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Following the Ghosts of Kraftwerk on the Trans Europe Express - Jools Stone

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Feb 6, 2017 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments are off

A shorter version of this piece originally appeared in Electronic Sound Magazine’s September 2015 issue.

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Taking the Trans Europe Express

I got my first hi-fi for my 15th birthday, in the sweltering summer of 1989. It was Amstrad’s finest, a symphony of clackety plastic and rackety drawers, with fetching pink and grey decals. With my hardware patently lacking in sophistication, I compensated with a choice selection of discs to road test it.
My relatively late blooming as a record buyer means I can proudly answer the question “What was the first record you bought?” with a resounding “Kraftwerk’s ‘Tour De France’ 12-inch, the Francois Kevorkian remixes, bought from Soho’s Reckless Records, since you’re asking” (worry not, my first
cassette albums – Nick Kershaw’s ‘The Riddle’ and a-ha’s ‘Hunting High And Low’ – swiftly deflate any cachet)
 Kraftwerk TEE cover
That same summer, I tested the jerky action of the CD draw with ‘Trans-Europe Express’. I vividly remember being blown away by the breaking glass effect on ‘Showroom Dummies’. It was the closest I’d got to experiencing 3D sound and felt as though I’d still be picking shards of audial Plexiglas out of my hair for weeks to come.

Two years later came my very first bona fide gig: Kraftwerk at the Brixton Academy in London, when they were touring their 1991 greatest hits remix package, ‘The Mix’. It’s fair to say that Kraftwerk are irrevocably entwined with my personal musical DNA and have had a huge emotional impact on my life in countless ways. 

Kraftwerk playing Tour de France
As someone who went on to also develop a passion for travelling by train, it’s tempting to muse on how much of that can be attributed to hearing ‘Trans-Europe Express’ in those formative years.
For a teenager living in bedroom isolation in suburban Bromley, never having ventured any further towards the glittering shores of continental Europe than Broadstairs, “Parks, hotels and palaces / Europe endless” sure sounded like an impossibly glamorous proposition.
 
I was especially intrigued by Düsseldorf, the mothership and home to the hallowed Kling Klang Studio, my Cavern Club, Brill Building and Salford Lad’s Club all rolled into one.
 
A few summers ago, I decided it was high time I made the ultimate music pilgrimage and walked the very allees and strasses where my personal Fab Four strutted their synthesised stuff. Following the route of the old Trans-Europe Express, a rather niche Destination Düsseldorf InterRail adventure was about to begin.
 

STATION TO STATION

 
Forgive the brief trainspotter interlude here, but it may interest you to know that the Trans Europe Express was not a single train journey. It was actually an entire European rail network, stretching from Copenhagen to Italy’s Messina Strait (north to south) and from Barcelona to Vienna (west to east). At its height in the seventies, it took in some 130 destinations.
Trans Europe Express route poster
 Established in the late 1950s, the TEE service was aimed squarely at well-heeled business travellers, with First Class only cars and schedules making same-day returns entirely feasible.
In an era long before budget airlines criss-crossed the map, before Europe’s first high-speed trains were introduced, and when vast swathes of the continent lay shrouded behind the Iron Curtain, the TEE seemed to express a sense of exciting possibilities and hope for the future.

Like the Kraftwerk song itself, it managed to be both nostalgic and futuristic all at once. Although the TEE network was surpassed by the mid-80s, today’s high-speed trains like France’s TGV and Germany’s ICE keep the spirit of the enterprise very much alive.

Their spacious, civilised and often surprisingly affordable services are arguably the envy of Europe. These are the trains that I am taking, following the journey documented by Kraftwerk, from Paris to Vienna to Düsseldorf.

 

‘LEAVE PARIS IN THE MORNING…’

 

eurostar to paris
Once Kraftwerk had enjoyed a little international success, they gravitated towards Paris, a city where they remodelled their image away from their staunch Teutonic roots towards a decidedly more European aesthetic.
It was here that they were styled and photographed for the ‘Trans-Europe Express’ album
cover and where they introduced fragments of French to their linguistic armoury.
Paris was also where they first met Iggy Pop and David Bowie of course, who took them to chi-chi nightclubs to rub shoulders with the rich and famous.
Champs d'elysees DeGaulle statue
After all, what self-respecting mid-70s European flâneur wouldn’t want a “rendezvous on Champs-Élysées”, a byword for cosmopolitan urbanity?
Nowadays, the boulevard’s last vestiges of glamour are overshadowed by the over-familiar Quick Burgers and Gap stores of course.
The over-priced bistros are still there, but the placements of beggars prostrating themselves on all fours along the pavement may make your fillet mignon a little harder to swallow.
Ignore the tall box hedges and Tricolores, squint a little and you could be on London’s Oxford Street, or any commercial thoroughfare in any old European capital frankly.
train bleu restaurant paris
The definitive Parisian stop on the Kraftwerk map is far more impressive today: Le Train Bleu, the opulent restaurant on the upper floor of Gare de Lyon.
With its high ceilings, rococo interiors and old school service, it speaks of the elegance and allure of international rail travel in a way that few modern train station eateries do.
Despite the heady surroundings, (where a lone cat was happily prowling about, somewhat bizarrely) you can enjoy a three-course dinner here for around 60 euros a head.
 
