Karl Bartos was a jobbing classical percussionist when, in 1974, he was invited to audition for the experimental pop group Kraftwerk. Shortly after, they motored to fame with Autobahn. But this dual identity, as Bartos’s enjoyable memoir shows, would continue throughout Bartos’s Kraftwerk tenure: one minute they were recording Radioactivity, the next he was performing Bartok, and he supplemented his stingy Kraftwerk salary with a teaching day job.
From the outside, Kraftwerk were an enigma. Imitating robots and crafting synthetic sounds, they were a band that posed questions about what it means to be human in the industrial age. From the inside, though, they were ordinary. They hung out at cafes, cycled bikes and harboured resentments. When, during a French tour, founding member Florian Schneider casually bought a pair of “extremely expensive” shoes on the Champs Elysée, it dawned on Bartos that there was a significant financial difference in the band. Ultimately, he realised that the two founders, Schneider and Ralf Hütter, saw the band as their private company, with Bartos merely an employee.
Like many music memoirs, The Sound of the Machine is written in an agreeably plain style, aided by Katy Derbyshire’s lucid translation. “At 22 years of age, I was fairly laid-back, but it felt a hell of a lot like I’d ended up in some movie,” Bartos says of visiting NYC for the first time on the Autobahn tour. When he meets Stockhausen, the elder composer recommends schmoozing politicians. Bartos touches on the crass Nazi tropes of English journalists and recounts Kraftwerk visiting Auschwitz on the Computer World tour. More candour, though, would have enlivened things: for instance, Bartos recalls partying till 8am at the Berlin nightclub Tresor, but carefully avoids giving details.
As a music nerd, I was interested to learn that the stacked perfect fourths in Trans Europe Express were based on Stravinsky. Surprisingly, a Cliff Richard track inspired the famous Numbers drumbeat, which spawned electro and techno. After Bartos quits Kraftwerk, he finds it hard to escape its shadow. “It seems I’m destined to remain a robot,” he says, showing the difficulty of living on after fame.
