Kraftwerk: Why did electronic music begin in Dusseldorf?

I’m standing on a street corner in downtown Dusseldorf, listening to two jolly German musicologists called Michael Wenzel and Sven-Andre Dreyer explaining the genesis of electronic music. It all feels rather comical, like a surreal Monty Python sketch, but although it’s bordering on the absurd it’s absolutely fascinating nonetheless. Sven and Michael are telling me how it all began here in Dusseldorf. Right here, in fact, in the building in front of us. Today that building is a smart apartment block, but 50 years ago it was a club called Creamcheese, and it was here that a local band called Kraftwerk played their first gig, a gig that changed the course of modern music.

Today Kraftwerk are widely – and quite rightly – regarded as the most influential musicians of modern times. A group that pioneered the use of electronic instruments, and created a brand new sound that fed a myriad of other genres. The list of bands who’ve sampled them reads like an A-Z of popular music. Their “Robot Pop” inspired everyone from David Bowie to Daft Punk, from the Pet Shop Boys to Coldplay. Their influence has been so universal, it’s almost become invisible – virtually every new release is infused with an echo of their style. And, as Sven and Michael explain, it all started here, in this grungy, glitzy city on the west bank of the River Rhine.

I’m back in Dusseldorf for the opening of a new exhibition called “Electro – From Kraftwerk to Techno”. “The idea is to capture the spirit of electronic dance culture, the club culture, the rave culture,” explains the show’s French co-curator Jean-Yves Leloup. This show has already been to Paris and London, but its spiritual home is here in Kraftwerk’s hometown, and through close co-operation with Kraftwerk founder-member, Ralf Hutter, it has expanded the section of the exhibition devoted to this city’s most famous sons.

It’s an absorbing, uplifting survey, which follows the evolution of electronic music, from its Teutonic origins here in the Rhineland to British new wave bands like Joy Division and Depeche Mode, then across the Atlantic to House and Hip-Hop bands in Detroit and Chicago, and then back to Europe via dance music, in clubs from Manchester to Ibiza. So why did it all begin in Dusseldorf? I’ve come here to find out.

I usually fly to Dusseldorf, but this time I came by train, which felt fitting. The most famous photo of the band was taken in Dusseldorf train station. Kraftwerk’s mesmeric anthem, “Trans-Europe Express”, was a celebration of international train travel. But was their connection with this city mere coincidence? Not at all. As Sven and Michael point out, although Kraftwerk was a one-off, like the Beatles in Liverpool they emerged from a communal culture which was rooted in a particular time and place.

Dusseldorf has always been a centre of the arts, but until the 1970s its dominant artform was fine art, not music. Since the 19th century, Dusseldorf Kunstakademie had been renowned as one of Europe’s most important art schools, and after the Second World War it became a leading forum for West Germany’s re-emerging counterculture. Leading German artists like Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke came here, as students and teachers, alongside some of Europe’s finest photographers: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky – Gursky’s photos of raves form a key part of the Kunstpalast exhibition. The art school became a focal point for musicians as well as artists, and its large student body gave them a captive audience. For several years, Kraftwerk were merely one part of a nascent movement that included bands like Neu!, also from Dusseldorf, and Can, from nearby Cologne.

Like most German cities, Dusseldorf had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombers and the Kunstakademie and the Kunstpalast were among the few buildings that survived. During the 1950s and 1960s, the city was rebuilt in a perfunctory modern style. This austere functionality was largely a matter of necessity, but it was also ideological. German culture had been utterly discredited by the Nazis. German architects didn’t want to repair or restore the past. They wanted to sweep it all away and rebuild Germany anew. Dusseldorf was recreated as a New World city of bland apartment blocks and busy highways. But it wasn’t just about the architecture – it was also a lifestyle choice. West Germans turned their backs on traditional German culture and embraced the popular culture of their conquerors and liberators: American fashion, American cinema and, above all, American music.

