It has never been hipper to be a middle-aged German musician. At the height of Britpop, indie musicians looked to Ray Davies and Paul Weller for inspiration. Then you could hardly move for Brian Wilson pasticheurs. Five years ago, if you weren't paying homage to Gang of Four and Joy Division you were out of touch. Now bands are turning, in numbers, to the sound of West Germany in the 70s - Krautrock - to bring a twist to their music.
They've been aided by a resurgence in the availability of the original music. The past couple of years have seen reissues of the catalogues of Krautrock's prime movers - Can, Neu!, Faust, Amon Düül II. The band Harmonia, once the very definition of niche, have reformed and played at the Southbank Centre in London. The trickle of Krautrock-inspired bands has turned into a slew, and brought the temptation to talk of a "Neu Kraut" scene, if it were not for the fact that nobody is entirely sure what the term really means, musically.
"That's because it doesn't mean anything," protests Irmin Schmidt, who played keyboards with Can, arguably the most revered of the German bands. "You Brits invented the word 'Kraut' for the Germans in the war, and the bands you refer to as Krautrock all started in Germany in the late 1960s, but that's all we had in common. I don't care for the word at all." Michael Rother, guitarist for Neu! and, later, Harmonia, agrees. "I suppose it makes it easier for people to handle music if they create boxes for it, but I don't like it," he says. "The music of the bands put in that Krautrock box is so different, with so many styles and ideas - I never felt like I was close to the other bands. I always wanted to be different."
Neu!'s streamlined instrumentals - the sound dubbed "motorik", certainly the most easily recognisable and probably the most replicated of the German sounds by later bands - certainly have little in common with Can's eclectic experimentalism, Amon Düül II's improvisational space rock or Faust's cut-and-paste sound collages. But it is easy to see why British critics felt the urge to lump the groups together: they shared a desire to deconstruct and rebuild in new forms the Anglo-American guitar music that had flooded Germany in the 60s.
"They were breaking down what rock music was meant to be and dismantling it from a West German point of view," says Jim Backhouse, co-presenter of Resonance FM's weekly Kosmische Krautrock show. "But not like Frank Zappa, cynically taking rock music apart just to dismiss it as silly frippery. They did it with a genuine sense of awe and wonder. When they put it back together again, it was with the absolute joy of doing it for its own sake. That's why it still sounds so exciting."
That approach is what still appeals to those bands who attract the "Kraut" tag today. "The way bands like Can based their music more around sound, rather than structure, meant that there were endless varied results," says Aaron Hemphill, guitarist with the Brooklyn band Liars, a band with a central position in the new wave of Kraut. "It's such a deep well of inspiration because there's so much different stuff you can take from it. It's absolutely fascinating."' Liars' recent album Drum's Not Dead, with its haunting vocals, sheets of morbidly manipulated guitar and delay-drenched drums, is the most obvious product of this enthusiasm. It was even recorded in Berlin.
Not so much leaping genre walls as liquidising them, Can were the first rock band to fully incorporate classical, jazz and avant-garde elements into their sound. Two members even studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen. "The idea behind Can was to form a rock group whose members came from all the different directions of 20th-century music - Stockhausen, jazz, Hendrix - and unite all of these phenomena into a new form," explains Schmidt. The band's writing and recording process was based on improvisation and post-recording manipulation in the studio. "We tried to strike a balance between creating a form and recording our improvisations around that form," says Schmidt. "We would then use editing to improvise on those recordings again and turn a track into something else. It was a very contemporary way of making music."
The processes developed by bands such as Can act as a portal into a sonic world where inventiveness and experimentation are the norm, and are being adopted by contemporary bands who use their influences as a springboard for developing their own sound, rather than as a formula to be slavishly copied.
One such are Canadian four-piece Holy Fuck. An hour before they take to the stage at London's heaving 100 Club with a hypnotic set of propulsive neo-electro, Holy Fuck keyboard player Brian Borchedt explains how the paths forged by the Kraut bands continue to intrigue him and his bandmates. "When you decide that you don't want play Louie Louie or the 12-bar blues over and over again - that you want to break away from that idea of what rock music is and just improvise around one note and make something weird and challenging - in an odd way it's reassuring and inspiring to put a Can or Neu! record on and realise that they had that motivation, too."
Much of Holy Fuck's live set is improvised, with Borchedt and fellow keyboard player Graham Walsh's equipment set up facing each other so they can communicate how each song will develop on stage. "We set out structures and themes for our songs, but we then give ourselves room to grow and breathe within those structures and themes, which is similar to what a lot of the Krautrock bands did," says Walsh. "It gives you a bit of freedom, the ability to make music that is free-form and somewhat interpretational from night to night."
The abandonment of the traditional techniques of songwriting was a key element of the Krautrock approach. Neu!'s Rother says he had to undergo an "intellectual process of forgetting" in order to create a sound that was genuinely innovative. "In my first band, I imitated my heroes - the Beatles, the Kinks, Cream. But then Hendrix came along and, combined with what was going on externally in politics and culture at that time, it made me realise that I couldn't go on copying," he explains. "I discovered that the only way to develop your own sound was to forget the cliches, everything you had grown up with. You had to go back to the basic elements of music - one note, one harmony, one rhythm - and start again."' Thus was born Neu!'s motorik beat, as defined by Hallogallo on their first album. Motorik stripped rock music of all ornamentation and ostentation, leaving only its streamlined primal core.
Described by Brian Eno as one of the "three great beats of the 70s" (along with Fela Kuti's Afrobeat and James Brown's funk rhythm), motorik's deceptively simple, hypnotic 4/4 pulse was perfected by the late Klaus Dinger, Neu!'s drummer. It is the element of Krautrock that conjures up the classic image of driving down the autobahn towards a horizon that will never be reached. It is also the aspect of the Krautrock sound that is easiest to imitate, which is perhaps why it has become shorthand for the entire genre, despite only being used by Neu! and, on occasions, Kraftwerk. Even Stereophonics adopted it for their single Dakota.
"There's something intuitive and unique about that rhythm," says David Best of Fujiya & Miyagi, whose recent album Transparent Things was heavily motorik. "It takes out all of the flab of rock music and reduces it to its core elements. You can hear that same ethos in house music, and even some hip-hop, when they just loop and loop the best bit of a song." Rother compares motorik to "a perfect human machine - primitive and reduced". As with Krautrock, though, he says the word itself is meaningless. "Klaus didn't like the term, he preferred apache beat. It doesn't mean anything in German, although I guess it does imply the physicality of the beat, the machinery and the repetition."
Both Rother and Schmidt admit it feels strange to be held up as revered godfathers, the McCartneys and Wellers of a parallel sonic universe where choruses and middle eights came be dispensed with. "In the 1980s we were nowhere, nobody was writing about us. We faced total ignorance and rejection - you could not even buy the Neu! albums on CD until 2001," says Rother. "I do care about the positive reception we get now, but I don't like to think too much about our position in rock history. I want to stay independent of the echo and keep working, keep moving forward."
That mindset, that insistence on continuing to create new forms, rather than resting on and replicating past achievements, is Krautrock's most significant legacy. And perhaps the nearest we will get to a dictionary definition.
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