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Kraftwerk in 1997, with Florian Schneider pictured second from right.
Kraftwerk circa 1975, with Florian Schneider pictured second from right. Photograph: Kraftwerk/Getty Images
Kraftwerk circa 1975, with Florian Schneider pictured second from right. Photograph: Kraftwerk/Getty Images

Florian Schneider: the enigma whose codes broke open pop music

This article is more than 3 years old
Alexis Petridis

The Kraftwerk co-founder remained a mystery even after death, but there is no doubting the impact he made with his group’s sublime, visionary music

Florian Schneider’s death came shrouded in a degree of secrecy. Gossip among fans about his health was first provoked at the end of April, when his fellow former Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür posted a sweet photo on social media of him and Schneider together in a bar, without explanation.

It had apparently been taken in 2016 – a decade and a half after Schneider and fellow founder member Ralf Hütter had served Flür with a lawsuit provoked by his autobiography I Was a Robot – and was subsequently deleted from Flür’s Facebook page. Then, a week later, another electronic musician based in Germany, the Manchester-born Mark Reeder, posted a brief eulogy; one commenter claimed that Schneider had died “several days ago”.

It was hard to know what was going on: Schneider had kept such a low profile after leaving Kraftwerk that rumours of his death had circulated before, only to be revealed as erroneous when he unexpectedly appeared at a Paris charity event in late 2015, wearing a jaunty jacket and matching hat apparently made from a recycled laundry bag, and premiered a song called Stop Plastic Pollution. Then finally, his death, apparently from cancer, was confirmed by the German branch of Sony Records; according to one source, Schneider died a week ago and had been buried in a private ceremony.

In a sense, this was the perfect departure for Florian Schneider. Few people could have claimed to have exerted as much musical influence while remaining so enigmatic. Given Kraftwerk’s pivotal impact on everything from synthpop to hip-hop to house and techno, it’s very difficult indeed to imagine what modern music would sound like had they, and specifically the five albums they released between 1974 and 1981, not existed. But what interviews Kraftwerk gave were vague on details, given to rewriting the past – they did their best to excise the first three albums they made from history, declining to re-release them despite a burgeoning market in bootlegs, and weren’t above changing their record sleeves to remove the faces of former members – and offered almost no personal information at all: Ralf Hütter was voluble on his love of cycling, and Schneider had a daughter, but whatever else they got up to when they weren’t being Kraftwerk remained a mystery.

And Schneider was the most enigmatic of the lot. There is hilarious footage of a persistent Brazilian journalist attempting to coax some quotes out of him and getting nowhere (“What songs are you going to play tonight?” “All”), while on another occasion, he consented to give an interview while wearing a fake moustache, claiming he had invented “humanoid sequencers” in 1947 and purporting to not remember who Kraftwerk were. Schneider received co-writing and co-production credits on virtually every track they produced during the imperial phase that stretched from Autobahn to Computer World, but it wasn’t entirely clear what he did in the band. Initially a flute and violin player, his keyboard skills were apparently limited; when pressed on Schneider’s role, Hütter talked vaguely of him as a “sound fetishist” with an interest in speech synthesis (Schneider patented a “system for synthesised singing in real time” called the Robovox in 1990), who ensured the sonic quality of their music was “up to a certain standard” and implied that his perfectionism was one reason why Kraftwerk released so few records after 1981.

In fact, without Schneider, there seems every chance that Kraftwerk would never have existed in the first place. Ralf Hütter gradually emerged as the band’s spokesman and, eventually, became their solitary original member, but according to David Buckley’s exhaustively-researched book Kraftwerk: Publikation, it was Schneider who started the band in the first place – after a brief period performing with an experimental combo with the remarkable name of Pissoff – and Schneider who ensured the band continued when Hütter briefly left to finish his university studies. The wealth of his father, a celebrated architect, meant Schneider could afford the latest musical technology, which – following a debut album under the name Organisation and two Kraftwerk albums in the avant-garde style that defined early 70s German progressive rock – increasingly came to shape the band’s sound, setting them apart from their krautrock peers. Most of the classic Kraftwerk elements were in place on 1973’s Ralf und Florian: electronic rhythms that dispensed with the need for a traditional drummer, pulsing synthesisers that presage dance music, and a gradual shift away from krautrock’s penchant for improvisation towards simple, compact melodies. It also demonstrated Schneider’s importance in defining Kraftwerk’s image. On the cover, Hütter is still long-haired and vaguely hippyish; Schneider’s hair is short, neatly parted in a style that recalled the 1930s, and he wears a suit and tie.

