The quietest revolution

Look at these guys. It's March 21st 1976 and they are in Rotterdam. It's six months since they released their second album as a four piece, 'Radio-Aktivität', the follow up to their now legendary classic 'Autobahn'.

Certainly in the UK, the music press doesn't quite know what to make of them, lumping their band, Kraftwerk, in with the lazy (and racist) genre of 'Krautrock'. Yet, these four young men - Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos, Wolfgang Flür, and Ralf Hütter - will have more impact on the music of the next forty-five years than any other band.

Their next album, 'Trans-Europa Express', will be picked up by David Bowie and directly impact his record, 'Low', which in turn will inspire such electronic luminaries as The Human League, Ultravox!, and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. Just over twenty years after this photo was taken, Madonna will release 'Ray Of Light', completing electronic music's colonization of the mainstream. (Later, her track 'Music' will directly lift from 'Trans-Europa Express'.)

They have yet to take on the various outfits that will become synonymous with their public image, although the impact of Gilbert and George's Düsseldorf show can be seen in their short hair as well as Hütter and Schneider's suits.

That exhibition is one of maybe two contemporary influences the band displays*. Their generation is metaphorically 'fatherless' and they have taken their lead from Germany's art scene in the late twenties and early thirties. Their haircuts are at odds with the wider 'kosmiche' scene, which they have already left behind, but in a country so acutely aware of its immediate past, they are as revolutionary as any punk statement, a situation they will aggravate massively with the cover of their later album 'Die Mensch Maschine'.

By the time they enter the public gaze with their surprise number one, 'Das Model', Kraftwerk's imperial phase will be over and their part in this, the quietest of revolutions that will take electronic music from novelty genre to the centre of pop music, will be complete.

I bought these two photos from Getty Images and had them printed and framed together. I enjoy the fact that they are from a time before Kraftwerk's public image was crystallised, before the full ambition of their "Gesamtkunstwerk" was established and subsequently delivered, pictures taken when they couldn't possibly conceive of their own as yet unrealised but extraordinary cultural significance.

There is something wonderfully informal about the shots, although they are clearly posing in the first one, and they work as a pair to illustrate the sense of humour that runs through everything the band ever did. There are many images of Kraftwerk I love, especially ones from the 'Computer World' tour, but these two make my heart ache.

At the time the photos were taken, I was only ten and living half a world away. I had never heard of Kraftwerk, yet they'd become the most important band to me in a lifetime of loving music. And looking at these pictures now, I feel an almost overwhelming and oddly paternal love for these four young men.

*The other is 'Jetsex' by Tonto's Expanding Head Band. Mind you, I've never heard anyone else make this connection, so take it with a pinch of salt.

Reading: 'A Treachery Of Spies' by Manda Scott (on @ferryoons recommendation).