass Even the greatest

stars Live their life in the looking glass

And of course, the absolute,

you know, the best thing on it is that we meet in the Champs Elysees and we get

the Trans-Siberian Express and maybe we'll meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie,

this whole idea, or meet Iggy Pop, which they did.

You know, now they're not only making conceptual records, but they're actually

referencing their sources and doing it so well that even the sources come to

meet them to congratulate them.

So, I mean, the album is a triumph.

I mean, it's one of the greatest records ever made.

It's so influential.

And outside of Kraftwerk, electronic music was beginning to flourish like

never before.

The rising stars of a more commercial form, Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre,

had already begun to break into the upper reaches of the charts with their

anodyne electronic soundscapes.

Yet it was with the arrival of Giorgio Moroder, an Italian producer working out

of Munich, but a new era of electronic music would begin.

On hearing his production work on the Donna Summer hit I Feel Love, Brian Eno

declared that this was the sound of the future.

The instruments were getting easier to play.

The instruments were getting smaller.

They were getting more versatile.

They were better.

Early synthesizers were huge.

The cumbersome it had to be.

They had to be programmed and everything with wires and patches and you need to

be a basic electronic engineer to work with them.

Now you were getting modular synthesizers with little keyboards and

all sorts of keyboard things.

Also you had other people working in dance music that were hearing Kraftwerk

and bands in Germany, the more like Neue and stuff.

I think that this rhythmic thing could be really used in dance music.

And George Moroder would have been influenced.

And of course it was in Germany that he recorded all the stuff with Donna

Summer. So of course, the I Feel Love and stuff, these things were... It was a

wonderful year for German music. It was great, 1977.

But Giorgio Moroder's influence, I think, is paramount in the whole concept

of turning, you know, what Kraftwerk were doing and taking it onto the dance

floor.

It's just this pounding sort of electronic beat that you've got hold of

and the way that it sort of finds rhythms within rhythms within that

electronic track and just keeps piling it on.

and then overlays it with Donna Summer's sort of vocal that make that

track work.

It's teaming the alien with the recognisable, you know,

a very beautiful woman singing a very erotic song over this really

extraordinary sort of robotic beat that's going on behind her.

and Kraftwerk themselves were fully aware of the flourishing world of disco.

At that time, we were going to the clubs frequently or

regularly. I wouldn't say we were doing like pop crawling or club crawling, but,

you know, we were working in the evening, and then late at night at 12,

1, or even 2 o'clock, we were going to the clubs, and we were listening to what

was going on there.

You had James Brown always in good clubs, like Sex Machine or Nature or

Papa Got a Brand New Bag, all these tracks, which we liked very much because

of the rhythm feel, of course. It was just a pictographical

rhythm, just moving on with this groove forever.

It was just what appealed to us very much.

Despite the band's interest in club music, Trans Europe Express did not

cross over into the mainstream and failed to chart in both the US and the

UK. For all their technical mastery, Kraftwerk was still searching for a

crossover hit to follow Autobahn.

It's interesting that Trans Europe Express doesn't seem to make an enormous

impact. Probably people very much had their eye on punk, new wave, and it was

just a little ahead of its time. Only a little, but just a little ahead of its

time at that point.

After we finished Trans Europe Express, we went to Paris.

We were going out at the Mega Disco at that time. I think it was the Palace

Club or Mega Disco.

Thousands of people.

And they put Trans Europe Express on.

And it wiped the dance floor completely.

It wiped it empty.

So again, Trans Europe Express at that time was a really flop.

It was a flop record.

Kraftwerk wouldn't have to wait long before their music was finally engaged

by a worldwide audience.

Electronic music had continued to develop through 1977, with the emergence

of numerous post-punk bands who embraced the synthesizer, and the release of

Throbbing Gristles' The Second Annual Report, the first notable industrial

album.

Bands such as New Yorker's Suicide and the British outfit Cabaret Voltaire were

developing similar sounds.

In 1978, the Yellow Magic Orchestra appeared with their self-titled debut.

A pioneering Japanese outfit interested, like Kraftwerk, in a synthesis of

electronics and pop music, they would prove a key influence for the movements

yet to come.

As a new electronic age was dawning, Kraftwerk returned to Kling Klang

Studios for their next record.

And having now kept their lineup constant for two albums, Schneider and

Hutter invited Carl Bartos to become a creative member of the unit.

In the beginning, Ralph and Florian, they had this feeling.

of being part, I think, being part of an

industry somehow, a cultural industry.

And we were, Wolfgang and me, we were hired,

called for some reason.

