John Harris 

Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany by David Stubbs – review

The emergence of krautrock was one of postwar culture's most spectacular blossomings. By John Harris
  
  

Kraftwerk
Musical economy … Kraftwerk performing in New York. Photograph: Mike Coppola/Getty Images Photograph: Mike Coppola/Getty Images

It is a truth too little acknowledged, but surely incontestable: rock music, during its 40-year era (1954 to 1994, roughly – its most obvious bookends are the first Elvis Presley single and the suicide of Kurt Cobain), had its roots in the second world war. Certainly, in Britain, its pioneers – members of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who – were almost all war babies, driven to break out of austerity by embracing and then developing an art form that represented its complete antithesis.

Jeff Nuttall's 1968 book Bomb Culture makes the argument that the accelerated, in-the-moment ways of pop were driven by the threat of imminent extinction revealed at Hiroshima. Whether that's true or not, duty and conformism were threatened by forces embodied in music: to the right ears, a record as unhinged as, say, Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" ("Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom!") served notice that tomorrow barely mattered and the idea of being stuffed into a military uniform – as happened to Elvis in 1958 – was reprehensible.

In the new West Germany, the postwar generation's push into a new era was more dramatic. Authority figures were not just cruel and moralistic, but often former Nazis, whose recent past was part of a history that was buried under the influence of the US and a flimsy kind of consumerism. Those with creative minds found themselves without any sense of heritage, and an urge to rebel. As a Cologne-based drummer named Jaki Liebezeit saw it, he and his peers "wanted to do something completely new … pop revolution, student revolution, build a new society, make everything better". In nearby Dusseldorf, a doctor's son called Ralf Hütter saw his task as a benign kind of national restoration. "Our parents were bombed out of their homes," he said. "Their main interest was to reconstruct a life for themselves. They became obsessed with material things and went over the top. In the 1960s our generation reintroduced consciousness and a social conscience into Germany. Music didn't exist and we had to make it up."

Such thinking fed into one of postwar culture's most spectacular artistic blossomings, which occurred between the late 60s and the mid-70s. Its stars defied the idea that rock and pop were best played by Americans and Britons, and often minted approaches to music years ahead of their time; even the names of the groups evoke a futuristic dazzle – Kraftwerk, Neu!, Can, Cluster. Some of the stuff made by this German generation inevitably dated fast, blurring into the florid, tiresome stuff we know as progressive rock: psychedelia-turned-pathological. But the best of the new music was experimental, while also holding fast to ideas of discipline and musical economy, and almost entirely devoid of hippyish affectations. As a result, though its initial appeal was cultish, it has slowly taken its place in the rock canon: indeed, it is only in the last 10 years or so that it has reached its peak of influence and esteem.

In the UK, what some Germans knew as kosmische musik was promoted by the music press and the radio show hosted by John Peel, but it unfortunately entered a culture in which Hitler references were still obligatory and even German longhairs were the focus of jokes about goose-stepping and the Luftwaffe. Thus, perhaps thanks to the then deputy editor of Melody Maker – and future Guardian writer – Richard Williams, it became known as krautrock ("If I did it, it was inadvertent, and I'd never have used it twice," he insists). The musicians weren't best pleased, but the name stuck. In 1995, its posthumous revival was sparked by Krautrocksampler, a beautifully rendered "field guide" by the musician, historian and writer Julian Cope, and now, every issue of any number of music magazines will include at least one mention of the word.

This is the story that David Stubbs attempts to tell in Future Days. It is a complicated tale, populated by groups whose genealogy is near-impenetrable, and one that takes in the student revolts of 1968, the rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof gang and postwar German cinema. Besides which, there is the towering presence of a group who emerged from the early stirrings of krautrock, but soon escaped it: Kraftwerk, founded by Hütter and Florian Schneider, whose trailblazing electronic music made the "rock" element of krautrock a complete misnomer, and whose legacy overshadows everything else in the book. Including their story here is almost like squashing the rise and fall of the Beatles into a text about 1960s pop: obligatory, but also unsatisfactory.

So what to do? Stubbs's solution is to attempt to tell the whole story in a meandering prologue, and then flesh it out in chapters devoted to either specific groups or musicians yoked together by projects or locations, as well as a miscellany headed "fellow travellers". He also regularly evangelises about the music's wonders, and links it to his own life, with distinctly mixed results. The result is an uneven book packed with an abundance of information that cries out to be edited and rearranged. When everything coheres, though, the text is illuminating, and capably done. Chapters on the commune-turned-band Amon Duul II and Can (featuring Liebezeit) are built on face-to-face encounters, long conversations, and a potent sense of time and place. By way of illustrating their permissive milieu, multi-instrumentalist Chris Karrer is quoted recalling a Russian fan named Anatole: "He used to dance to our music in a very extreme fashion. Once I saw him at the front of the stage with this naked old woman and he was shoving his Vaselined finger in and out of her backside to the rhythm of the music while ringing a bell at the same time." Liebezeit, whose eureka moment came when an audience member told him to play the drums more monotonously, recalls a rehearsal when he attempted to convince Can's bass player, Holger Czukay, to play "less, less, less" with the aid of an axe.

Yet the chapter on Kraftwerk is largely a blow-by-blow résumé of their albums, followed by an awkward restatement of their brilliance, built around aphorisms printed in block capitals (for example, "KRAFTWERK'S RETICENCE IN INTERVIEWS IS UNDERSTANDABLE, EVEN NECESSARY", "KRAFTWERK ARE NONCONFORMISTS"). And the author's verbal raptures soon pall. "Can were not just a group but a way of being, a way indeed of living forever, an infinite organic continuum," he writes. The album by the same group that gives the book its title is credited with being an "ambient" record, "but its ambience is that of the year 2050, a dappled landscape of lapping, glittering waters and shimmering mirages." You what?

At one point, Stubbs quotes the brilliantly grumpy krautrock instrumentalist Klaus Schulze, quoting Stravinsky: "Music is just notes. What you speculate beyond that is pure nonsense." Those words rattled around my head before I bowed to the inevitable, put down the book, and went straight to the source: as the admirably succinct Julian Cope later put it, "the music of a whole Youth-nation, working out their blues".

• To order Future Days for £16 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

 

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