“Karl left because they spent millions on these machines but never played one note. They were caught by the technology and it overtook them”: Our lost interview with Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür gives rare insight into the band's internal conflicts

Kraftwerk are the founding kings of electronic music. Their venerated 1970s canon - which includes the seminal likes of Autobahn, Trans-Europe Express and The Man-Machine - forever changed the language and toolkit of popular music.

But, despite creating and making some of the most advanced, future-predicting music ever recorded, the four central members during this most pioneering era - Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos - didn’t always see eye-to-eye.

That much is clear from re-reading an old interview that our recently shuttered (but not forgotten!) Computer Music magazine did with Wolfgang Flür way back in 2007.

At that point, Flür was embarking on a solo music project - Yamo - and keen to talk about his new discovery of software, but he also fascinatingly reflected on his decision to leave the band; “The more we developed, the more the robots developed in ourselves,” Flür told us. “It was when the human attitude went. I am human and I didn’t want to develop as a robot taking orders. Ralf and Florian came to the studio less and less. They had a new love, new devices also made from metal: bicycles. Cycling was the end of Kraftwerk.”

Eyebrow-raising stuff. The full interview - which you can read below - is a real treat for anyone with an interest in Kraftwerk, or the origins of electronic music in general.

Wolfgang Flür - The Computer Music Interview (2007)

Wolfgang Flür - The Computer Music Interview (2007)

As Kraftwerk’s percussionist, Wolfgang Flür helped define their sound. He also invented electronic drumming and, as we discover, has long since turned his back on the man-machines to run his musical projects from the comfort of a laptop…

Kraftwerk are, to many, the band that kick-started electronic music. In doing so, they influenced all dance music as we know it.

Their Kling Klang recording studio has become legendary, taking on an almost mystical status among fans. The band’s silence over the years has helped maintain the Kraftwerk legend, even through some patchy releases.

However, they didn’t quite manage to stop ex-member Wolfgang Flür revealing some of the inside story in his book Kraftwerk: I Was A Robot. And as Computer Music chats to Wolfgang on the eve of his appearance at the Futuresonic Festival in Manchester, he reveals more about the band, his love of laptops, his major contribution to the development of the drum machine, and the time he witnessed the birth of the very sequencer you’re using. Yes, really.

When I was a robot
“I wasn’t in search of them, they were in search of me,” says Flür, recalling his first meeting with Kraftwerk founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. “OK, maybe they were not especially after me, but they were in search of a drummer. They always had good drummers that came from jazz backgrounds but they drummed too much for the band’s new minimalist music!”

At this time, in 1973, Kraftwerk’s music may have been minimalist but it was not yet electronic.

“When I joined the group there was nothing especially electronic,” remembers Wolfgang. “Ralf played a Farfisa and Hammond organ and Florian played a flute. He had an echo tape machine and amplification for effects but that was all. They had a broken drum set for me and I said, ‘I’m not playing that!’. But they didn’t want to get a new one.

"Then I saw a tiny beat box lying in the corner. It had only had Samba, Foxtrot and Beat 1 and Beat 2 presets but also some knobs to play the tones. I said, ‘Wow, let’s put it through an amplifier, I can play it like that, by hand’. I thought, ‘This is something new, but I’m a drummer so we have to build something that a drummer would use’. So I thought about sticks and round metal plates to make an electronic circuit to trigger the pads.

“Anyway, they asked me three times to come and join the band so I said, ‘Only if we build that [electronic drum set]’. It took three days to build and we took it to a TV studio in Berlin to play our first TV show together. We played Tanzmuzik and all the TV cameras were on the drum machine and me! They’d never seen such a thing.”

With Wolfgang’s electronic beats the band started to move more towards a totally synthetic sound, but Wolfgang claims that this was more through luck than judgement.

“I can’t remember that we made a single decision to do that. Really it started with the development of my drum pad board. Then we had a rehearsal at Conny Plank’s studio. Everyone who was in the business at the time, including David Bowie, went through that studio. Florian was very nervous and very excited because they had a little machine that looked like a home organ made from wood. I said, ‘What’s so special about it?’, and he said, ‘Look at the knobs, the filters and all of that – it is a ‘synth-e-sizer’!’. I hadn’t even heard the name but he connected it and it was the first time I’d heard that fat analogue sound. That was the Minimoog and we thought, ‘This is the next step’. First the drum machine, next the Minimoog and then Florian then bought an ARP synthesizer.”

And suddenly Kraftwerk had a sound like no one else… “We used to make our music in a pop song type of structure, but everything was made with ‘computer music’,” says Flür. “I think we were the first. I’ve not heard of any other group that used those instruments so early. They were brand new.”

So did the group realise quite how groundbreaking their sound was?

“No, of course not,” says Flür. “We were young, shy and childish! We loved to construct things and we never thought we would get famous from that.”

