Kraftwerk Talks to Caroline Coon

Ritz, November 1977

KRAFTWERK:

RALF HÜTTER (composer, vocalist, electronics)
FLORIAN “V2” SCHNEIDER (lyricist, vocalist, electronics)
KARL BARTOS and WOLFGANG FLÜR (electronic percussion)

“V2 SCHNEIDER, V2 SCHNEIDER” echoes DAVID BOWIE across the first track on the second side of “HEROES”. David has called KRAFTWERK his “favourite and most inspirational group.” In Germany he sings the title track of the album in German – “Helden – Helden fur einen Tag.”

BRIAN ENO: “Whereas most musicians stop when they can add nothing more, KRAFTWERK appear to stop when nothing more can be taken away.”

Chris Spedding is a fan too.

DONNA SUMMER and her ace hit producer GIORGIO MORODER are known for creating the “Munich Disco Sound”. In fact, when “I LOVE YOU” was first released, fans thought it was KRAFTWERK’S new single. Today DONNA and GIORGIO acknowledge RALF and FLORIAN, who record in Düsseldorf, as major influences.

KRAFTWERK’S music is like hearing the promise of a utopian future now. RALF and FLORIAN, visualising minute technological details of the coming space age, create with enchanting electronic sounds, a majestic yet modest audio movie of an ideal urban environment. Their music is gentle but tough, rhythmic, dreamy and real. Which is a little surprising considering the kind of society in which they live and work.

West Germany is the most advanced technological bureaucracy in the world. And probably the most inhumane. Artists sketching blue-prints of the future usually come up with grim prognoses. RALF and FLORIAN don’t. They work outside and against popular belief systems. And they are especially suspicious of the system which creates and ultimately emasculates rock ‘n’ roll stars. They want to break through the hierarchy which spells death to ideas. Their music is essentially about human relationships and their whole approach is personal. Which is why they don’t have a manager.

When I arrive in Düsseldorf, even though BE 632 is two hours late, RALF and FLORIAN are at the airport to meet me. Ralf says, ‘how do you do’ first. He doesn’t klick his heels. His English is fluent. FLORIAN leads the way to his 50’s Mercedes – a show piece, built like a tank and upholstered in oyster grey fit for the boudoir of a President’s wife. He plays the ISLEY BROTHERS on the car stereo. Until he starts giggling he gives the impression of being very forbidding and stern. Together, RALF and FLORIAN tone into each other making it difficult to imagine them apart. Like a perfect symbiotic relationship, their union seems vital.

They both love cream cakes. So, naturally, we first stop at one of their favourite haunts – Düsseldorf’s confiserie, the CAFE STOCKHEIM. Here, bourgeois matrons, their feet on sound absorbing mushroom coloured carpeting, munch the most delicious patisserie in Europe.

RALF orders an eclair. His coffee comes piled high with whipped cream. FLORIAN, who is very skinny, orders three. He winks at the French waitress.

Don’t they find it difficult I ask RALF (since FLORIAN has his mouth full), without a manager?

Especially when it comes to asking for money?

“Not at all,” says RALF, whose black leather gloves are placed neatly by the side of his plate. “Asking for money isn’t difficult. Getting it is the problem. Sometimes we ask for it before a performance and we go on stage with the money bulging out of our pockets.”

CC: Are you wealthy?

RH: That depends. Wealth is relative. We started with a tape recorder, a second-hand Farfisa organ and some old German amplifiers in ‘68. And now we have our own recording studio and we’re independent…

CC: Your lifestyle doesn’t seem to be indulgent or flamboyant.

RH: No. The money we make we plough back into our studio to make it better. And also, we come from bourgeois families. Our families have a house, a garden, two cars and we’re educated in a certain way towards money. There’s no reason to flip-out about being rich.

FS: We can sit here and eat cakes or we can go to a disco. We’re really no class now. We’re fluxus.

RH: Money isn’t that important to us. I assume that everyone who plays music does so because they love it. The first time you get compensated with money, however much it might be – ten or a thousand marks, it’s really fantastic. Normally, where work is concerned, money is to pay off your hurt. We’re being paid for doing something we love.

