Uwe Schütte - Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany

Uwe Schtte is a Reader in German at Aston University, Birmingham, where he teaches and researches contemporary Austrian and German literature, the writer W. G. Sebald and German popular music.

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First published 2020

Copyright Uwe Schtte, 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover photograph: EMS Synthi AKS Richard Lawson www.rlmusic.co.uk
Cover design by Jim Stoddart

ISBN: 978-0-241-32055-6

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This general introduction to the astounding phenomenon that is Kraftwerk is the result of four pivotal moments in my life. It all began the first time I heard Autobahn on the radio. I was probably eight or nine years old at the time, and the song could not fail to make an impression on me, a German boy always dreading my parents taking me for a drive on the motorway I suffered from severe car sickness, and of course you are not allowed to stop when driving on the Autobahn.

The unusual German band name also stuck. Meaning power station in English, Kraftwerk was an unusual choice of name for a pop band, Also, the lyrics were in German. Pop music inevitably meant English lyrics, which I could not understand, save for the few obvious key words. Pop bands always came from Britain or the US: Elvis, The Beatles, Buddy Holly and a few others were the musical heroes of my childhood and early-teen years. Though the small provincial town in which I grew up was only just over a hundred kilometres from Dsseldorf, where Kraftwerk were working in their Kling Klang studio, my next brush with their music came about four years later.

By then, we had moved into a village in rural Bavaria. Unhappy and an outsider among the village youth, I holed up in my room, busying myself with collecting stamps, reading and listening to music. My first record player was a gift from a kind neighbour who passed it on when she got a new one. I must have been about twelve years old then. Now I needed records of my own to play on my pretty, though modest, portable player.

I bought a copy of Deep Purples In Rock and Kraftwerks Radio-Aktivitt (Radio-Activity) from a schoolfriend. I loved both. The latter featured some pretty odd cover artwork: it looked like an outdated Nazi radio set. Because it was an outdated Nazi radio set. How weird! Pop music on an album whose artwork imitated one of Hitlers instruments of propaganda. But then, Kraftwerks music was neither pop nor rock that much I understood. The album sounded more like a radio play, an odd transmission from a future past, containing some pop tunes and lots of strange noises and sounds. It was odd, too, in that it praised nuclear energy, which many people in Germany strongly opposed at the time.

I listened to Radio-Aktivitt for many years and never grew tired of it. When and where my vinyl copy disappeared out of my life I cant recall. I probably sold it at the point when CDs became all the rage. For several years, I didnt bother with Kraftwerk, and this was the period in which they released one groundbreaking album after another. Needless to say, I deeply regret my stupidity in flogging my copy of Radio-Aktivitt. Whenever I come across the album now in a second-hand-record shop, I check the inner sleeve to see if it has my name on it, in my immature handwriting from some forty years ago.

My next meaningful encounter with Kraftwerk happened about a decade later. I was a university student in the late eighties and at some point I saw a scruffy poster in a Munich second-hand-record shop. It looked strangely familiar, like a cheap reprint of a coloured photograph from sometime around the thirties, and showed four men wearing neat suits and sitting at a table underneath a tree. A very German image. Despite its nostalgic look, I recognized the group of men they were the members of Kraftwerk.

The peculiar juxtaposition of a retro photograph and futurist, avant-garde electronic music immediately made an impression on me. At the time, I had been listening to all sorts of music neo-classical New Music, jazz on the avant-gardist ECM label, US punk and English indie rock but not Kraftwerk. Seeing this image on the poster rekindled my interest, and I had also read several times about Kraftwerks considerable influence on the British and American electronic music I was listening to at the time.

Whats more, I felt that the incongruous poster expressed something deeply complex about my country and the difficulties I and my friends had with being German: a strange feeling of not being part of the countrys history and its national identity, which was overshadowed so harrowingly by the crimes of the Holocaust and the horrors of the Second World War. Yet there was also a comforting sense of belonging to a nave, childhood version of the country an innocent, prosperous, positive Germany, as it were. A socially just Germany that allowed my refugee mum and working-class dad to work their way up the social ladder to enjoy the materialistic comforts of the middle class and enabled me to have a good education. The enervation triggered by the poster led me to hunt for more Kraftwerk in the shop. And I was lucky, digging out a cassette of their then most recent album, Electric Cafe, from 1986.

Fast-forward two decades. The final turning point in my relationship with Kraftwerk came in London on 20 March 2004 the night they played the Brixton Academy. By then, I was a university lecturer. As I had never seen Kraftwerk live before, or even listened to a bootleg tape of one of their concerts, I was very much looking forward to finally being able to see them. Ticket sales started online just when I was scheduled to teach a class on German history to first-year undergraduate students. Needless to say, I was a little late. Fortunately, it took me only five minutes to get hold of two tickets.

On the evening of the concert, my partner didnt feel too well, but she decided to come along anyway. I vividly remember my heart pounding in anticipation. At precisely 8 p.m. the lights went out and a robotic voice announced the band in German; I hadnt been so excited about seeing a concert since my teenage years and had forgotten how physically energized you could get about going to a live performance.

Even though I had no clue what to expect, the show lived up to my expectations, which were considerable the songs were immediately recognizable but sounded very contemporary and up to date; the visuals were fascinating to watch, interacting with the music in various ways; finally, the pristine electronic sound just blew me away. I had never heard anything like it before. Oh, and I should also mention that my girlfriend now my wife experienced a miraculous recovery during the concert. Maybe it was the power of the music.