Florian Schneider: the Human Face of Kraftwerk’s Ghost in the Machine

Kraftwerk were always hurtling towards the future. So it’s strange that the response to news of the passing at 73 of Florian Schneider, for decades the group’s primary driving force alongside Ralf Hütter, feels so much like a throwback.

It hit us the way rock star deaths used to, back when such events still felt like a bolt from beyond our realm of experience. When we genuinely believed some things – music icons, especially – were forever.

With coronavirus and the purgatory of lockdown non-stop, perhaps we’re all feeling more emotional than usual. Or maybe it’s to do with the fact that, as with Bowie and Prince, Kraftwerk were carved completely from the new.

They conjured an entirely original sound out of thin air. From their roots in the avant-garde scene of late ’60s Düsseldorf, Schneider and Hütter essentially created electronic music. They were the ghosts in the man-machine, deploying soundscapes that spoke to the industrial age whilst also brimming with humanity.

It goes without saying, at this point, that they were massively influential. Rap producers in New York were first to glom on to what they were doing, with Afrika Bambaataa, for instance, pinched the frosty riff from ‘Trans-Europe Express’ for ‘Planet Rock’.

Bowie was hip to them, too: ‘V-2 Schneider’ from Heroes was his homage to Florian. And Kraftwerk returned the compliment, ‘Trans-Europe Express’ being their shout-out to Bowie and ‘Station to Station’ (a companion homage to the thrill of a train journey into the sunset).

Pop is all about irony. And never more so than with Kraftwerk. As anyone who saw them perform will testify, in concert Schneider and Hütter played the part of groove-purveying robots. And yet, just beneath the surface, they vibrated with emotion.

Has there, for instance, ever been a better song written about freedom, the sense of a future stretched before you, than ‘Autobahn’? Or a track to induce melancholic tingles as mercilessly as ‘Neon Lights’?

Kraftwerk’s music – so sternly teutonic on the outside – was laced with dry wit, too. ‘Pocket Calculator’ was a hilarious bop. ‘Autobahn’s chorus of “Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn” winked towards the Beach Boys, who embodied California much as Kraftwerk hoped to embody the soul of Mitteleuropa.

All that and they furnished us with a lifetime supply of humorous anecdotes. There are all those tales of their addiction to cycling. And the Johnny Marr story about how their Kling Klang studio in Düsseldorf was outfitted with phones that did not ring: instead you called at a prearranged time and Hütter would pick up the handset.

Obviously it is their exquisite electronica that will be Schneider’s legacy – a sound that had the miraculous quality of representing the gleaming and new. “Kraftwerk really created electronic music out of nothing,” pop historian Simon Reynolds told me in 2012. “This idea that people have always recycled, it's very fatalistic.”

But being different is the easy part. Bringing people with you is the challenge In the case of Schneider and Kraftwerk the magic flowed from the emotion bound up with the mould-breaking.

“‘Autobahn’ was about our life touring the universities and the art galleries and museums in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” Hütter told me in 2013. “We did hundred of thousands of kilometres in my old Volkswagen, which I put on the cover of the record.

“It was a fantasy that I created with my former partner Florian. We dreamed of hearing our music on the car radio. It was our hope that, with the song ‘Autobahn’, it might one day become true. Our career is like a road movie that started in 1974.”