CC: Many rock ‘n’ rollers say they join bands not for the music but for the money, fame and the girls.

RH: But is that really true? And do they get the girls?

CC: You should know! And I believe so. Eighteen months ago RAT SCABIES confessed to me that he’d never made love to a girl he really liked. Since joining the DAMNED he seems to be having a better time…

RH: But I don’t think a rock star could get any woman he wanted.

CC: If he had the confidence I think he could.

RH: You could have many, depending on your physical condition but…

FS: Put it another way. An actress like BRIGITTE BARDOT – she couldn’t have anybody she wanted. At a certain point, star status has the opposite effect.

CC: BRIGITTE BARDOT is a bad example. Surely she is the epitome of the woman who COULD have anyone she wanted – from beautiful twenty year olds, to movie producers and German industrial millionaires…

RH: No. She cannot have every man. (A long pensive pause.) She didn’t have us so far!

CC: So that’s your criteria. Now we know…

RH: When we first went into rock ‘n’ roll we couldn’t have girls at all. The girls we could have before were from our own social background. But the minute we went into music for real they were put under pressure from their parents not to see us.

CC: Why?

RH: In Germany, it’s a throwback from the middle ages when musicians were nomads. They didn’t have guilds. They were made to live, literally, outside the walls of the city. And subconsciously, I think that’s still how people think of musicians today.

CC: Does that explain why there’s no rock ‘n’ roll culture in Germany?

RH: Indirectly, perhaps. But more important is the fact that rock music is a cultural import here – like chopsticks or spaghetti. It was brought to Germany as a result of the war being won by the Allies and Germany was transformed into a U.S.A. colony.

In some respects, culturally speaking, we are like strangers in our own land. A majority of people still don’t realise they’re living in a cut off situation. Before the war the intelligentsia and modern German culture was wiped out by the Nazi system. Artists, musicians, film makers, they all, practically the whole new German culture, emigrated. O.K. There were some people left. But they did their thing in the context of the Nazi system. And that was bombed out after the war. American music and culture replaced it.

Still, the majority of Germans don’t understand that. Our generation, the Bundesrepublik Generation, who were born immediately after the war, has no identity. Most people live with ABBA or MOZART. Musically speaking they are in a vacuum. Just nowhere.

Which is where KRAFTWERK come in. We were one of the first bands to have a German name. And our lyrics are in German.

In the late sixties we tried to find out where we stood culturally. We tried to find out what our culture was and WHERE it was. First of all we felt torn apart from everything. We were standing nowhere. And then we realised that we may be standing nowhere, but at least we were standing. Today. Or tomorrow. And we started to build. We forged an identity for ourselves.

CC: You seem proud to be establishing a new German culture.

RH: Not nationalistically. It’s not so much pride in modern GERMAN culture as belief in OUR Kulture Klima. It’s where and what we’re breathing.

FLORIAN dabs icing sugar off his lips with a serviette. It’s time to see the renowned but mysterious KLING KLANG STUDIO from whence, over the last five years, the KRAFTWERK sound has emerged. I was prepared for a vast aircraft hangar deep in the country. In reality, the studio is little bigger than a decent size garage right in the heart of the city. Synthesisers, sequencers, electric pianos, rhythm machines and banks of amplifiers and speakers are stacked from floor to ceiling. The atmosphere is peaceful but alive with coiled wires and eerie lights. The machines are plugged in but resting.

CC: KRAFTWERK means power-station – power factory?

RH: Yes. We work on the factory floor. We don’t want to distance ourselves from our machines. We don’t work in isolation, sitting on a mountain top waiting for inspiration to descend upon us. We work every day. We’re like scientists, laboratory workers plugging into the electronic system and transforming it into music. We feel more like experimenters than effete artists. That’s our attitude and there’s something very Germanic about it. You know, all those mad scientists from Frankenstein to Dr. Faust! Their ultimate objective was to create man. We’ve found an identity through music. We’ve kind of created ourselves.

