Just Finished Reading: Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany by Uwe Schutte (FP: 2020) [286pp] 

Reading about Music isn’t something I usually do. Music, in my mind, is for listening and I’ve never really been that interested in the people who made it, produced it or distributed it – nor those who write about it. But I say this chunky little boy sitting there in my fave Indie bookshop on a recent visit and I thought it was worth a ‘punt’ as something different to read about. 

I think my first exposure to the German electronic ‘rock’ band was hearing parts of and then buying ‘Man Machine’ in 1978. As far as I can remember I had already been ‘exposed’ to electronic music in the guise of Tomita’s 1974 album ‘Snowflakes are Dancing’ (which incidentally made me a life-long lover of Debussy) and some of Vangelis's earlier works such as ‘Albedo 0.39’ (1976) and ‘Beaubourg’ (1978), so I don’t think I was a complete ‘noob’ on the subject. Even so, I instantly LOVED Kraftwerk’s industrial electronic sound and have loved them ever since. I remember buying their later album ‘Computer World’ (1981) (everything on cassette in those days) and then backtracked to listen to some of their earlier stuff such as ‘Autobahn’ (1974) and ‘Trans-Europe Express’ (1977). Of course, what I didn’t know anything about – at the time – was where the band had emerged from and why they produced the sounds that they did. It’s an interesting story! 

Growing up in Dusseldorf in the post-war, Cold War era surrounded by American Rock music the two core band members Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider founded Kraftwerk (meaning power station or powerplant) in 1970 as both a reaction to the era they had grown up in, the Nazi past that no one wanted to talk about and a desire to produced authentic German music from their heavily industrialised region. Strangely their earliest music seemed to have little appeal locally but was growing in popularity in the UK and especially France. An American tour following the release of ‘Autobahn’, where the album reached No 5 in the Billboard charts, made them a world phenomenon. The rest as they say is history! Kraftwerk’s output had a HUGE influence on the infancy of electronic music not only across Europe but also in the US (the band were surprised at how much of their music influenced not only electro-pop but also Hip-hop and much else besides in Black Music) and the Far East. 

Not having read much (if anything) like this before I wasn’t really sure what to expect. What I found was very often fascinating and it both made me appreciate the music more and, inevitably, buy ALL their albums again on CD – which I’ll do at some point when I get a new CD player/system. It’s also interested me in reading more music related books of which I already had a few in a small stack awaiting their turn. This is definitely a worthy read for anyone interested in or a fan of Kraftwerk or the origins and influences of electronic music on the rest of the world. Recommended.  

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