Fifty years ago, the electronic pioneers released a 23-minute song about a road – and changed pop music for ever. Our writer hits the speed-limit-free highways of Düsseldorf and Hamburg in search of its futuristic brilliance
Fifty years ago, the electronic pioneers released a 23-minute song about a road – and changed pop music for ever. Our writer hits the speed-limit-free highways of Düsseldorf and Hamburg in search of its futuristic brilliance
Schneider’s father Paul was a renowned architect responsible for the brutalist Terminal 1 building in Cologne Bonn airport – and it is here that I pick up an early morning hire car and drive the short distance to Potsdamer Platz in Bonn, the most southerly point of the A555. Despite his contribution – Flür has called him the true “visionary” behind what became the Kraftwerk sound – Plank was bought out by the band for DM 5,000 and never made anything from the subsequent success of the song nor the album of the same name from which it comes from. The band produced all future recordings in their studio Kling Klang and Plank never worked with the band again.
“Kraftwerk?” repeats a waitress, looking puzzled. “I don’t think so. We do have a band called Die Toten Hosen.” Back on the street an emergency vehicle’s siren builds then fades. A motorbike rider lets his engine rip. But the area is largely unremarkable. The only trace of Kraftwerk I’ve seen so far on this whole trip has been in a Cologne brauhaus stuffed with vintage music contraptions – put a euro in the slot and you can watch a duo of accordion and tuba-playing puppets perform the band’s biggest hit The Model. Fun, of course, but not the most towering of tributes to the godfathers of dance music.
When the show came to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall the following year, I got my first taste of driving on the autobahn. There I stood as Volkswagens, Mercedes and enormous lorries passed by my side, and the 800 or so passengers riding with me reached out to touch them. It was a perfect synthesis of music, art, technology, design and film. And it all grew from the seed of Schult’s painting.
But such things won’t have been strangers to Kraftwerk even at the time they were writing it. In 1973, an international oil crisis was so severe that Germans were banned from driving the autobahn on Sundays for a month – instead people took strolls on it. Yet such tumult is noticeably absent in the song’s nursery rhyme lyrics, which were written by Schult. covered awe-inspiring valleys, repetitive white lines, green ditches – and what sounded to anglocentric ears like a Beach Boys lift.
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