WE WERE ROBOTS
“Anyone who swims with the current will reach the big music steamship; whoever swims against the current will perhaps reach the source.” PAUL SCHNEIDER-ESLEBEN (Father to FLORIAN SCHNEIDER)
Florian Schneider, along with Ralf Hütter, was one of the founding members of Kraftwerk. If ever musicians swam against some kind of current, it was them. But so too did the other two long-standing members, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos. I’m currently reading Flür’s book, I Was A Robot, because I hoped I might learn a little more about the enigmatic nature of Kraftwerk. And I have done so far, but in the process I’ve discovered a man that writes exquisitely about such things as the imagination, creativity and his own need for artistic freedom over everything else. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t talk quite so much about the music as the kind of human experiences that making music can create. I guess the same goes for any kind of pursuit, anything that takes you on a tangential journey to unpredictable places. Anyway, it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling reading it. Maybe it will for you:
“I had known for a long time how it felt to be on stage. I had also experienced what it was like to be applauded. During my amateur period I had been in many groups, and I had grown very fond of them, even if they were not particularly successful. They were all bands, groups that I had founded. However, with Kraftwerk, the whole world stood open to me, and that was the thing - apart from my discoveries and my minimalist drumming - that most enchanted me through all my years with the group. Human contacts in every nation, countless conversations and the flirtations that often emerged from them, the universal cultural worldview that I was able to form for myself without just getting it from books - all of these things gave me wonderful experiences which later, following my painful separation, also helped me to find a way to myself, to the love and sound of my new music.”