But they did. In 1974 their 20-minute opus Autobahn gained momentum in the States and the band were projected into the limelight. Joined by Karl Bartos, the four went through arguably their most creative period, producing the albums Radioactivity, Trans-Europe Express and The Man-Machine in double-quick time.

But then the output slowed down, with just two albums released in the 80s. “The more we developed, the more the robots developed in ourselves,” says Flür. “It was when the human attitude went. I am human and I didn’t want to develop as a robot taking orders. Ralf and Florian came to the studio less and less. They had a new love, new devices also made from metal: bicycles. Cycling was the end of Kraftwerk.”

Sidenote: Kling Klang
The legendary Kling Klang studio was not always legendary, nor indeed a recording studio…

“It was just a rehearsal room,” remembers Wolfgang. “It was big and rented from an electrical company who were upstairs, and they had a big store room that was free, which they advertised. It was like nothing, just lots of things lying around with just one window that we covered with a wooden case because we were very loud.”

“Karl [Bartos] was in Kraftwerk longer than me. After I left, they took two or three years to rebuild it to make it look like a spaceship. They bought a Synclavier, computers and took over another floor. But Karl left because they spent millions on these machines but never played one note and he couldn’t stand it anymore. They were caught by the technology and it overtook them.”

The end and the beginning
Wolfgang left in 1987, just as computers were starting to find homes in studios across the world. And as Wolfgang was at the cutting edge of hardware, you’d also think that the band would have kept abreast of software developments. Actually, no…

“When I left Kraftwerk they didn’t even have any MIDI in their studio,” he says. “Can you believe that? I then met some young guys who had their studios with Amigas at home and it was astonishing to me how they could produce music in their bedrooms with some machines on a table.”

So was he tempted to get back into making music by this new computer revolution?

“It made me very interested but not interested enough to make music again. After Kraftwerk I went back to furniture design with no plan to do music. I made money from it, unlike Kraftwerk! But then during the Bosnian war in the 90s I wrote Little Child, a benefit song for the Sarajevo children’s home. That was when I started music again.”

And so his new act, Yamo, was born. An album – Time Pie – followed, which Wolfgang produced with Mouse On Mars. He’s currently working with Stefan

​​“We use Logic in the studio,” says Wolfgang. “Stefan has just about every [soft synth] there is. Sometimes we hire some of the old synths if we think the original fat analogue sounds can’t be done digitally though.”

As well as making music, Wolfgang DJs and writes short stories (about “mad people”)., and his shows somehow manage to combine all of these pursuits. “I sometimes read book excerpts at my live Yamo shows. They also have films, my music, projections and live dancing. I use the [Edirol] motion dive program to switch the movies and clips to fit to the music tracks. I have plenty to show from the old days, very rare Kraftwerk material from my time with the robots. I also DJ with my laptop using Ableton Live and GarageBand. Live is great to play live using different songs.”

Laptop versus VW
So when Wolfgang sees the power of his laptop, running Live for his DJing and Logic for his music creation, he must be pretty impressed with how technology has marched on from those early days.

“It is very good and makes people more mobile,” he says. “I had an idea, a future vision that I want everything for my stage show in one small bag; and I am nearly there, using Ableton Live for DJing and motion dive software for the visuals. This is the development that we asked for. When I was in Kraftwerk we needed two VW buses or a truck to carry everything wherever we went.”

So he agrees that today’s computers and sequencers are impressive, but then reveals that, if it hadn’t been for his old bandmates, we might not even have had sequencers in the first place!

“We developed a lot of things,” he says. “We weren’t engineers, we were visionaries with the ideas of what we needed, like the first sequencer.

It was probably Ralf, I think, as he wanted to play more than two synthesizers. He had the Minimoog and the new double-keyboard Polymoog, so he didn’t have hands free to do anything else. He and Karl thought it would be great to have a machine that you could program to play something like the bassline step by step. It had to be developed by an engineering company in Bonn and cost 16,000 Deutschmarks – twice as much as a Minimoog. And now it’s free and you get it in software!”

So what went on at Kling Klang not only defined certain genres of music, but also some of the tools we now use to make it. How does Wolfgang feel about the latest technology, some of which surely owes him and his band at least a tip of the hat?

“It’s OK. They steal everything [laughs]. If I’d patented my drum pad boards, maybe I would have made millions by now. But you know I also play with Dyko, a young band from Germany. I am drumming with them 20 years after I did it with Kraftwerk, and I’m drumming again with a new Roland V-Drum kit.”

Which, arguably and ironically, was born out of something that he put together all those years ago… “Yes, but you can put all of my Roland and Edirol gear in a case, unlike when I was with Kraftwerk! Everything is faster and easier today, and more lightweight. In Kraftwerk we used to play with machines the size of washing machines! With today’s music programs we can record while travelling – on the train, for instance. I have everything on my MacBook that I need and can write music wherever I want, even on the airplane. What a world we have today!”

This interview was originally published in issue 115 of Computer Music in July 2007