By the time Kraftwerk came along, this infatuation with Americana had begun to lose its lustre. After the student protests of 1968, the US seemed less like a liberator than an oppressor. For these students, the Vietnam War loomed larger than the Second World War. Kraftwerk emerged from a group of young musicians who were looking for a new style of music, something with European roots, rather than just a hollow pastiche of Anglo-Saxon pop. “We wanted to oppose the superiority of Anglo-American music with something frightfully German,” quipped former Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flur, in Rudi Esch’s landmark book about electronic music in Dusseldorf, Electri_City. Yet for these musicians, it was equally important to distance themselves from the German culture that produced the Holocaust. “The idea was to reinvent music after the apocalypse,” says Jean-Yves Leloup. “They had to reinvent their own culture – the idea was to invent a culture for themselves.”

This geopolitical backdrop was much the same throughout West Germany, but Dusseldorf was uniquely fertile ground for the movement which became known as Krautrock. Shorn of its eastern territories and divided by the Iron Curtain, Germany’s centre of gravity had shifted westward, from the River Elbe to the River Rhine. Dusseldorf was part of a cluster of Rhineland cities which formed the industrial powerhouse of West Germany. During the wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) of the 1950s and 1960s, it became the richest city in the region, a centre for fashion as well as art. Dusseldorf is a compact city, and the juxtaposition of grime and glamour is dramatic. The altstadt (old town) is full of lively clubs and bars. Konigsallee is one of Germany’s smartest shopping streets, full of chic designer stores, Claudia Schiffer was discovered in a nightclub here.

For a musical movement which pioneered the use of synthesizers, money was important. Fifty years ago, the cost of a synth was way beyond the reach of most wannabe musicians. Florian Schneider, who co-founded Kraftwerk in 1970, came from a wealthy family – his father was a prestigious architect. He had enough money to buy a synth, and the rest is history.

Synthesizers had appeared in popular music before, but only fleetingly. Kraftwerk were the first band to build their entire sound around them. It wasn’t just the instruments which were groundbreaking. The music was also something new. Previously, German pop had mimicked American rock music. Kraftwerk’s music, conversely, had more in common with Bach and Mozart than Chuck Berry. It felt closer to classical music than rock’n’roll. “They thought about music anew,” says Sven-Andre Dreyer. “They made completely different music to other musicians worldwide.”

“There’s a strong and innovative way of making rhythms,” says Leloup. “There are some very memorable melodies.” The riffs on tracks like “Tour de France” sound so archetypal, so elemental, it feels as if they’ve always been there, like the melodies from “The Magic Flute”, or “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”.

Kraftwerk’s early compositions were largely instrumental. It was their lyrics which transformed these modernist sonatas into timeless works of art. Like all great artists, they described the world around them – an anonymous urban landscape of subways, neon lights and autobahns. This was the sound of the city. Kraftwerk were the first musicians to encapsulate this brave new world. As Flur recalls, in Electri_City: “In our rehearsal room, studio and shared flat, a sound was created that would travel the world.”

Such is the influence of Kraftwerk that nowadays this kind of subject matter is so commonplace, it’s difficult to convey how revolutionary this approach was at the time. The early Seventies was an era of prog rock, glam rock and heavy metal. The music was baroque, the lyrics were verbose and the outfits were flamboyant. Conversely, Kraftwerk sang songs about transport and computers. This robotic minimalism was unheard of. Even the name of the band, which is German for power station, set them apart.

The music was the most important thing, but Kraftwerk’s look was also radical, a reflection of their clean-cut, dispassionate aesthetic. “Finally, we did the unthinkable – we bought suits and wore ties,” recalled Wolfgang Flur. A rock band dressed like neat and tidy sales reps is no big deal today, but in the mid seventies it was shocking. You could tell at first glance, before you heard a note, that this was something new. The record sleeves were also artworks in their own right. Music, costume and branding combined to produce a gesamtkunstwerk, a united, multifaceted, total work of art.

To promote their breakthrough album, Autobahn, Kraftwerk toured the UK, but the British music press didn’t get it. “For God’s sake, keep the robots out of music,” wailed the Melody Maker. “This is what your fathers fought to save you from,” shrieked the NME. It’s an indication of how avant-garde they were that their first appearance on British television wasn’t as aspiring pop stars on Top of the Pops but as boffins on Tomorrow’s World.

