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.
