Kraftwerk

Sad songs hit harder, I find, when their meaning hangs just out of reach. Aside perhaps from the exquisite ache of Portuguese fado, there is no more desolate sound in the world than a lamentation in Scots Gaelic, sung in a language most of us can’t speak but conveying emotions we seem, atavistically, to somehow understand. This became clear last weekend while watching Julie Fowlis, the internationally renowned singer from North Uist whose extraordinarily pure voice evokes the power, beauty and savagery of the Hebridean and Highland landscapes, but also connects to some even more profound and universal force.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Right from the beginning, everything about Kraftwerk was odd. They had no frontman, they seemed to play no instruments and their strange, electronic music owed nothing to blues, soul or any of the other forms of music that underpinned 20th-century pop. Instead, a Kraftwerk gig consisted of four gauche-looking fellows from Düsseldorf standing in a row, each poking at a synthesizer while strange, apparently unconnected images appeared on screens behind them. A Kraftwerk album could be just as confounding. The cover of 1977’s TransEurope Express featured the band in suits and ties, looking more like the partners at an accounting firm than a pioneering electronica band.