CC: Ummm. Those mad doctors were always trying to create Superman…

RH: The Übermench? Yes. The KRAFTWERK Übermench. Maybe…

CC: And yet you don’t seem to be using the media to make KRAFTWERK world famous or yourselves super stars.

RH: No. We want to communicate and come across as clearly as possible. The media however, has a tendency to come between a musician and his music. It uses people and destroys them for the purpose of making profit. The media exploits you until it’s had enough. Then you’re thrown away and someone else is picked on. It’s vampirism. Media can kill you and we don’t want that to happen to us.

FS: We like walking about not being recognised. We don’t want to be smothered in bodyguards. We don’t want to lose contact with ordinary life – which is important on a personal as well as an inspirational level.

RH: And, being German we’re certainly very aware of what Dr. Goebbels did with the media. His films and propaganda were Germany’s Hollywood. His system is still deeply rooted in German society.

CC: It’s difficult sometimes to remember how evil Nazism was because, with all the flags and rallies, it looks so fantastic.

RH: Yes. It was total art. Apart from the input and the philosophy. Dr. Goebbels’ side of it was perfection of the media system. There is something in Germany which calls for perfection. It isn’t an easy country. You can’t just sail along. And that’s reflected in our music. We really want perfection in what we do. And to achieve it we ask a lot of questions. We ask ourselves and not the audience. I think when artists get too involved in media they respond too much to their critics. And then they disappear up their arseholes.

CC: In art or science there comes a point where progress is halted because there isn’t the machinery to help man across a new knowledge threshold. For instance, the microscope revolutionised science. The synthesiser is a new instrument which has had a dramatic impact on music. But apart from the sound, has the machine itself determined how you relate to it?

RH: Yes. Very strongly. Many people don’t see or understand the intricate relationships between hardware and software. Ideally they become one. And that’s what we’re trying for. Nor are we asking l’art pour l’art.

CC: If it’s not art for art’s sake, then does your music have a philosophical message?

RH: Yes, certainly.

FS: We’re trying to make people conscious of their environmental sounds. Any sounds, because they are sound, can become music. Music is not just bound to chords and harmonies. Our machines are creating the sounds of the environment.

CC: But that’s a very traditional concept. MAHLER tried to create, with an orchestra, the sounds of nature, birds, waterfalls…

RH: There is a big difference. The invention of the tape recorder did to music what the invention of the movie camera did to images. The tape recorder is like a sound camera. What MAHLER did, I think, was still painting. What we’re doing with our electronic machines is, in a sense, film making. We’re making acoustic films.

CC: And the philosophy? I read once that you felt ambivalent about the impersonal nature of modern technological society. Many people believe machines ruin the environment. That they’re anti life.

RH: We’re always being attacked because we play machines. But we’re also being PLAYED by our machines. Today everyone is playing and being played by machines. They just don’t acknowledge the fact. They still think they have to beat and impose themselves over machines. They give machines a subservient role in society. Machines do the slave work. This has been the attitude of the last century. We see it differently. We consider ourselves to be on the same level. We don’t want to beat our machines – or destroy them like the WHO.

CC: Scientists are beginning to see molecules behave in ways which can’t be explained by chemical interaction. The theory is again being discussed that atoms, after all, do have a ‘conscience’ or a ‘mind’…

RH: That’s interesting because we experience on a very direct level how this could be true. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to put our kind of music together.

FS: We’ve found that our machines are so sensitive we have to relax around them. If we’re ungeduldig (impatient) nothing creative happens. You have to have a certain devotion to machines otherwise they won’t do what you want. And if we all paid more attention and respected machine sounds, the environment wouldn’t be so harsh. You could have five hundred Volkswagens driving down the street in tune.

RALF and FLORIAN, side by side on a sofa, are calm and immaculately courteous. They neither smoke nor drink. Like their monochrome clothes, what movements they make are as economically streamlined as the gleaming machines around them. Their fastidiousness gives them both the refined air of merchant bankers whose only vices lie in the secure depths of a city vault. Such unruffled propriety however, only makes me more certain of the illicit passions which must stir beneath their exterior restraint. What else would explain their ability to compose and play some of the most sensually compelling sounds of the decade?