So I did just that, treating myself to the house specialty – rhum baba, which was accompanied by an entire bottle of Saint James rum, casually plonked down on the table before me. Laissez les bons temps rouler, as they say in New Orleans.
From one side of the restaurant, you can look out onto the train platforms ready to whisk you to Nice, Geneva, Milan and beyond. From the other, the open windows give views of the plaza and the enticing neon signs of L’Européen Bistro.
train bleu gare de lyon
This was the very spot where, over dinner with their friend Paul Alessandrini, the band’s two lynchpins Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider hit upon the idea for the ‘Trans-Europe Express’ album.
You can well imagine how the rarefied environment of Le Train Bleu inspired excitement for the concept, especially at a time when Kraftwerk’s career and international profile was really gathering diesel.
They even celebrated the release of the album by commandeering an entire vintage train for a
press junket, shuttling critics to Reims and back, the album’s shimmering contours blasting out from the tinny speakers.
Thinking about it, this also marks the point where the band’s obsession with modes of transport took a greener turn, going from cars to trains before eventually getting to bicycles.
If Ralf Hütter ever deigns to spend some productive time in the studio again (we can but dream) perhaps Kraftwerk’s next opus will be a hymn to the joys of speed walking?
IN VIENNA WE DRIP…
Prater BIg Wheel Vienna
Next stop Vienna, which poleaxed me with an insufferable soup of humidity. I take shelter in a cafe with almost heroically indifferent service under the shadow of the Riesenrad, the big wheel at the Prater Amusement Park, where Orson Welles gave his famous cuckoo clock speech in ‘The Third Man’.
Like a late summer wasp, I stagger around the wedding cake-like architectural excesses of the Ringstrasse in a daze, searching in vain for the Franz Schubert Memorial. (‘Franz Schubert’, an unabashed homage to the great composer rendered on synths, is the penultimate track on the TEE album.)
Vienna Ringstrasse
I finally give up the ghost and settle down for an al fresco pizza in the Stadtpark, a handsome sprawl of greenery with a deep river basin, dotted with crumbling white remnants of almost Romanesque statuary. There is a small tango demonstration happening while I digest my margherita, which admittedly doesn’t seem terribly Viennese, but these are the global times we now frequent. Plus ca change, as they don’t say here.
‘Late night cafés’ are one Viennese institution that’s very much alive and kicking, ranging from lavish hotel drawing rooms serving tea and Sachertorte (a type of chocolate tart) to humbler, more bohemian places where the intelligentsia browse newspapers in cosy booths over
steaming bowls of goulash. 
Vienna Stadtpark
Sadly, I fail to find one, having banked on discovering a gem by Vienna Meidling station, where the night train to Munich awaits.
The area is a virtual wasteland and the closest I get to recreating this key part of my journey is a hastily sucked Vanilla milsch-shake in the McCafe by some roadworks next door to the station.
Such are the realities of whistle-stop InterRail trips. The best laid plans of mice and mensch are often taken hostage by mundane practicalities, personal energy levels and basic map reading
competency when you’re travelling on the hoof.
If only Europe really was ‘endless’ and ‘life was timeless…’
ABZUG MUNICH
Ok, time to ‘fess up to some poetic license here. Munich *doesn’t* actually feature in ‘Trans-Europe Express’ at all, but it makes a sensible journey marker none the less, breaking up a 12-hour trip with a utilitarian, but entirely comfy, Hungarian-run night train.
The city does not reveal many obvious Kraftwerk landmarks either, but the funny thing about embarking on a laser-focused odyssey like this is that, after a while, everything seems to glimmer with a certain Kraftwerk sheen anyway.
BMW Welt Munich
One of Munich’s prime tourist attractions, for instance, is the resolutely corporate and palatial BMW Welt, a tiny bit like Computerwelt, only more corporate I suppose.
And among all the gauche supercars and F1 testosterone engines sits a humble vintage VW Beetle, as seen through the car windscreen on the original German artwork of ‘Autobahn’. 
Lenbachhaus Gallery Munich
Ah but hang on eine minuten, here’s another, less tangential link for you. In the city’s excellent contemporary art gallery, the Lenbachhaus, which houses surrealist paintings of men hunched over transistor radios and surgeons examining their own freshly dissected eyeballs, there’s a room showcasing the disturbing work of Joseph Beuys, one of Düsseldorf’s most influential artists.
Bueys did much to invigorate Dusseldorf’s post-war art scene pathing the way for Kraftwerk and their peers, encouraging their early performances and hippy happenings. He is possibly most famous today for sharing a gallery space with a wild coyote in a 1974 performance piece called ‘I Like America and America likes Me.’
Meanwhile, on the platform of one of the brightly lit U-Bahn stations, my attention is immediately
arrested by what is clearly a poster for Kraftwerk… which turns out to be a furniture showroom. 
kraftwerk ad munich
 
