A week on from the sad news that long-serving Kraftwerk member Florian Schneider had passed away at the age of 73 in April, Pete Muscutt takes a look at the life and legacy of one of the founding fathers of modern electronica, synth-pop and arguably, dance music as a whole...

Little did Florian Schneider know when he formed the avant-garde, experimental duo Kraftwerk with fellow music student Ralf Hutter in Dusseldorf, Germany some fifty years ago, that one day they would be regarded as the inventors and pioneers of an entire musical genre. Formed out of the ashes of a Krautrock ensemble called Organisation, Kraftwerk (or "power station" in English) began very differently from the slick, efficient electronic outfit they would become.

Crafting (Krafting?) melodies from modified electronic flutes, violins, guitar and analogue synthesisers, the duo's first three albums were not, commercially at least, for the faint-hearted. Bizarre, long, semi-improvised tracks with titles like 'Vom Himmel Hoch', 'Ananas Symphonie', 'Atem' and 'Strom' were not exactly easy listening. With 1974's breakthrough album 'Autobahn', featuring the famous 22-minute title track (which was mercilessly hacked down to form a rudimentary 3-minute pop single!) the duo ditched the acoustic instruments, and focused for the first time on purely electronic sounds. Schneider reflected on this in interviews as being a process, whereby a microphone, loudspeakers, echo unit and then a synthesiser were purchased, with the conventional instruments gradually being used less and less. It was also around this time that Schneider and Hutter enlisted Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur, the electronic percussionists that would form the most stable line-up of the group for several years.

Rather than a musician, Schneider's friend and co-founder Ralf Hutter described him as a "sound perfectionist", who preferred being ensconced inside the studio, creating new sounds and rhythms to the idea of constantly touring. His expertise in this field led to the creation of a new electronic flute instrument, as well as vocoder and speech synthesis machines. One of these, the Robovox, became a much-utilised part of the Kraftwerk studio.

Schneider, along with Hutter, have the honour of being the only men to play on every Kraftwerk studio recording, up to his departure from the group in 2008. No clear reason was given as to him severing ties with the group, with his position in the famous four-workstation stage line-up taken by video technician Stefan Pfaffe. One mystery that has sadly been taken to the grave is the folder that Schneider would take with him as he left the stage at the end of a performance - usually after performing a short solo improvisation during the traditional set-closer 'Music Non Stop'. Quite what was in the folder - technical information? Set-list? Notes on the evening's performance? - will unfortunately never be known...

While some people will claim to have never heard of Kraftwerk (and, for the casual music fan, this could well be true - despite their sole UK No.1 single in 1982 - 'The Model' - they were not known for troubling the upper echelons of the charts) their status as "the electronic Beatles" is often massively understated. It was not always this way, however; even their early album releases were met with derision from the music press, who did not put much faith in four guys pretending to be shop window mannequins. "These are the sorts of guys who would gladly see the planet blown up just to see what noise it makes" said one less than favourable review. The sheer list of bands and artists we probably wouldn't have been privy to, or would have had to wait a much longer time for them to emerge, is endless. So many of the modern synth-pop, electronic, industrial and dance acts we know today owe a huge debt of gratitude to them.

My own introduction to the group came through the music press, who, in early 1997, ran articles with such intriguing titles as "WHO THE FUCK ARE KRAFTWERK?" in readiness for the band's first major show for a few years, headlining that year's Tribal Gathering event in Luton. Reading more and more about this strange, reclusive, enigmatic group of what appeared to be red-shirted robots with slicked-back hair made me want to investigate further, and listening in to a Radio 1 broadcast of their performance was the ideal place to do it. Like many others before, and countless more after me, I was blown away. From the first strains of the vocoder introduction - "Mein damen und herren...die mensch maschine...KRAAAFFT...WERRRRK" and the insistent, early-techno sounds of 'Numbers', I was hooked. It was like nothing I had ever heard before, and I suddenly saw what my mum meant when she'd told me Kraftwerk were "that foreign lot who made 'Doctor Who' music".

The very next day, I went out and bought four Kraftwerk albums - 'Autobahn', 'Radio-Activity', 'Trans Europe Express' and 'The Mix', and lapped them all up (and still do to this day). The band were even the catalyst for me making new friends, when, in the course of wanting to find out about them in the pre-internet society we then lived in, I wrote to Teletext's much-missed 'Planet Sound' pages, with a request for people to get in touch with more information. I still regularly correspond with someone I met through this, and eagerly discuss bands we have a mutual love of, as well as swapping song lyrics and compositions we have each come up with.

With just ten studio albums in their fifty years in music, theirs is not an intensive discography, but one crafted with a typical German precision and perfectionism. Listening to their albums, some of them could almost have been recorded yesterday - not an ounce of fat, filler or wasted lyrics evident in any of the tracks they committed to tape. Whereas many bands and artists invariably see their work endlessly repackaged, re-issued and re-released as anniversary and deluxe editions, it is somewhat refreshing to see that, despite a 2009 remastering campaign and a recent 3D live performance boxed set, there has been very little activity on this front from Kraftwerk.  Their music is, and remains, as it was, untainted by time, with very little of it sounding dated or behind the times (the one exception being the somewhat disappointing 'Electric Cafe' from 1986, when most of the bands Kraftwerk had inspired had gotten their acts together and were creating sounds and songs that in many cases utilised technology that even Kraftwerk were not up to speed with). Their famous Kling klang studio in Dusseldorf (where the band maintained a weekly, 9-5 "office worker" schedule) saw a digital overhaul in 1991 to alleviate this problem. This was after it had been re-designed in the early 1980s to allow them to take much of their sound equipment with them on a lengthy tour in support of their 'Computer World' album of 1981, and the new stream-lined space was implemented so that the previously analogue recordings and instrumentation could be modernised as the times changed.

The sheer scale of what Kraftwerk achieved in musical terms in hard to put into words. To say they inspired an entire generation is an understatement (one only has to look to the volume of acts who have sampled the band - legally or not - as an example of this), and their modus operandi is not one that would perhaps work in such a social-media heavy world as the one we occupy today. Despite this, and their infamously reclusive nature, it was the unlikely figure of Coldplay's Chris Martin who made contact with the band, writing to Ralf Hutter to ask permission to use the melody of the band's 1981 track 'Computer Love' as the instrumental refrain to their 2005 single 'Talk'. In response to Martin's request, Hutter reportedly sent him back a one-word, handwritten reply: 'YES'.

Although hampered by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Kraftwerk are still very much a mainstay of world tours and the festival circuit, which comes after a period where it seemed unlikely they would perform live much in the future. Certainly, there was immense and widespread fervour for their '3D' live shows, which saw edited versions of each album performed during residencies at various venues, with an accompanying 3D visual element to the shows. Speculation still runs rife about an "imminent" new Kraftwerk album, although long-term fans know to take such words as "imminent" with a handful of salt, even if such comments are from Ralf Hutter himself. Will a new LP ever emerge from the Kling klang studios? Only time will tell. But in the meantime, we thank Florian Schneider for his foresight, vision and musical ability, that, along with Ralf Hutter, gave birth to a brand new sound - a shimmering, romantic, futuristic, precise and above all else, danceable, distillation of electronica that is quite unlike anything else out there.

R.I.P. Florian.

Words by Pete Muscutt