We became, we were studio musicians in the beginning, and later on...

When I started being a composer and author on Man Machine, for me at least,

it changed.

Working together in the studio and after two records really, I

was really invited to be part of the composer theme because it came easy.

I didn't have to prove anything.

I proved it before.

And so, unfortunately, I was growing up to this

easy pop music as well as on the classical background.

So it really came easy. And the first thing I really composed on Man Machine

was, I think it was a riff on Metropolis, really.

We were using at that time the sequencer, and Man Machine was the first

record on which we could link the drums with the sequencer. So I didn't play the

drums. It was played automatically by the drum machine.

We came up with this. It was a Russian idea, we thought. Somehow it had to do

with Metropolis, the movie.

But when we first started improvising the tracks, at that time we did a lot of

improvisations in the studio, we had this Russian feel.

I think it captures the feel quite nicely from that.

And then apparently robots, neon lights, and the model, yeah, really.

So I think it was done in six weeks. My machine was recorded in six weeks using

this fantastic new equipment.

And it worked like clockwork, actually.

Released in May 1978, The Man Machine presented a new group image and more

commercial content and was a breakthrough for the band.

With a controversial cover image referencing pre-war socialist and

constructivist art, the album condensed the trademark Kraftwerk sound into even

shorter tracks and the notion of the band as music machines spread into their

TV and live performances and photo shoots.

The album went on to sell over 200,000 copies in France.

and charted for 13 weeks in the UK, where it peaked at number nine.

Man Machine, to me, has a visually arresting Kraftwerk image, and it's the

height of Kraftwerk as provocateurs, posturing that kind of rouge lipstick

and those red shirts.

The whole thing is derived as sort of constructivist homage.

Synth pop is already beginning to sort of happen when that comes along. And

nothing could be calculated, you know, especially kind of American audience,

people who believe in the authenticity of the guitar, the sincerity of the open

-net sort of hairy-chested macho rock hero, you know, the Bruce Springsteen

type, whatever, the Bejeans type, all this kind of thing. I mean, it offends

on every level. I mean, you know, I think that's wonderful about that. Here

they were kind of more of a band.

They were an identical kind of unit.

In the same way that the Ohio-based Devo had dressed

themselves up in yellow outfits and came on as a kind of an army in a way,

Kraftwerk were a kind of more haute couture army.

It is a very good gimmick for that time to just say, well, we're a machine.

You know, Kraftwerk is a kind of man-machine, and this is what we do.

You just turn us on and we'll turn you on.

That is the basic simplicity of what they were trying to do at that time.

It's where crafters begin to detach themselves as human beings from the

concept. It's the beginning of the robotic era of crafters. But Man Machine

sold like 100,000 copies in the UK alone, charted and everything.

And it had this wonderful song called The Model, which kept on charting. I

think it got to number one in 1991.

I think Transylvania says then charted because of it. Then it was re-released

again. It was an ad. It kept going and going.

But by that stage, they were so consummate in their abilities to make

fantastic pop music out of what they were doing. And it was so honed and

precise and sheen.

It was almost like automatic music. They were just pumping this. They were

basically the new Beatles.

It only takes a camera to change her mind.

From that time on, more and more, we were pretty much aware we were working

on the structure of the song.

So I just remember me counting, counting the verse, and now here we have to have

a mid-eight, here we have to have a bridge, and it worked, fantastic.

And I just remember talking about structure and whistling.

We thought we missed a hit.

on model, because we haven't had a refrain.

There's no chorus.

So it's just a good structure, but there's no chorus summing it all up.

It's just a guy telling a story about how he

wants to pull a model.

We always were quite sure we missed the refrain, we missed the chorus.

But somehow it worked.

They'd retained the sounds that they had on Trans Europe Express, but they had

sharpened it as well and sort of made it more sort of

accessible in a way.

They'd figured out the way of compressing it in a

way, compacting it would be a better way to explain it, from a 12-inch... size

record into a 7 inch size record into a song that lasted not 20 minutes but

a song that lasted 3 minutes.

They'd managed to compact all that energy all that sort of newness all that

kind of strangeness as well.

There's a very strange still weird kind of feel about it. Again you see showroom

dummies and things like that in the window and that's the kind of you're not

talking about A model as such, walking up and down the catwalk, you're talking

more like a model in a shop window that's just about to have an expensive

fur coat draped over its shoulders, but it'll just stand there in the same

position. But it's kind of alien but beautiful in a way.

Yet despite its phenomenal success, Man Machine divided some of its listeners,

although it was pivotal in bringing Kraftwerk to a larger audience.

