How Kraftwerk’s Autobahn remade pop (original) (raw)

Looking good: (l-r) Karl Bartos, Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider and Wolfgang Flür on the cover of The Man-Machine. Photo by Fröhling/Kraftwerk/Getty Images

Fifty years ago in West Germany, a country at the heart of the growing European Communities, several innovations jumped off the production line. One was a government led by a new, outward-looking chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who helped set up the first World Economic Summit in 1975. Another was the Volkswagen Golf, a car with an in-built radio and cassette player, perfect for cross-continental drives.

A view from a car windscreen was on the sleeve of Kraftwerk’s fourth album, Autobahn, released in November 1974. Painted by artist Emil Schult, it evoked a promise of going somewhere else, somewhere new: green triangular hills sit in the distance, the sun’s rays sparking behind them. It arrived as Germany’s identity as a country was changing under the younger, post-Second World War generation. So was its sound.

Other young German bands like Can and Neu!, were popularising the motorik beat – a relentless, propulsive, pulse. Kraftwerk were morphing from a progressive art-rock band into an electronic one, liberated by new technology. Their aesthetic changed radically too: a sticker on early copies of their LP, featuring a white motorway sign on a blue background, was transformed into the actual cover art for the album’s UK editions.

The band embraced this design wholeheartedly – it offered a neat visual shorthand for their precise, minimalist pop. They were turning the modern world around them into music, moving away from their country’s recent past, accelerating into the future. Fifty years on, it’s clear to see how Kraftwerk’s beats and ideas helped lay the foundations for many future genres; a decade later they influenced hip hop, synth-pop, techno and house, and this LP alone was sampled by techno duo Orbital, rapper Mos Def, indie group Stereolab and UK ravers the Future Sound of London.

The record’s title track (and lead single) was the turning point, stretching to 22 minutes, occupying a whole side of vinyl. A three-minute radio edit got to number four in the UK in June 1975 and entered the US top 30 – good going for a song sung entirely in German.

Kraftwerk were formed in 1970 around university friends Ralf Hütter, who still leads the band, and Florian Schneider, whose father, Paul, a world-renowned architect, gave him funds to buy box-fresh, groundbreaking synthesisers. By 1974, percussionist Wolfgang Flür and multi-instrumentalist Karl Bartos had joined, Hütter got a haircut, and their image shifted. By their European tour in early 1975, they were besuited and slick, standing behind electronic drum kits and blue neon signs bearing their names. It was a twisted boyband logic, reaching its apex on the sleeve of 1978’s The Man-Machine, where the quartet wore black ties, scarlet shirts and matching lipstick. Standing in a diagonal line, replicating the style of a 1920s constructivist poster, this was pop art in excelsis.

The creative potential of Weimar-era, pre-Nazi Germany loomed large in Kraftwerk’s world. The first Autobahn was developed then and opened in 1932, a year before the election that brought Hitler to power. Kraftwerk’s lyrical description of what it felt like to be on one still sounds giddily childlike. “_Wir fahren, fahren, fahren_” (We drive, drive, drive)”, they sing, their pacy delivery recalling “Fun Fun Fun”, the 1964 hit by the Beach Boys, a favourite band of Schneider’s.

Then come their innovations with sound, recalling the early-20th-century work of the futurist Luigi Russolo and the “art of noise”. “Autobahn” begins with a car door opening and a horn being tooted twice, “as if greeting the listener”, Bartos writes in his 2022 autobiography, The Sound of the Machine. Then a synthesised voice interjects, repeating the song’s name like a mantra, then becomes distorted, like a warning. This effect was created on a vocoder, a tool first used by Schneider on the band’s previous album, “which made him one of the first to do so in the pop world”, Bartos adds.

Before then, vocoders were more often used in encoded government telecommunications – JFK used one during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But after “Autobahn”, they became a central element of Kraftwerk’s sound, in a magical way. “On ‘Autobahn’, so it seems, a combustion engine is speaking to us,” Bartos writes. “It’s so uncanny when technology talks.”

The track perfectly captures Kraftwerk’s compelling mix of blissful, nursery-rhyme naïveté and crackling unease. The opening tune glistens with possibility, full of light and air. The central section is different, with synthesised percussion suggestive of wheels speeding on tarmac, then single-note stabs and doppler-like sirens bringing punctures of tension.

The relationship between the human and the machine lay at the heart of Kraftwerk’s work ever after. Their next album, 1975’s Radio-Activity, explored the potential of radiowaves for communication and contamination. Trans-Europe Express (1977) had tracks about mannequins coming to life (“Showroom Dummies”) and a borderless continent (“Europe Endless”), at a time when the Iron Curtain still hung heavily. Many of their subjects could have come from a child’s toy chest (trains, robots, bicycles), but Kraftwerk were returning to an early sense of awe in their work, trying to renew their identity. “We certainly represent the generation with no fathers,” Hütter told the NME in 1981, referring to the legacy of the Second World War in their country. “It was very hard to accept at first, [but] it is also in some ways encouraging because it gives you possibilities of doing new things.”

“Autobahn” was the first Kraftwerk track that travelled. In 2020, Saul Smaizys, director of Chicago’s Triad Radio, remembered playing the 22-minute version in 1974: “The phones went crazy.” It also reached the top 20 in Ireland, South Africa, the Netherlands, Austria, Canada and Germany, although the critics dismissed it. “Spineless, emotionless sound with no variety, less taste,” railed Keith Ging in the Melody Maker. Nick Kent called the band “little more than experimental quacks… they remain merely annoying”.

The music press was swaggeringly macho at the time. Kraftwerk’s music was never about the gut or the loins, but the mind and heart. This is clear on _Autobahn_’s often-overlooked second side, featuring four tracks that revel in the cosmos and circadian rhythms. Washes of oscillating sounds and delicate basslines carry “Kometenmelodie 1” and “Komotenmelodie 2”, inspired by the Kohoutek comet that passed by the sun in 1973. “Mitternacht” (Midnight) uses electronics to create impressions of dimly lit underpasses and eerie voices (a clear influence on David Bowie’s Low, released three years later) while “Morgenspaziergang” (Morning Stroll) conjures up rippling water and birdsong. Schneider adds his original instrument, the flute, to the mix, providing a beautiful bridge between the present and the past.

In 2013, Hütter spoke about this album to Uncut and referenced its gentle finale: “All the tracks [on _Autobahn_] are like film loops, short films. ‘Morgenspaziergang’ is what we wrote when we came out of the studio… in the morning, everything seems fresh and our minds are open again.” Autobahn still sparks the imagination half a century on, like a child’s impression of the open road, stretching out towards the horizon.

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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, American Horror Story