If you were to believe the various platitudes and tributes to the band’s founder member Florian Schneider, who sadly passed away a few months back, Kraftwerk were a band whose beats literally kick-started a multitude of genres. While assembling this month’s cover feature on electronic beats, then, it felt somewhat appropriate to wedge in a classic interview with Wolfgang Flür, the band’s ‘drummer’ during their most formidable period. In it, he claims to have instigated not just the band’s invention of the drum machine, but their most electronic foundation of beats.
“It’s those beats that we are celebrating here”
(Even more extraordinary was that he made these claims to me, back in 2007!) Schneider and the other founder member of Kraftwerk, Ralf Hütter, did apparently dispute these claims but there’s no denying that, at the very least, Flür’s distinctive percussive style certainly added to the band’s live presence and historical impact. And whichever way you look at it, and whoever really did take that ‘tiny beat box’ and turn it into a world-changing drum machine, Kraftwerk really did change the face of music making as we know it. And it’s those beats - or at least what they became - that we are celebrating with this Electronic Beats special issue. So thank you to Wolfgang, Florian, Ralf et al, and to everyone else: read on and enjoy their legacy. As they say ‘musique non stop’.
andy.jones@futurenet.com