The more commercial elements were off-putting to many of their earlier

fans, while some critics felt that the conceptual rigour that had been applied

to Autobahn, Radioactivity and Trans Europe Express had here been diluted

somehow. It is the classical pop album done by Kraftwerk. And of course

it's not everybody's taste.

A lot of fans, I think, never really felt that Kraftwerk is

a pop group.

Felt a bit disappointed. Yeah, I thought they sold out Yeah, nice cover. Yeah

interesting image a little bit Russia a little bit. Yeah Communism a little

bit of this and a little bit of that and a little bit of Roberts and a little bit

of Schaufenster Puppen and models and It's a it's just a pop-up

I don't think it works as well as Trans Europe Express.

Conceptually, I think Man Machine is more a collection of great songs.

Man Machine, I think, is probably in terms of a pop record, a better

collection of songs because the songs like The Model and some of that are

extremely well put together. They're almost like a Beatles song or a Burt

Bacharach song. It's fantastic.

The other side of it is that, you know, as a concept, the man-machine does not

hold together.

It's not, from beginning to end, a perfect conceptual record where, you

know, a transhuman process conjured up in the 1930s, travelling, say, on the

Orient Express.

Meeting kind of film stars like Marlene Dietrich on the train, people in

wonderful private carriages with mirrors and stuff, looking out at the

countryside, going from one side of Europe to the other. Yeah, from

beginning to end, it was a complete journey.

Where Demand Machine, no, Demand Machine, it has a concept, but it's a

looser one.

Yet the album was key to the dawning of a new electronic era.

In the UK, a new generation of musicians obsessed with the sounds of Berlin-era

Bowie and Kraftwerk emerged, and in 1979, the seeds of the synth-pop era

were sown by a young DJ called Rusty Egan, who recognised the dance floor

potential of this music.

I would think Autobahn was probably my first introduction to electronic music.

My interest was the length, the fact that it was like...

15 minutes long and it kept stopping and starting.

I mean, what is it? It's got nothing on it. It's just the road.

It just goes on and on and on.

So to create that beautiful... To

create that monotonism, in a way

they call it trance today.

And for me to then say, well, how can I...

Play that in a bar, you know.

The bar in question was London's Blitz Club, where Egan's electronic nights

flurried. A new culture was emerging, and as Bowie released his Scary Monsters

album with its more commercial electronic sound, young acts making

prominent use of the synthesizer sprung up across the country.

And the hub of this activity was The Blip, where this new music was played

alongside Kraftwerk and their fellow electronic pioneers.

As the DJ in the club and playing records

not made for DJs, don't forget these people, Kraftwerk, Klaus Schulz,

however, were making their music unbeknownst that there was a...

bar or club somewhere that was going to play. They weren't making music to be

played in bars and clubs.

They were making their music.

Craft work were being, you know, dimension machines.

They were being robots.

Nobody was saying, hey, this is going to be the new electronic dance music.

Nobody said anything like that.

So they were just making their music.

And, you know, simple minds in Scotland were making life in a day. Talk, talk.

You know, they were making great music.

Lots of people were making great music using synthesizers. And you've got Soft

Cell in Leeds, and you've got Depeche Mode in Essex.

Everyone can get hold of a synthesizer.

What they were actually doing with it, some people were trying to make a beat.

And if you'd made it with a beat, I found it.

We were pretty much aware what was going on in England.

Apparently it was these new electro groups coming up.

And I especially, I was pretty much aware of the fact that the groups coming

from England, all of them, they brought something new into this electronic

sound, which wasn't there before. They brought their heritage.

They brought back the Beatles and they brought back...

All this English pop music, but now they weren't using guitars, they were using

sequencers. And I thought, OK, that's fair enough. They bring something

into it again.

Alongside the Human League, Ultravox and Depeche Mode, a more abrasive set of

groups appeared who had emerged from the punk scene and were using synthesizers

within a punk aesthetic.

Like their more commercial counterparts.

Bands on newly formed independent labels such as Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division

and Soft Cell were all equally influenced by Kraftwerk. Those kind of

groups like Joy Division, like the Druity Column, like a lot of factory

bands, or bands on Mute, or what we call Gang of Four, those kind of bands,

Cabaret Voltaire, all of those bands in the UK.

those what we call left-field NME bands at the time, they would have had every

Kraftwerk record in their collection.

Certainly. They're the kind of people who would really, who often cited

Kraftwerk, who would be a massive fan, particularly Cammie Voltaire.

Really obsessed with Kraftwerk.

