All language subtitles for Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution

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.