THE PROG INTERVIEW

Wolfgang Flür

Every month we get inside the mind of one of the biggest names in music. This issue it’s Wolfgang Flür. The drummer, who teamed up with Michael Rother in Spirits Of Sound, is best known for playing percussion with Kraftwerk between 1973 and 1987. Along with Conny Plank, he formed part of the band’s shift from krautrock towards a more electronic, synthetic sound. Now, 35 years after his departure, he’s released a new solo album that finds him collaborating with a host of experimental artists, including Midge Ure and Claudia Brücken. Prog catches up with him to look back on his groundbreaking work and find out how he almost worked with David Bowie.

Words: Julian Marszalek

The man behind the machine: Wolfgang Flür.

Though there are many disciples and offspring who follow in their wake, few are bands or artists who can claim with any degree of honesty to have altered the course of music. Occupying that rarefied space are Kraftwerk, a group so far ahead of the curve that the ramifications of their work are still being felt to thi very day. Their run of albums from 1974’s Autobahn through to Computer World in 1981 remain peerless examples of a whole new genre of music being created that at once anticipated the future while simultaneously defining it.

New solo album, Magazine 1.

PRESS/TOM STEINSEIFER

Crucial to the band’s rise was electronic percussionist Wolfgang Flür. Born in Frankfurt in 1947, Flür began to make his name as a drummer in the 60s first with the punningly named and Merseybeat-inspired The Beathovens and then with Spirits Of Sound where he was joined by future Kraftwerk member and Neu! founder Michael Rother.

But it’s for his work with Kraftwerk that Wolfgang Flür will be best remembered. Joining founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider after the release of Kraftwerk’s third album, Ralf Und Florian, Flür aided the pair in pushing their synthesised agenda further forward by helping to create an electronic drum kit. So while the gamechanging Autobahn was the last Kraftwerk album to feature traditional instruments such as guitars, violins and flutes, it was the first to entirely eradicate acoustic drumming and rhythms. In the process, Kraftwerk rejected entirely the influence of British and American rock and bluesbased music for a vernacular that saw this uniquely German band reinvent and reclaim its musical culture after the horrors of the country’s recent past. And in doing so, they ushered in a new epoch of musical modernity that set off a big bang that exploded in all manner of directions.