When I was in Leeds, the punk thing was still big and happening.

And it was like, okay,

so you can play three chords on a guitar.

Well, what I thought, hang on, I could play one note on a synth.

And so it was kind of like a progression.

It was just like a zeitgeist, really. You know, there was like the Human

League and there was...

There was Cabri Voltaire and stuff. And there was us.

And we were just like, our initial songs, we were writing them in this

little crummy little studio in art college about sort of Tupperware parties

and just rubbish and shit biscuits.

And just basically about the state of society, which I think is still relevant

today, quite honestly.

And it was that kind of, you know, it was just like, that was like electronic

punk. I think that's what we were doing. We weren't trying to be pop stars. We

weren't being Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran.

I mean, I saw some Duran Duran recent stuff and they're trying to be

Kraftwerk. I mean, you know, God bless them, you know, but they're not

Kraftwerk. But I mean, we were punks, basically.

We were just punks with synths.

When I was a kid, I was probably about 13 and...

I heard stupid records on the radio, because I loved the radio, Radio 1 at

the time. Things like Popcorn by Hot Butter, which is a really silly record.

Beep, beep, beep, boop, beep, beep, boop. And the other one was Son of My

Father by Chicory Tip, which I later discovered was written by Giorgio

Moroder. I was just kind of, what's that new sound?

When I heard Autobahn, I thought, I want that sound. But then I was listening to

kind of soul music.

So to me it was like a sort of like, Kraftwerk, Northern Soul, you know,

bang. And that's really how Tainted Love happened.

And obviously working with Mark Harmon, who's such a passionate singer,

brilliant lyricist and passionate singer.

And I was into synthesizers, and that's what brought it about, really.

But where certain bands like Soft Cell were taking the sounds pioneered by

Kraftwerk and moving into new areas, others were more obvious in their

approach. With his trilogy of records beginning with 1979's Replicas, Gary

Newman not only showed that he was influenced by the sound of Kraftwerk,

but also mimicked their man-machine image.

I thought it was fair enough if they bring their Liverpool and London

heritage into synthesizer music.

like the Human League did, Don't You Want Me Baby.

This is great, and this is perfect, because it's a combination.

They used, apparently, the synthesizer sound, which we didn't come up with,

actually. Somebody else did.

We only put something together, probably, and we invented a

statement.

And I thought, at that time, I thought, oh, still, I think it's fair enough if

they bring together, if they make a collage of synthesizer, sound,

electronic drums, and their

English pop music. It works fine, and it's cool.

But if you start wearing red shirts and black ties,

look grim in the camera and make photos like this. It's just a parody.

Gary Newman was a rock star, no matter how he wished to

cast himself.

And every time he came on and did Cars or something, you weren't thinking, wow,

Cars. You were thinking Gary Newman.

Whereas when Kraftwerk came on and did The Model, you thought The Model,

because you had nothing to really identify with that song. With Gary

Newman, you knew there was this...

rather portly bloke with makeup on, sort of making funny sweeping gestures and

singing about cars in a sort of ballardian kind of way, you know what I

mean? But with Kraftwerk, who knows what they were really like? You know, they

were robots.

In a way, they, well, definitely, they were the precursor to

the dance.

music scene from Acid House where the stars there were a DJ who you

couldn't really identify either. It was a man who put records on and mixed

records and manipulated sounds to create a sound that was the

whole thing. That was what you were interested in. You were interested in

being taken over by the sound as opposed to gawping at the individual making

the sound.

And I think that's what they pioneered, really.

And it was into this musical world that they had so clearly influenced that

Kraftwerk released the follow-up to Man Machine.

Issued in May 1981,

Computer World was a return to the band's more coherent conceptual

approach, and the album made the UK top 20 and remained on the charts for 22

weeks. In December, a double A-side release of the album's title track and

the model took Kraftwerk to number one in the UK singles charts.

And it was clear that the times had finally caught up with the band.

With The Man Machine, I felt that for the first time, they seemed to be just

slightly behind the times of anything. But with Computer World, they're back at

the forefront, they're back at the vanguard.

And one of the biographers for Kraftwerk has written that if IBM in 1981

had embraced computers...

in the way that Kraftwerk did thematically on that album they'd have

been in a much healthier situation ten years down the line because they didn't

Kraftwerk are absolutely spot on on that album not just about something that's

just beginning to come in but about the fact that anticipating the sort of you

know the the the the digital swarm of the kind of 21st century that you sort

of see you know you know which which is the sound of that album you know that

kind of very point to a specific point particularly like numbers um they really

are they're looking a long way down the line

i'm the

operator of my pocket calculator

I'm the operator with my pocket calculator.

