In the course of a long listening career, records tend to come and go. I look back at old columns and marvel at the enthusiasm I once felt for records I no longer remember owning, let alone enjoying. Some records come and go and come back again, of course, and a few stay for ever: the 30 or so albums you’d be buying tomorrow on Amazon if your house burnt down today. And just occasionally there’s an album you think has gone for good but which returns, better than ever before, and you wonder, was it always this good? Was I not paying attention? Shall I play it again right now, or wait until tomorrow?
One record always leads to another, and this trail began with a CD on the cover of Mojo, the magazine that caters for the unreconstructed elderly rocker who doesn’t mind reading ten-page features on The Doors. (People are always writing in and saying, what about Gentle Giant and Van Der Graaf Generator?) Mojo’s cover CDs are always themed and usually reflect very specialist tastes which aren’t mine. But one of them, Mojo Presents OK Computer, was irresistible. Nothing to do with Radiohead: this was a random aggregation of old and new synthesiser music, including early Human League, Tangerine Dream, silly old Gary Numan, some dodgy old funk and even something by John Foxx, the original lead singer of Ultravox (he was actually called Dennis Leigh). There were also some terrific newer songs that have led me down other musical paths, but my overwhelming feeling after listening to this a few times was, I need Kraftwerk. Give me Kraftwerk. It was a little like being pregnant and wanting to eat soil. Except that, in this case, massively computerised electronic music by four Germans pretending to be robots was the only thing that would do.
Kraftwerk, of course, retain a reputation as great innovators, whose strikingly original music of the 1970s has been shamelessly ripped off by several generations of hip-hop and R&B artists. I have some of their albums but on vinyl, which shows how long it is since I listened to any of them. There’s also something slightly deadening about the idea of a band who are best known for being influential. The implication is that, while they had the ideas, others went on and made better use of them. And so a band just drifts off, over the horizon, until a quarter of a century later, when the craving suddenly starts.
I bought their 2005 live double, Minimum-Maximum, going cheap in a second-hand CD emporium. Not that Kraftwerk really ‘play’ live as such: the machines are running the show, which makes this album a sort of greatest hits with occasional applause. It’s mesmerising stuff. Much of the older material has been subtly reshaped, the newer ones are a little dull, but what stand out are the tracks from their 1981 album Computer World. It sounded old-fashionedly futuristic then; now it sounds timeless. I went out and bought the 1970s albums again on CD. Trans-Europe Express is the groundbreaker; The Man-Machine has the daft novelty single, ‘The Model’; but Computer World is the one. It teems with musical ideas: it’s almost as though they put everything they had into the one album, in the hope that more and better ideas would turn up later.
But they didn’t. That was it. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, their reclusive leaders, became obsessive cyclists, and recorded two new albums in 25 years. Other band members gradually drifted away, and even Schneider left recently. Instead of ideas, there were remixes, tours and live albums. But we are left, happily, with Computer World. If you can’t improve on perfection, at least you achieved it in the first place. Maybe I will play it again now after all.
In Robin Holloway’s music column last week, the end sentence should have read: ‘Influence without Anxiety is what all three, in their blissful perfection, proclaim.’ Apologies all round.
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