Electro Retro: Kraftwerk/Depeche Mode
Timing, they say, is everything. And never has this been more true than this morning. Back in 2004, after I attended my first coachella I realized I had missed one of the biggest shows of the weekend: Kraftwerk. Having known nothing about the influential band at the time, I was able to find the soundboard recording of the set and have since listened to it quite a bit.
Fast forward to this weekend, where Kraftwerk decided to grace Coachella with their second set in 5 years. This year i was sure not to miss it, and while i admit i didn’t stay for the entire set, I thoroughly enjoyed 75% of it and started to fully understand how influential of a band they were, considering that they released a lot of this music in the 70’s. It’s amazing to think about.
Over the weekend, I got an email from my friend, not knowing my current interest in Kraftwerk, recommending I listen to Depeche Mode’s debut album Speak & Spell (released in 1981). Anticipating dark-electro goodness, this morning I obliged. What I got wasn’t at all what my mind had told itself to expect when putting on a Depeche Mode album. Instead of layer upon layer of dark electronic moodiness, my ears were filled with minimal, simplistic, almost mechanical beats and blips accompanied with similar styled vocals, if vocals at all. The focus seemed more on the former than the later. I think i checked my iTunes 5 times to ensure it really WAS Depeche Mode i was listening to. It sure was.
Now comes that timing thing I was talking about. I got about half-way through when i thought to myself, this sounds very similar to Kraftwerk. Maybe because it was so fresh in my mind but the same mechanical, robotic, non-human beats and dynamic that i found throughout Kraftwerk’s set were underlying in most of the Speak & Spell songs. Sure the songs were more vocally driven and had more of a pop melody, but the underlying feel was extremely similar. I had to look into this more.
This is where Wikipedia truly comes in handy. Here is the lineage. Kraftwerk started in 1970 and shortly after, in 1971, some of the members of Kraftwerk formed Neu!. As wiki says:
Neu! formed in 1971 as an off-shoot from an early line-up of that other seminal krautrock band from Düsseldorf, Kraftwerk, whose early works were also produced by Conny Plank.
Drummer Klaus Dinger had joined Kraftwerk midway through sessions for their eponymous debut album. Guitarist Michael Rother was then recruited to the Kraftwerk line-up on completion of the album.
Kraftwerk founder Ralf Hütter left the band at this point, and for a 6 month period, Kraftwerk consisted of a trio of Rother, Dinger & Florian Schneider. Attempted recording sessions at Conny Plank’s studio were unsuccessful, and Dinger and Rother parted company from Schneider and began a new project with Plank: Neu!
So now we have Kraftwerk—>Neu!
Now going from the other direction, looking at Depeche Mode. The big difference between Speak & Spell and all of the other albums is that it is the only album which included Vince Clarke; who wrote every song on the album except 2, before he quite and started the band Erasure. What does Vince Clarke have to do with Kraftwerk, you might ask? Well, before he helped start Depeche Mode, “in 1979, Clarke played guitar in an “Ultravox rip-off band, The Plan“.
What does Ultravox have anything to do with Kraftwerk? Only that their three albums released in 1978, 79, and 80 were all produced by Kraftwerk and Neu!’s heavy-handed producer Conny Plank. And, Ultravox’s original spelling was Ultravox!, in reference to Neu!. It is also worth mentioning that Ultravox’s 1980 release Vienna went to #3 in the UK charts that year…home to what band? Depeche Mode. Who released Speak & Spell the following year.
So we now we have: Kraftwerk–>Neu!–>Ultravox–>Conny Plank–>Vince Clarke–>Depeche Mode–>Speak & Spell.
So anyways, i could spend all day reading about this stuff…unfortunately I don’t have as much time as i would like. But i thought it was worth sharing. Both bands are great, and I was pleasantly surprised with the different sounds of Speak & Spell. I guess i will be looking into Neu! and Ultravox in the coming weeks as well. Here are a couple Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode songs that remind me of one another. Enjoy.
Kraftwerk – The Man-Machine (Live @ Coachella 2004)
Depeche Mode – Any Second Now
Kraftwerk – Radioactivity (Live @ Coachella 2004)
Depeche Mode – Nodisco
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Tags: Uncategorized , depeche mode , kraftwerk
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