DESTINATION DÜSSELDORF
Dusseldorf HBF
A pair of ICE trains finally deliver me to Düsseldorf in eight hours, via a stop-off at Frankfurt Flughafen, another deep warren of corporate chrome and steel that somehow echoes the BMW Welt in its essential, thrusting Germanity, if indeed that is a word. Well, it is now.
Exiting Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof under a pregnant, inky sky, I’m greeted by a statue of a suited figure wielding a camera mounted on a poster case, a temporary art project by Christoph Poggeler. There are a dozen or so others dotted around the city. They’re quite startling and are well worth seeking out. 
poegeller statue Dusseldorf
First impressions reveal a city that is as strikingly modern (there are precious few pre-war buildings) as it is multicultural.
There are rows of 24-hour imbisses (kebab shops, as we know them, but mostly far superior in quality) and shisha bars flanking the streets around the station and an extensive Japanese district where even the butcher shops serve sashimi steak labelled with kanji.
japantown-resto
Japanese electronics businesses arrived in the nearby industrial Ruhr Valley in the 1950s, but a sizeable Japanese population chose the more amenable city for their home, which might possibly explain Kraftwerk’s willingness to record Japanese language versions of some of their tracks, such as ‘Pocket Calculator’ (recalibrated for Japanese ears as ‘Dentaku.’)
 
DIGITAL DELTA
If Düsseldorf is the “Memphis of electronic music”, as some claim, then the Rhine is surely the equivalent of the Mississippi.
Rhine riverwalk Dusseldorf
 Like the Mississippi, it is broad, powerful and churning. The main Düsseldorf crossing, the Theodor Heuss Bridge, recalls the classic design of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
And like every German city worth its sauerkraut, Düsseldorf has a TV tower, the Rheinturm. This one has the world’s largest digital clock, made by Seiko (another industrial Japanese link), with an illuminated counter on the exterior giving a precise (if convoluted) read-out, which again
seems eminently Kraftwerkian to me.
TV Tower dusseldorf
From the bar at the top of the tower, you get a proper sense of the city’s scale and industrial
clout. The bar’s neon strip lighting shoots laser rays that reach out across the bold Frank Gehry buildings, the construction work bursting from every corner and the freight barges constantly
plying the river.
 