The robots ... Kraftwerk, with Schneider far right. Photograph: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images

By the time of Autobahn, all of Kraftwerk looked like that. Moreover, the title track honed the musical advances of its predecessor into a 22-minute piece of music that sounded utterly unlike anything in British or American rock and pop, despite its wry lyrical nod to the Beach Boys’ Fun Fun Fun (Kraftwerk would later begin 1977’s Showroom Dummies with a clipped “eins, zwei, drei, vier” in homage to the Ramones). It was so futuristic the band made their British TV debut not on Top of the Pops, but on Tomorrow’s World, the most memorable moment of their appearance coming when Schneider unexpectedly broke ranks with their wilfully stiff, automaton-like performance and stared directly at the camera with an oleaginous smile that looked both ridiculous and faintly chilling. An extremely dry sense of humour was to prove another Kraftwerk trademark.

Plenty of British synth musicians have suggested Kraftwerk’s arrival on British TV represented a life-changing eureka moment, but not everyone was enamoured with music so uncoupled from prevalent trends. Their 1975 UK tour was sparsely attended and attracted hostile reviews (“spineless, emotionless … keep the robots out of music,” blustered Melody Maker); the accompanying album, the gorgeously atmospheric Radio-Activity, flopped almost everywhere but France.

Florian Schneider at the Parley for the Oceans dinner as part of the COP21 in 2015. Photograph: Poree Audrey/ABACA/PA Images

1977’s Trans-Europe Express, however, proved another breakthrough: for all Kraftwerk’s rejection of standard Anglo-American rock and pop tropes, there was something weirdly danceable about the machine rhythm that underpinned the title track. If you want evidence of how ahead of their time they were, it took another five years for Trans-Europe Express to be repurposed as the Soul Sonic Force’s groundbreaking hip-hop single Planet Rock. A year after that, Detroit techno pioneer Juan Atkins used a sample of The Hall of Mirrors as the basis for Cybotron’s Clear. In 2014, with the full extent of Kraftwerk’s influence apparent, the LA Times called it “the most important pop album of the last 40 years”.

Kraftwerk made two more astonishing albums. 1978’s The Man-Machine was home to both The Model – a UK No 1 four years later, by which time British pop had begun to catch up with Kraftwerk’s innovations – and The Robots, which became the band’s unofficial theme tune. 1981’s Computer World might be their creative pinnacle, an incredible collection of songs underpinned by rhythms that demonstrated that the least funky-looking band on the planet had an innate, if idiosyncratic, understanding of the dancefloor. Remarkably, for an album made at the cutting-edge of technology, it hasn’t dated at all nearly 40 years on, evidence of the fact that rock and pop now exists in a world that Kraftwerk did a huge amount to invent, where music is made by computer as a matter of course and where no one believes that the use of synthesisers denotes a lack of emotion or impact. Hanging over everything from Coldplay to dubstep, Daft Punk to Jay-Z, they may well be the single most influential band since the Beatles.

Kraftwerk’s actual production of music slowed to a crawl as the 80s progressed – 1986’s disappointing Electric Café, a remix collection in 1990, Tour de France Soundtracks in 2003, nothing new since – although in recent years they’ve toured relentlessly, the world’s most futuristic heritage act, playing the classics with 3D visuals at festivals and in art galleries. At some point, Schneider left, although, characteristically, when or why isn’t clear. It was announced in 2009, but in an interview later that year, Ralf Hütter claimed he was “not really involved in Kraftwerk for many, many years”. As with almost everything else about Florian Schneider, it remains a mystery; virtually the only thing you can say for certain is that the music he helped create changed pop forever.

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