KARLBARTOS.COM

7th January 2010

Football, Motorik And The Pulse Of Modernity – John Doran , January 6th

When we started The Quietus we made the fairly arbitrary decision that modern popular music started with KW’s ‘Autobahn’ in 1974. John Doran talks to Michael Rother, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Karl Bartos about the build up to this flash point in musical history

Excerpt:

Speaking to the Quietus last year about this 1975 tour of the States and how they became an unlikely cult concern amongst black fans of funk and proto disco, Bartos said: “This happened not too long after my first encounter with Ralf and Florian. In 1975 we went over the Atlantic and spent 10 weeks on the road. We went from coast to coast and then to Canada. And all the black cities like Detroit or Chicago, they embraced us. It was good fun. In a way apparently they saw some sort of very strange comic figures in us I guess but also they didn't miss the beats. I was growing up with the funky beats of James Brown and I brought them in more and more. Not during Autobahn or Radio-Activity but more and more during the late 70s. We took some black beats into our music and this was very attractive to the black musicians and the black audiences in the States. In a way probably it reminds me of what The Beatles did. They took some Chuck Berry tunes and they transferred it to our European culture before taking it back to America and everyone understood that. In a way that was probably what we did with black rhythm and blues. But we mixed it of course with our own identity of the electronic music approach and European melodies. And this was good enough to succeed in America.”

He said it was some time before he actually realised that they'd had a direct effect on black dance music producers: “Well it happened [some years later] actually when we were in New York and we were in the street and we saw a record shop full of our records and black people stood in front of them making jokes about the covers and about how strange we were looking, but people were making loops out of 'Metal On Metal' and dancing to it. These loops were going on forever! Made from just these heavy metal sounds! They were break-dancing to it. Then we were aware that we had access to this culture.”

The phenomenal success of 'Autobahn' both signalled the rise of KW to international prominence and the end of the genre's imperial phase elsewhere. But on the world stage the long and fruitful history of electronic dance music was only just beginning.