KRAFTWERK Quotes

“The year 1968 was also ground zero for popular music in Germany. Karl Bartos, in 1968 a 16-year-old gifted classical musician, puts it like this: ‘We don’t have the blues in our genes and we weren’t born in the Mississippi Delta. There were no black people in Germany. So instead we thought we’d had this development in the twenties which was very, very strong and was audio-visual. We had the Bauhaus school before the war; and then after the war we had tremendous people like Karlheinz Stockhausen and the development of the classical and the electronic classical. This was very strong and it all happened very close to Düsseldorf, in Cologne, and all the great composers at that time came there. During the late forties up until the seventies they all came to Germany; people like John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Pierre Schaeffer, and they all had this fantastic approach to modern music, and we felt it would make more sense to see Kraftwerk as part of that tradition more than anything else.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“We had to redefine our musical culture. Not only our musical culture, however: at the end of the sixties all German artists had the same problems. Writers, directors, painters … all of them had to invent a new language.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“Tellingly, Ralf has revealed himself as an Internet sceptic. One suspects he thinks the World Wide Web has made things too easy for people, certainly too easy to ‘pollute’ the world with the meaningless and the inconsequential. ‘I am not a fan of the Internet, I think it’s overrated. Intelligent information is still intelligent information and an overflow of nonsense does not really help. In Germany it’s called Datenmüll: data rubbish.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“Secretly, many punks were in love with Genesis and Pink Floyd, but to say that in an interview would have been the end of a bright career. And,”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“One of the songs which certainly impacted greatly in the summer of 1977 was a song which sounded as if Kraftwerk had gone potty and recruited a bona fide American soul singer. In fact, it wasn’t Kraftwerk, but Italian musician and producer Giorgio Moroder. ‘One day in Berlin,’ says Bowie, ‘Eno came running in and said, “I have heard the sound of the future.” … He puts on “I Feel Love”, by Donna Summer … He said, “This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.” Which was more or less right.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“Asked why he thought Florian had left, Wolfgang Flür’s reply was terse, but probably accurate: ‘Too old, not necessary any more, enough money, especially no more flying: he was tired of all that. I think he should have done it earlier, much earlier.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation

“Punk was the politicised pop experience again,’ is Peter Saville’s assessment. ‘It was for a generation for whom the established music scene wasn’t working … by the time you are floating helium balloons over Battersea Power Station you are not speaking for 15 year olds on housing estates. Pop had lost its authenticity and punk was super-authentic. Punk was the band standing next to you having a drink at the bar rather than ultra-beings that you queued up with three thousand others to watch. Suddenly music was part of your reality again.”
― David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation