Together in Electro Dreams: An Interview with Wolfgang Flür

There aren’t many bands who’ve been around for going on 50 years and managed to maintain an air of mystique, but there’s still an awful lot about Kraftwerk that we don’t know.
Some insight into what goes on behind those closed Kling Klang Studio doors will be provided at Metropolis by Wolfgang Flür, the group’s drummer from 1973 to 1987, which took in such landmark albums as Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine and Computer World.

Before accepting Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter’s offer to join the pre-international breakthrough Kraftwerk – that came a year later with Autobhan - Flür had been a member of Dusseldorf’s answer to the Fab Vier, The Beathovens.

“They were the first amateur band that I founded with my schoolmates,” Wolfgang tells Hot Press. “We covered The Beatles and other songs we heard on our mono radio every Saturday afternoon from 4pm on Radio Luxembourg. My favourite album then was The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. It provided the accompanying melody and atmosphere to me falling in love for the first time, aged 17, to Brigitte!”

My perception of Kraftwerk changed a few years back when I discovered lines like "Chain reaction and mutation, contaminated population” (‘Radioactivity’) and “I’m your slave, I’m your worker” (‘The Robots’) are being darkly intoned in the German equivalent of a thick Cork accent. In other words, they’re not as unrelentingly serious as us non-Teutons think they are.

“We developed our own speech and humour – Rheinische Mundart,” he agrees. “We laughed a lot together. There was a funny situation at the Swiss border when a custom’s officer opened this flight-case, which was the size of a coffin, and found Karl Bartos’ robot-doll lying inside! The man was frightened to death because the doll looked absolutely natural.”

Wolfgang says the band felt “not shocked but happy and understood” when the Autobahn title-track earned them their first Top Of The Pops appearance, which the likes of OMD, The Human League, Depeche Mode and New Order cite as a seminal moment. They were altogether more taken aback when ‘Trans-Europe Express’ crossed the Atlantic and helped fuel the Bronx’s B-Boy explosion.

“We were absolutely surprised by this development,” he resumes. “We didn’t get to fly over to check out the likes of Afrika Bambaataa but we liked his dance/hip hop version of ‘Trans-Europe Express’, ‘Planet Rock’.”

While Wolfgang rues not being in Dusseldorf when the rest of Kraftwerk met celebrity admirer David Bowie – “My colleagues told me how nice and polite he was” – he did get to meet another of his all-time heroes, Heinz Edelmann, in Chicago.

“He’s the German illustrator and designer responsible for The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine movie,” Wolfgang reminisces fondly. “Heinz wanted music from us for one of his new cartoon films, but Ralf and Florian politely refused.”

Always the member of Kraftwerk who was most enthusiastic about playing live, Flür continues to clock up serious air miles as a ‘music presenter’.

“I’ve developed my own performance style,” he explains. “I ‘act’ music and add special effects to a selection of electro tracks fitting to the movies and images behind me on the projection screen. I move and dance. I can’t stand still; that’s my temperament!”

The 69-year-old has just released Eloquence: Complete Works, a solo retrospective, which includes the autobiographical ‘Pleasure Lane’. “I recorded it with my musical partner Stefan Lindlahr and a singer called Miriam Suarez. The song tells of my experiences in life, especially after splitting from Kraftwerk. I also love the collaboration with Anni Hogan on it, ‘Golden Light’.

“I’ve just produced a dance version of ‘Neon Lights’ for my MusikSoldat show, which I’m playing for the first time on Saturday in Milan,” he reveals. “There’s also a new album in the works. It will be titled Collaborations and I already have four titles. The highlights of my musical career are my two solo albums, Time Pie and Eloquence and meeting talented and charming music colleagues in England, Ireland, the USA, Japan and Mexico. The latest is Alexander Young, a student I met in April when I was invited to the opening of the new studios at Northbrook Music College in Worthing. He sent me a wonderful soundtrack he was working on via-the internet, and I added melodies and some lyrics to a song called ‘Robo Boy’.”

Eloquence: Complete Works and Wolfgang’s I Was A Robot autobiography are out now respectively courtesy of Cherry Red and Sanctuary Encores