RH: Oh, we can talk about the Kulture in our music and discuss it academically but we can go beyond that too. Our music is very primitive. Positively primitive. The electronic waves and pulses are very animalistic. Basically our machines are just more disciplined than any American disco rhythm section. And anyway, we love discos. We’re great dance fanatics!

CC: I’ve noticed that the musicians and critics who snobbishly put down disco music are invariably hopeless dancers.

RH: Yes. Most musicians are really afraid to dance. They feel naked. They stand on stage and hold up their guitars as if this were the middle ages and they were holding shields. In England they call the guitar an AXE. They actually feel they can hammer audiences on the head with it… the guitar is a weapon.

With a synthesiser on stage, you can’t hide behind it – however naked you feel. The synthesiser is there and you stand beside it. Then the music comes from the speakers and so you might as well dance…

At this point I need to dance myself – towards a Ladies. RALF and FLORIAN rise to their feet. The Kling Klang toilet has been misused by workmen, they explain. Would I mind a short trip, by Mercedes, to the conveniences at Düsseldorf station? Why not? A chance to see the town while it’s still light.

Düsseldorf on the Rhine, a bright bland city thriving on light industry, could be anywhere. Except that the populace, although well fed and prosperous, are uneasy and tense. Two days before this interview the Baader/Ensslin suicide/murder had shocked the world into wondering whether democracy could ever survive in West Germany. Armed special police patrols are out in force.

CC: The situation here is more highly politicised than at any time since the war. As individuals, do you feel caught in a dilemma between becoming men of action out in the street affecting politics, and remaining detached, in this studio, as artists?

RH: Basically, everything we communicate through our music IS political just by its existence.

CC: Is it?

RH: Yes. We plug our music into society. (A very long pause.)

CC: Are you saying YOUR music is political because YOU play it, or is ANY music political?

RH: All music is political per se. Whether it’s music in supermarkets, or opera or what we’re doing. It’s all the political statement of the people involved.

CC: That’s what I believe too, but I’ve suggested this to rock ‘n’ rollers before they deny it, backing away from facing up to the responsibility. I once disagreed with BRYAN FERRY that there was such a thing as art for art’s sake and he got so angry that he kicked a marble table at me.

RH: Of course. Most musicians allow themselves to become merchandise. They’re packaged, shipped and delivered.

FS: They’re the clerks of the record industry.

RH: From the start we refused to be treated like that. We are responsible for what we do, we have artistic control and we are completely independent. Politics is a strange word. But it’s basically a communication system from one human being to another. And you simply can’t deny that this communication exists in music. If you did, you wouldn’t perform and you wouldn’t record. You’d play in a cellar behind locked doors. But musicians do take their music right into a situation with other people. It’s an existential act and nothing is more political. So called politicians rarely face their audiences. Especially in Germany.

CC: Political comment may be implicit in your music but it isn’t defined – which is why you’re still free to go out and perform, whereas bands like the SEX PISTOLS, whose lyrics are highly defined political statements, are banned. Existential gestures are fine, but aren’t you concerned to confront the Establishment more directly?

FS: We’re not in a position to criticise… although we could destroy.

RH: We’re more interested in doing something constructive… maybe setting an example.

FS: We just don’t want to deal in put-downs. Our position is basically geradeaus (straight ahead). We want to be positive.

RH: Politically I think what the terrorists are doing is very inconsiderate. The only effect they are having is to provoke a certain number of right wing people in Germany to pass reactionary laws which apply to everyone. They’ve provoked a situation where now you see machine guns in the street and you’re continually searched. This wasn’t happening before. Ever since BRANDT was elected (the first time Germany EVER had a Socialist government) there was a strong feeling for people to socialise together. This feeling had to be allowed to grow very gradually and it had to be nurtured. Now the terrorists have ruined all that. They’ve just provoked the country into inner armament. They do nothing constructive. They don’t even kill the people who are their adversaries. They kill ordinary working people.

CC: Wasn’t HANNS MARTIN SCHLEYER, in terrorist terms, a valid target?

RH: He was a powerful industrialist. But all industrialists, be it in Germany, France or England are like him. All industry today is paramilitary.

