Wired For Sound

From their origins in the art student bohemia of Dusseldorf nearly 40 years ago to their iconic status today as pioneers of Techno, Kraftwerk have never compromised their singular aesthetic. An interview with Ralf Hütter

On the week of 10th May, 1975, a single entered the UK charts by the German electronic music ensemble, Kraftwerk. It was ‘Autobahn’; its B side was ‘Kometenmelodie 1’ (Comet Melody 1). Released in Britain on the old Vertigo label the song was as infectiously melodic as it was conceptually perplexing. During a month when the UK singles chart was dominated by Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’, and the excruciating ‘Oh Boy’, by Mud, what were British audiences to make of a record titled after motorways by a group whose name translated as ‘Power Plant’? Musically, ‘Autobahn’ sounded as though the sublime harmonizing of The Beach Boys had been re-routed via the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop – a comparison that was immediately clinched by the phonetic similarity between the Beach Boys’ iconic hook line, ‘fun, fun, fun’, and ‘Autobahn’s’ electronically carolled observation, ‘wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n auf der autobahn’ (‘we’re driving, driving, driving on the motorway’).

Regarded in part as a novelty record – it was compared to the relentlessly perky hit ‘Popcorn’ by Hot Butter – ‘Autobahn’ nonetheless became a Top 20 hit in Britain and the US. The track has a vivid, utterly distinctive and instantly engaging momentum; the electronic rhythm is thrillingly assured and filled with the rolling romance of the road. And then there is its European coolness – a quality both aloof and charming, but given a further edge by a pleasing tingle of faintly sinister, robotic ultra-modernity. The album version of the song, fans discovered, ran to just under 23 minutes.

By the time they made their first tour outside of Germany in 1975, Kraftwerk’s appearance compounded their originality: the quartet appeared neat, be-suited and bourgeois. During an era of dope, denim, glitter and shoulder-length hair, they looked like a quartet of university librarians who had got together to form an academic cabaret act. With their impassive expressions and lounge suits the group’s demeanour made a statement of resolute social conformity and intent conservatism – but within pop and rock music where precisely the reverse was expected, their conservatism was transformed into a radical gesture.

And there you had it. When, in his ‘Kraftwerkfeature’ for Creem magazine, published in September 1975, the rock journalist Lester Bangs described ‘Autobahn’ as ‘more than just a record – it is an indictment!’ declaring Kraftwerk had recorded one of the most radical songs in western popular music since Elvis Presley recorded ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ for RCA in 1956. For just as Elvis had turned rock and roll music inside out to create a three-minute soundtrack for white teenage alienation – ‘a psychodrama’, as Albert Goldman would later describe it – so Kraftwerk had recorded a near-perfect, genre-defining, culturally iconic pop song by reversing every technical, emotional, thematic and stylistic quality that pop and rock as a form, up until that point, had been seen to comprise: the less they moved, the more they swung.

Since then, Kraftwerk has become recognized as one of the most influential and iconic groups within the canon of modern music. Now resembling both a venerable institution and a secret facility for advanced research (every aspect of the group’s creative activities is kept strictly off-limits to outsiders – even to their record company) Kraftwerk have also maintained their reputation for timeless modernity – their releases and live performances are beyond the reach of mere fashion. Tour de France Soundtracks (2003) was followed by a sold-out world tour, which was recorded and documented on the Grammy nominated DVD and live CD, Minimum-Maximum.

Referenced by stadium-filling acts from Kylie Minogue to U2, repeatedly cited as the inventors of techno and the godfathers of electroclash, and with their music sampled across a thousand DJ-release dance tracks, Kraftwerk have never compromised either their singular aesthetic or apparent secrecy. Their professional existence and meticulous control of their product is closer to that of a senior visual artist than a musical group. They also rarely grant interviews: all that is currently known about Kraftwerk is that electronic sound engineers Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz have cooperated for more than 20 years with the group’s founders, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider in their recording activities and live performances.

Meeting Hütter at the offices of Parlophone Records in west London – an interview with frieze having been proposed by one of his oldest friends, who is now a gallery owner – I was courteously greeted by a man who is neither formal nor casual, confiding or secretive. ‘We had been touring continuously, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, from university to university, from art gallery to art gallery’ he recounts, referring to his initial musical collaborations with Schneider, and their eventual discovery of their mature artistic signature; ‘we would rest sometimes at the houses of friends, and then travel home during the night, say from Frankfurt to Dusseldorf, on the autobahn. Then one day the ultimate formula occurred to us, like Einstein’s e= mc2: Autobahn!’ Immediately we knew the whole work. It took some months of pre-recording and rehearsing in the studio. Then we engaged the engineer Connie Plank to bring in his equipment, and the two of us recorded all the tracks. With our friend, the painter Emil Schult, we wrote the lyrics and made the artwork. We were fantasizing that maybe one day the track would come on the car radio, because in Germany this sort of music was not played on the radio at all. And so later in the track you hear our song coming out of the car radio! A friend asked why it didn’t continue on the second side of the record, because it could go on forever: it’s the ultimate road music, perhaps.’

‘Autobahn’ was the track which brought into crystalline harmony the ideas that Hütter and Schneider had been exploring for nearly seven years, and across three earlier albums: Kraftwerk (1970), Kraftwerk 2 (1971) and Ralf and Florian (1973). As such, particularly in its album version, it was a total work – a Gesamtkunstwerk – its concept, vision, composition, styling, artwork, instrumentation and lyric all combining to create and intensify not just the musical presence of the song, but what the track expressed as a statement about art making in the modern world. In this sense, Kraftwerk, after ‘Autobahn’, became Germany’s Andy Warhol: artists dedicated to expressing the quotidian landscape of a Mass Cultural age, and doing so in a manner which was itself a further expression of mass cultural technology. 

Michael Bracewell