olfgang Flür was minding his own business working as an architect in Germany when all of a sudden he was a member of Kraftwerk. Between


’73 and ’87 he was their drummer, and helped to develop their futuristic, minimalist electronic sound that has influenced generations since. He’s coming to Norwich to play an audiovisual DJ set at Epic this month, and I spoke to him about his career past and present.


Before Kraftwerk you were a conventional drummer and were in a Beatles cover band. Do you still enjoy Te Beatles? Tese days I don’t listen to pop music at all; since I started writing my own songs I don’t want other music to influence me. It’s a very strange and dangerous thing, you know, to listen to beautiful music and melodies and then not be able to get them out of your brain. Suddenly you find parts of them in your own music. Te Beatles are so brilliant and so catchy; they made the music that started my career. I started by copying Ringo Starr’s style as it was easy to play. He also did minimal drumming which was good for me when I started playing Kraftwerk’s experimental music. When you met Florian and Ralf and started making music together as Kraftwerk, did you realise this was going to be massive for you or did you expect to head back to the architects office soon? Absolutely. I didn’t know what to do. I worked with this nice guy in Dusseldorf, making very interesting interior designs, and he trained me like I was his son. He wanted to teach me everything he knew and for me to take over his office when he died. Tis was a good offer! One day I was working on ground plans in the office when there was a knock on the door and suddenly these two weird people were there inviting me to a rehearsal session. I found it really difficult to get used to the kind of music that Ralf and Florian were making, it was too strange, too far away for me to start off with. How did you come to develop your special electronic drum kit device and what difference did that make to the


resulting Kraftwerk sound? Te drum kit they had for me was, in German, scheiße (shit)! A broken practice drum kit for children in fact! I told them to go and find me a proper drum kit. But of course they didn’t know if I would stay with them so they didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it in case I didn’t stay. We had the opportunity to appear on a famous culture programme in Germany, so we had to practice a song. One evening I found an automatic rhythm box that had been used on their first album; it had four or five rhythms already programmed in, like Samba, and Beat I and Beat II. Beat II I could play, it was easy…like a Merseybeat. It took us three or four days to work out how we could use that little box; we soldered some plastics on and wires, and anything we could get from the scrapyards. I put everything together and it still stank of glue. We went to Berlin, they gave me 300 Marks (the first time I had received a fee at that kind of level) to play one song on one evening at the TV show. I couldn’t believe it! We flew there…so elegant! Did you ever have any major malfunctions when playing? We sometimes fused theatres and all the lights went out, with no electrical power on stage. We had synthesisers which gave up on stage and burnt with a black smoke. We had to tune our machines in advance…we would rehearse in the afternoon and tune them, and we would leave them turned on until the show so the warmth would offer some stability to the sound. Later on they were more stable as better synthesisers were made. Te development of electronic instruments was racing in those years by Yamaha and Roland and other


Japanese companies. But by starting out how we did we gave the industry a real kick. Can you tell us a bit about your show, Musik Soldat, that you’re bringing to Norwich? I bring my own collection…you could call it techno but it’s not disco-techno. Tere are good songs from friends of mine, some DJ mixes from my Yamo music projects. I even play dance versions of two songs from my next album, called Eloquence. We have visuals too, they’re 50% of the whole show, and everything fits together, the visuals and the music. Tere’s everything from old Polaroids and home videos from years ago to some pictures I’ve been given by other people. Like woollen Kraftwerk dolls, or stained glass windows with a Kraftwerk design. I want to show not only the brilliant side of Kraftwerk but also the funny side. I’m always the one to show the human side of my former bandmates, but that’s not always to their liking. Tese days you can even make electronica on your mobile. Is there anywhere left for technology to take electronic music in the future? I like that they’ve developed smaller and cheaper ways for young people to make music, if they have the talent, and make music that comes from the heart and the brain. You must have something to talk about though, whatever instrument you use. It’s great that you sit on the train or in an airport with your earphones on and you can create something without a big studio and without a lot of money.


Lizz Page Wolfgang Flür plays at Epic on 20th June. Tickets from ueaticketbookings.co.uk 22 / June 2015/outlineonline.co.uk


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