There's something else going on with computer world that I think is again

coming back to this this provocation this teasing of um ross kind of self

-image and pretensions um and it's that they use the pocket calculators and the

idea that music can just be made on pocket calculators they constantly use

the word little and rather just constantly using the word listening so

machines is just little i think that especially men and the synthesizers

quite often slightly a great bounce of synthesizers and playing two at a time

you know the bigness of it has some sort of like phallic significance um a lot of

the time you know you can just make the same things which is different you know

constantly teasing using the word little all the time and then the kind of like

the clients of the show where they come out and they just like you know that

didn't you know you could have made music like that but nobody wanted to no

because nobody that's you know people you know well you know when crap would

like to strike a pose but they're making poses with a point The fact is that

especially sort of male sound makers didn't really feel comfortable playing

something that little.

I'm controlling and composing by

pressing down a special key to play a little melody.

By pressing down a special key to play a little melody.

Kraftwerk really kind of were looking into a long future here where they were

looking at the embryonic beginnings, the embryonic beginnings of home computers

were starting off in the early 1980s.

Still quite expensive, available to the few, not the many, but Kraftwerk were

clever enough to be able to see that the future would be computers.

And the future would dominate for a very long time. And they made an album, a

concept album around it.

But as many people say, it's their last great concept album. They had Tour de

France and stuff, but it's not as strong a concept as Computer World.

We get into that era of craft work where they really don't want any more to be

seen by anybody.

Where they have mannequins and robots.

The records would come out, but that was it. And there was not really a feeling.

People were wondering, is anybody there anymore?

But I mean, they still got enormous respect from the media and enormous

respect from the public, the album chart.

But at this stage, it's fair to say that there were so many other groups making

good, good and great electronic music around them that the future had at last

caught up with them. They weren't any more ahead of their time in terms of

their sound.

They were just part of a general, I wouldn't say morass, but a general...

group of people who were making music with electronic instruments.

And as Kraftwerk receded from the public eye, electronic music continued to

evolve.

Their influence was not only heard through the samples used on Afrika

Bambaataa's landmark Planet Rock record, but even in the music of singer

-songwriter Neil Young, who openly confessed his debt to them on his 1982

album Trans.

And as the 80s progressed, new forms of electronic music continued to emerge,

such as house and techno, which also clearly owed a debt to the pioneering

work of the German four-piece.

Yet Kraftwerk themselves were mysteriously absent from this electronic

revolution, with only one more album released before the close of the decade.

When they were a lone force, they thrived, but once part of a larger

musical landscape, Kraftwerk drifted away from the limelight.

synthy pop, new electronic pop, new romantic, and so on.

That, I think, well, it referred aesthetically to Catholic, but that was

very much about individual people, and in a way, it was not

really competing with them. Early electronic hip-hop was much more.

Those, they're the ideas of...

being robots not being authors but being there having work on a pseudonym this

was this was really a competition uh and and they didn't have an answer for that

uh because that was uh now it was no longer for for people in in some uh

düsseldorf uh studio who were uh always pretending to thinking seriously about

every beat, but now it was an entire movement in the US, and it was

anonymous, it was mechanical, it was about death of the author, if you wish.

The connection from this electric boogie, electric hip-hop, to

early house, to early Detroit and Chicago.

They were very big in that. They were always mentioned honorably there. But

that was, of course, such a big thing that they could not respond to

it any other way than becoming the senior, the elder statesman. That's the

only possible role that was there for them after that. And they haven't done

anything else but that.

And as elder statesmen, the group still remained reclusive and detached from

popular music.

In the new millennium, their musical activities have notably increased, their

infrequent live shows continuing to draw huge audiences, and their 2003 album

Tour de France soundtrack receiving warm reviews.

Yet as pioneers of electronic music, their time has perhaps passed, and the

baton has been handed to a whole slew of significant acts who would not exist if

it weren't for the revolutionary music of Kraftwerk.

Conceptually, maybe they had what they have ideas.

Maybe this is possible.

It's very hard to know.

They had done, remember they were making a record a year from the 1970s, or 1959,

so this is the 1970s, 71, 72, 73, 74.

There's always a new record coming out.

And you know, that's the kind of work, right? And there's so many brilliant

records, you can't keep it up. It's not possible. Nobody has kept it up, even

the Beatles.

So, I mean, you know, I know at the end of the day, crapper are human beings

making music and you have to admit that they are human and they actually did

show human failings as well.

But what a legacy to leave behind you, you know.