That’s the nature of their hierarchy. So I don’t see that killing one man, or hijacking, achieves anything other than giving right-wing reactionaries the excuse to re-arm.

CC: But I thought that’s exactly what the terrorists were trying to do – to provoke the Fascists in the core of German society to reveal themselves.

RH: And THEN!

Just study how Nazism takes power. What happens is they grab any small bomb incident or protest (they’re lumping anti-nuclear power demonstrators with the terrorists) to make out that there’s a need for more S.S. men.

CC: But why?

RH: Because there are still certain people around, men who were powerful industrialists in Hitler’s time, who will gain again if the same situation develops. And Germans generally respect and are obsessed with hierarchy.

CC: You mean that Germans respond well to being ordered around?

RH: Well, that’s an international characteristic! Germans have just highly perfected the system and at one time it was highly publicised. Now, every time it happens here the International Press gloats, makes analogies and draws conclusions. I mean, media wise, Hitler was and is the most popular and phenomenal figure of all time. He’s Germany’s biggest media product… in the same way as the BEATLES are the biggest media product of Britain.

CC: Which says a lot about Germany and a lot for Britain… I’m sorry, you just have to make a value judgement on that…

RH: I’m not trying to minimise what happened, it’s just that Germany is very proficient at what it does with a tendency to be perfectly extremist.

What the terrorists are doing however, doesn’t make sense. What I’ve seen in the last three weeks is a country arming itself. But I believe what is happening here will become a general universal problem. We’re moving into an historical era of inner conflicts, where personal, psychological problems will be acted out with machine guns.

FS: The real problem for most people is boredom. You work forty hours a week but there’s one hundred and twenty eight more. People used to have punch ups but now guns are readily available. And fighting is entertaining and fun. The way terrorists explain themselves sometimes, you can sense their very macabre humour. In turn, the public has begun complaining when T.V. companies don’t devote enough time to reports of the hijackings and kidnappings. The terrorists are media stars now. And they want to be.

RH: It’s all a game of showmanship. ULRIKE MEINHOF was a frustrated housewife. She was just bored with washing dishes.

CC: I understand she was a respected and successful journalist.

RH: Yes – on the paper owned by her husband. She was right up against the chauvinist Godfather attitude – ‘it’s my paper, you’ll write what I say…’ In a sense too, she was like the archetypal, rather sadistic German schoolteacher.

THE THREE of us fall silent. Talking about Nazism and its aftermath is dispiriting and overwhelming. The facts speak for themselves. They are, none the less, unbelievable.

CC: Has your generation been able to discuss frankly what happened in World War II? Have you talked about those times with your parents?

RH: No. No. It’s not possible. On a personal level those people have gone through too much. They can’t view it. Unless they are unique. Then it’s possible to get outside of themselves, take a look and then get back. But for most people that’s impossible.

FS: This is one of the things Germany is facing at the moment. It’s been hard for us to get our feet on the ground. So much time was devoted in the 50’s and the 60’s to rebuilding the country that deeper issues have been brushed aside. In other societies there was time to discuss social psychology. Now however, German society is materialistically rebuilt and belatedly, we’re facing an inner, psychological crisis. The conflict is being carried out with weapons.

RH: Though surely, it won’t be possible to solve the problems again with policemen and guns…

CC: The situation is so far out it’s like some Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare.

Can we end on a more optimistic note?

(Smiles all round. Düsseldorf has a clutch of great discos. That evening, surrounded by exotic women, RALF and FLORIAN proved their point about dancing. In the early hours of the morning they returned to Kling Klang to work on their new album.)

FS: After concerts, when people come up and thank us, their response is so direct that you can’t help feeling you’ve done more than just entertain fans for a couple of hours. Maybe, after they’ve heard us play they will be motivated to do something for themselves…

DISCOGRAPHY

Early albums: “Kraftwerk” (Vertigo). “Ralf and Florian” (Vertigo).

Highly recommended: “Autobahn” (Vertigo). “Radio-Activity” (Capitol).

Definitive masterpiece: “Trans-Europe Express” (Capitol).