Following the Bike Show's January 2005 feature on Kraftwerk and bicycling, I was invited to write an article for a new road racing magazine called Rouleur, looking deeper into the obsession that the German godfathers of technopop have for cycling.

Rouleur is published by those fabulous people at Rapha and is now out - £9 - featuring beautiful photography as well as great articles by the likes of Graeme Fife and Matt Seaton.

The Bike Show Kraftwerk special is available in MP3 format and Real Audio.

Below is an extract from my feature-length Kraftwerk article in Rouleur:

Kraftwerk and the Ultimate Man-Machine

Mensch / Natur / Technik. In three words are distilled the ethos of one of the most innovative and influential pop groups of all time. Kraftwerk’s pursuit of harmony between man, nature and technology also explains a passion for cycling that has at times bordered on an obsession. Described variously as the godfathers of techno and industrial music, ‘the Beach Boys from Düsseldorf’ and the inventors of electro pop, it is hard to find a band more revered (and sampled) by their peers, or more worshipped by their fans.

Famous for shunning the media spotlight and turning down invitations to collaborate with names as big as Michael Jackson, David Bowie and The Smiths it is strange to hear Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter describe with star-struck awe how he and fellow founder-member Florian Schneider rode in a Tour De France race car with French cycling legend Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle during the Alpe D’Huez stage in 2003 Tour De France. But it would not surprise any Kraftwerk fan who blames cycling for the dramatic decline in recorded output since their 1983 Tour De France single. The suspicion that Hütter and Schneider had abandoned their banks of electronic recording equipment to ride over the high mountain passes of the Alps and Dolomites is given further credence by former sideman Karl Bartos who said that the excessive cycling contributed in part to his decision to quit the band.

Kraftwerk means ‘power station’ in German, and hailing from the industrial heartland of the Rhur valley, Hütter and Schneider were fascinated by industry and technology both as a way of making music and as a broader cultural aesthetic. Products of Germany’s post-war ‘fatherless generation’, both had witnessed how industrial progress had enabled Germany to rebuild and redeem itself after the moral and material ruin of the Nazi era. They were disappointed at how most continental European pop groups rarely strayed from aping their American and British counterparts and one of Kraftwerk’s early objectives was to develop an uncompromisingly modern style that was at the same time distinctively German.

There is a some irony that Kraftwerk’s first international commercial success came with Autobahn (1974) a concept album about driving a Volkswagen Beetle on the German motorway network – two technological innovations widely associated with the Third Reich (although in the case of the Autobahn, the connection is largely erroneous). This was an unlikely radio and hit, the single being an edited version of the album’s 23-minute long title track.

The four albums that followed mined a rich seam of similar themes in which delight in modernity is balanced by nostalgia for bygone times. It is difficult to find another group whose music so closely relates to overtly stated concepts: radio broadcasting and nuclear power (Radio-Activity, 1975) train travel and European integration (Trans Europe Express, 1977) robots and mannequins (The Man Machine, 1978) and computers, surveillance and international finance (Computer World, 1981). It is sometimes unclear whether Kraftwerk’s vision is portraying technology at the service of mankind or machines taking over at the expense of humanity.

The exhausting process of recording the Computer World album led the band to discuss the issue of physical exercise and it was not long after that Hütter and Schneider took up cycling. The pair encouraged the other members of the wider Kraftwerk clan to take to the roads and even formed their own cycling club, Radsportgruppe Schneider. Their all-black cycling strips matched the black coffee that sustained night-long sessions in the studio. By all accounts they were no slouches in the saddle, often completing 200 km rides and riding the classic climbs of the Tour de France and the Giro D’Italia. Of all the band members it was Hütter who took the sport most seriously, both as a rider and a spectator, making special trips to follow of the Classic races like the Paris-Roubaix.

The creative life of the band revolved around Kling Klang, the custom-built studio they describe as their ‘electric toyroom’ and ‘laboratory’. Yet Hütter explains how working in a ‘very synthetic world’ made them want to escape into ‘the fresh air, sun and wind’. Cycling helps to ‘free the mind’. Maxime Schmitt, a long-time Kraftwerk friend and collaborator told Pascal Bussy, author of the unofficial but authoritative biography Kraftwerk: Man, Machine, Music (SAF Publishing, 2001) that “the bicycle was a perfect way of getting a lot of fresh air. We noticed that it was an anti-stress sport because it concentrated totally on the bicycle. When you ride a bicycle, you don’t think about the new album, about how we are going to launch it. We realised that during three or four hours on the bicycle, we were discussing things like, ‘Oh, you have new brakes’, ‘Oh, where did you get your handlebars?’, ‘Is the saddle well adjusted?’, or ‘What about the pedals?’, things that were only connected with cycling.”

It was not long before they turned to making a record about riding a bike. Describing the Tour De France EP Hütter explained that “the bicycle is already a musical instrument on its own. The noise of the bicycle chain, the pedal and gear mechanism, for example, the breathing of the cyclist, we have incorporated all this in the Kraftwerk sound, including injecting the natural sounds into the computers in the studio.” The crisp, clean sound that came to characterise the Kraftwerk sound in the digital era of the 1990s also has a resonance in the sound of the bicycle (or rather the lack of it): “When your bike functions best, you don’t hear it – it’s silent, there’s no cracking, just shhhh – you’re gliding. It’s the same when you’re in good shape and your in form and you’re riding your bike, you hear nothing – maybe just a little bit of breath.”

This entry was posted on Friday 5 August 2005 at Friday, August 05, 2005. You can skip to the end and leave a response.