Friday 23 October
This documentary film examines how a radical generation of Krautrockers rebuilt a new German musical identity out of the cultural ruins of war.
Overlooked in their own country, these bands were grouped under the unsympathetic heading of Krautrock by an inquisitive British music press, when Dad's Army and war jokes were the lingua franca of the times. Nearly all of the bands objected to the term, apart from when it helped to shift records.
Today, Krautrock is one of the coolest influences any band aiming at credibility can drop.
Devotees include The Fall, Franz Ferdinand, Radiohead and Kasabian.
In 1968, the world was in the grip of a youthful revolution, and nowhere were the stakes higher than in Germany. Despite a post-war economic boom, the youth of the country felt that nothing had changed for a generation growing up in the aftermath of war. Power was still in the hands of an older generation and Germany's once magnificent artistic culture lay trashed and looted, much of it sullied by Nazi associations. For young people in cities like Berlin, Dusseldorf, Cologne and Munich, it was time for something new.
Between 1968 and 1977, bands including Neu!, Faust, Can and Kraftwerk looked beyond Anglo-American pop to create some of the most radical and original sounds ever heard in the country. The experiments of Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and Cluster would give the world its first taste of electronica.
By the late Seventies, some famous English and American ears took notice as David Bowie, Brian Eno and Iggy Pop decamped to Germany in an attempt to tap into the Zeitgeist. Meanwhile, in a studio overlooking the Berlin Wall, Iggy and Bowie would record Low, Heroes and Lust For Life, taking the sound and feel of Krautrock to the bank and to the world at large.
Great programme overall, though of course there were a few "why did/didn't they include so-and-so?" type quibbles.
'By the Seventies we were living in the future,” begins Synth Britannia, a documentary that charts the rise of synth pop from suburban England to the world’s dance floors.
Most people’s first exposure to synthesized music was in 1971, on the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The film’s sinister score – written and performed on the Moog synthesizer by American composer Walter (now Wendy) Carlos — would lead many listeners always to associate synth with the idea of a bleak and alienating future. Then in 1975, a group of young German men called Kraftwerk appeared on Tomorrow’s World playing only electronic instruments. In the robotic irony and minimalism of the German, short-haired “engineer musicians”, small, isolated pockets of aspiring musicians across the country heard the future.
But what did the British do with this new sound? We did what we’ve always done when we hear a new sound — we distilled it into popular songs.
“We thought we were avant-garde,” says Andy McCluskey of OMD, “but we were the future of pop.”
The synth was all new and you could make a completely original sound on it without any lessons. The only problem was money: in the mid Seventies, a synthesizer could cost as much as a small house. McCluskey bought one from his mother’s Kays catalogue in 36 instalments of £7.76. Joy Division’s Bernard Sumner ordered a self-assembly machine from an electronics magazine and spent two months soldering it together, only to find that “it didn’t work incredibly well”.
But this didn’t matter. These guys were boldly twiddling knobs and pressing buttons no musicians had touched before. British synth poppers were the eccentric, back garden rocket engineers to Kraftwerk’s Nasa. Gary Numan was the first to hit the mainstream when Are 'Friends’ Electric? went to No 1 in 1979. “I’d only had five days’ studio time with a synthesizer,” he says. “There was no time to read manuals. It was a case of 'press that, turn this, that sounds good’.”
Rock critics argued that this wasn’t “real” music. As McCluskey says, they felt “it wasn’t honest, it wasn’t working class, it wasn’t earthy, sweaty, manly.”
It was manufactured. But when had music ever not been? “What’s a piano?” asks John Foxx of Ultravox. “It’s wood that has been felled and carved; lacquer; bits of elephant sawn off and polished and stuff that’s been mined and cast into steel which we stretch into strings which are hit by hammers we activate by pressing keys mechanically. Music is a map of all the mad technologies we’ve co-opted to make nice or exciting noises.”
Today, electronic sounds dominate the charts. But we’ve domesticated the electricity that once sounded so exciting and packed it into little white computers. As Human League founder Martyn Ware says, the element of risk has gone and watching even the pioneering Kraftwerk on their last tour “was like watching four old guys checking their email”.
Three decades on, artists such as Little Boots and La Roux are fetishising the early Brit synth sounds. But that’s just pop eating itself. They’re not yet taking us into new territory. As McCluskey says: “People ask why I don’t like La Roux and I say it just sounds like a woman warbling, badly, over an old Depeche Mode record. We had such a vast, new space to ride into. We were part of the last big wave of Britain inventing something original that rolled out across the world.”
They were the future.