ampleman
I stop in at Verige, one of the city’s oldest breweries, famous for its dark ‘altbeer.’ I don’t drink beer so my request for a coke is gruffly demurred by my suitably manly server, before ending the night in the boho Bistro Zicke on Berger Allee, the very street where the four robotniks shared a house during their mid-1970s prime. Today the street is still comfortably one of the most well-heeled streets in the city.
bistro-zicke
The bench outside the gastrobar is decorated in homage to Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’. True to form, Kraftwerk have been characteristically elusive on this pilgrimage so far, but their ghosts are everywhere.
KRAFTWERK IN CONTEXT
Surprisingly, there is no official ‘Kraftwerk guided tour’ of Düsseldorf, so I take the next best thing – the tourist board’s We Love Music Tour. It was instigated fairly recently, not really driven by Kraftwerk geeks at all, but instead on the back of the city hosting the Eurovision Song Contest in 2011.
Kraftwerk may share the limelight on this tour with other notaries, such as next generation punkers Die Krupps (whose amiable bass maestro Rudi Esch has done much to put Dusseldorf on the map since, instigating the excellent Electri_City electronic music conference writing the city’s first oral history music book of the same name) and DAF, but it’s a great way of mapping out the cultural context from whence they came.
The Rhine River walk is one of the city’s main tourist drags, lined with seafood restaurants, bars and cabaret clubs. On the horizon, you can see the skyscraper built by Florian Schneider’s architect father. 
The Mannesmann building was Germany’s first skyscraper when it went up in 1956. The Mannesmann steel pipe company sold the building to Vodaphone and it then was passed on to the government. Parts of it currently house refugees. Even now it’s a no-nonsense, brutalist structure of some power and presence.
Across the water, just along from a rickety-looking funfair, is the upmarket district of Oberwasser, where both Hütter and Schneider still live.
The tour guide says tells me they do so in virtual anonymity, the city’s youth largely unaware of their existence, let alone their influence on the bulk of their listening matter. I ask the guide about the local kids’ jam of choice. “Oh, you know, just the usual R&B shit” comes her off-hand reply.
BEUYS KEEP SWINGING
beuys-pipe
Düsseldorf’s wider art scene was far more progressive and experimental, providing another crucial piece of the Kraftwerk puzzle. Our old friend Joseph Beuys played a pivotal role by setting up the legendary CreamCheese Club, a venue for underground art happenings where the band staged their first multimedia shows.
What was once one of Europe’s hippest joints is now a fairly anonymous office building,
but you can still see Beuys’ controversial stove pipe sculpture sprouting surreally from
the exterior wall of the Kunsthalle Museum.
I’m no art historian, but to me it seems to say, “This is modern art, growing unlovingly from the concrete and industrial grime that surrounds us and shapes us, whether you like it or not”. It’s an unfussy, utilitarian manifesto which Kraftwerk would surely endorse.
k20 Gallery
Later on, I pass the Conservatoire, where Hütter and Schneider first met, and the piano-
shaped K20 Contemporary Art Gallery, which hosted one of Kraftwerk’s eight-night
3D residencies in 2013. It was the first time the group had played in Düsseldorf since 1991.
Konigsallee Dusseldorf
SHE’S A MODEL AND SHE’S LOOKING GOOD…
I also visit Konigsallee, the centre of the city’s fashion district, avoiding the steely glares of the sharp-suited doormen guarding the Hermes and Prada stores on the elegant Parisian-style boulevard. It was here that Claudia Schiffer was ‘discovered’ apparently.
Fashion has long been one of Düsseldorf’s key industries (mostly the less glamorous, wholesale end), providing plenty of inspiration for the likes of ‘The Model’ and ‘Showroom Dummies’ no doubt, not to mention the band’s own iconic sartorial style, exemplified on the sleeve of ‘The Man-Machine’.
kraftwerk_-_the_man-machine
NO FLIM FLAM, JUST KLING KLANG
Kling Klang Studio
Here we go. Is your spidey-sense tingling yet? It should be. Now we’re getting closer to the source.
Kraftwerk’s original Kling Klang studio is easily found in a drab courtyard down the
decidedly unprepossessing Mintropstrasse, a street bordered by a small island of car tyres (I later learn that this is actually a public art project) and given over to grubby-looking betting shops and strip bars.
The building, which is apparently now managed by Schneider’s daughter, still houses a variety of music, film and creative studios with evocative names like Staub Audio and Akustik+Tontechnik.
The old Elektro Müller sign is still there of course, but there is no fanfare, no plaque, no obvious
attempt to commemorate the spot where Kraftwerk slaved over a hot mixing desk for
some 35 years, siring most of their classic albums.
The only visual clue in fact is a single red and white traffic cone resting beside an orange plastic chair by the courtyard entrance.
Coincidence or an oblique nod to those in the know? As ever, the Kraftwerk enigma remains deliciously intact. Outside there are bags of junk on the street alongside a discarded video player and a Hoover. Maybe these are part of an impromptu “tribute installation” too?
‘I’m the operator with my broken vacuum cleaner. Beep, boop, dooooo!’
Turn left out the courtyard and it all makes perfect sense. Within a few steps, you can see the imposing brown brick tower of Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof, leaving you with no doubt that Kraftwerk’s recording sessions would have been punctuated by a regular backing track of the trains’ grinding brakes, screeches and, well, metallic klings and klangs.
The rhythm of the rails must have been etched onto the group’s psyche long before the ‘Trans-Europe Express’ album was even a glint in Hütter and Schneider’s ears.
We’ve circled back to where it all began, the good old Düsseldorf HBF.
Leaving the Kling Klang building behind me, I start thinking about what a fascinating trip
this has been.
Kraftwerk themselves remain as remote to me as ever, but I now have my own personal mental route map to accompany a record that still sounds wonderfully fresh, yet intractably alien, more than 25 years after I first alighted on it.
Fancy reading some more about Dusseldorf? Check out this more recent piece on my rail travel site Railway Stays.

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