Yet despite the incomprehension of the music critics, Kraftwerk were already making British converts. Andy McCluskey saw Kraftwerk in 1975 at the Liverpool Empire. Suitably inspired, he formed the seminal British synthpop band, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. “Musically, we are much more the sons of Dusseldorf than we are the sons of Liverpool,” he said. For him, bands like Neu! and Kraftwerk loomed far larger than the Beatles. “Kraftwerk is a common language for all the British bands of the new wave,” confirms Michael Wenzel. Within a few years, the British pop charts were awash with electronic bands inspired by Kraftwerk: Visage, Soft Cell, Ultravox, Eurythmics, Heaven 17, the Human League… The list goes on and on.

More established artists caught on too. David Bowie namechecked Florian Schneider on his Heroes album. Kraftwerk returned the compliment on Trans Europe Express. Yet it wasn’t until 1981 that Kraftwerk topped the British charts. They released a single called “Computer Love”, taken from their new album Computer World, but British DJs preferred to play the B side, an older song called “The Model”, from their previous album, The Man Machine. Re-released as a single, it became Britain’s number one.

Kraftwerk are often described as futuristic, but in fact their work is closely connected with the past, the German past. “We are the children of Fritz Lang and Wernher von Braun,” declared Ralf Hutter. Fritz Lang created the visionary movie, Metropolis; Wernher von Braun developed the V2 missile for the Nazis, and then went on to play a leading role in the Nasa space programme. This wasn’t an endorsement, but an acknowledgement of the weight of German history, the best and worst of times. There are traces of Dada in their work, and the Bauhaus. “Our reality is an electronic reality,” said Hutter. After Kraftwerk, all the bands that came before suddenly seemed terribly old fashioned.

Even more remarkable was Kraftwerk’s influence on African-American music. You might think these two worlds would be poles apart, but the African-American response was supremely egalitarian. Unlike British rock critics, making snide jokes about the war, they knew nothing about Kraftwerk or where they came from. They simply loved the music. It’s no coincidence that Detroit and Chicago, where Kraftwerk first took off Stateside, are industrial cities, like Dusseldorf. The sound that grew out of these rustbelt conurbations was percussive and mechanical, forged in the steelworks and factories. Kraftwerk even composed a song called “Metal on Metal”. “You’re always confronted by a soundscape that is very industrial,” says Michael Wenzel.

“It was a worker’s city,” says Alain Bieber, co-curator of the exhibition, over coffee in the Kunstpalast. But is Dusseldorf still a worker’s city today? The old industries are long gone. Nowadays it’s a hi-tech hub. Sure enough, the electronic future that Kraftwerk foresaw 50 years ago has finally arrived. Not everyone here is wealthy, by any means, and a lot of the city still looks drab, but it’s a pricey place to live nowadays. Gentrification has transformed Dusseldorf, and on the whole it’s a lot better than before, but inevitably something has been lost along the way. I don’t think the musical revolution that happened here in the 1970s could happen here today. But that doesn’t mean the story’s over. “The history of electronic music will never be finished,” says Bieber. “It will evolve, it will change.” The next big thing could happen anywhere, on any continent, in any city on the planet.

“Electronic dance music is a global movement,” concurs Jean-Yves Leloup. “It can be very underground or hugely mainstream.” And Kraftwerk were there at the beginning. Would it have happened, eventually, without them? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have been quite the same. Kraftwerk requisitioned the escapist euphoria of Disco, and used it to scrutinise the lonely wonder of the modern world. Fifty years on, the soundscape they created has become so ubiquitous that they’ve vanished into the foreground, into the aural fabric of our daily lives.

Electro – from Kraftwerk to Techno is at the Dusseldorf Kunstpalast (www.kunstpalast.de) until 22 May 2022. For more information about music in Dusseldorf visit www.duesseldorf-tourismus.de