Why I Love… Kraftwerk

After seeing Later…With Jools Holland last night, I felt compelled to write this article. In between songs by Echo and The Bunnymen and the meaningless Calvin Harris, Jools sat down for a trademark awkward interview with guest Gary Numan, everybody’s favourite right-wing New Wave star.

Jools mistakenly claimed that Numan’s Pleasure Principle album - released in 1979 - was a watershed moment for music: the first time anyone ever had ever made pop music in which synthesizers replaced the standard guitars. To my horror, Numan simply accepted this as fact and tried to appear modest that he was, in fact, a musical innovator. Like Beethoven or Roy Wood from Wizzard.

Needless to say, I was left dumbfounded by the audacious claim that Low-era Bowie clone Gary Numan had invented synthpop.

By the time Pleasure Principle had been released, Kraftwerk had been knocking around in various incarnations for roughly a decade.

For anyone unfamiliar, the group was the creation of Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, two music students who met at Düsseldorf at the tail end of the ‘60s. After embroiling themselves in the Krautrock scene, releasing a few experimental albums and going through several personnel changes, by 1974 Kraftwerk had refocused their energies and released their seminal album Autobahn.

Autobahn mixed driving, computerised beats with keyboards and pop harmonies. In effect, Kraftwerk became the first ‘80s band six years before the decade had even begun. Further albums using a similar formula followed (notably Trans-Europe Express and The Man Machine), but one thing is for certain – the sound of Autobahn ran right through the pop of the 1980s; a sound which has made a resurgence in pop in the latter half of this decade.

35 years on from Autobahn's release, the world is still in love with music pioneered by some German computer geeks. Not by Gary Fucking* Numan.

Greg.

*Numan's real middle name is Christopher.