The experimental aesthetic and anti-rock ethos of Krautrock played a key role in shaping the sound of British post-punk music. The term ‘post-punk’ is generally applied to the avant-garde popular music that arose in the immediate aftermath of the punk scene in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s. Well-known musicians who had been central to punk in Britain – perhaps most notably singer Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) of the Sex Pistols – drew upon Krautrock as a means to escape the strictures of their own legacy. Other bands that had been catalysed by punk’s energy – like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus – channelled Krautrock’s ‘Teutonic coolness’ into new subgenres, such as gothic rock.
Still others, like Manchester’s Joy Division, took David Bowie’s Krautrock-inspired Berlin albums as a cue to experiment with songwriting, production, and expression; and post-punk cult band The Fall, also from Manchester, used Krautrock as the foundation for their potpourri of stylistic influences. Indeed, it was ultimately the post-punk rocker, Julian Cope, singer of The Teardrop Explodes, who would serve as Krautrock’s most important and vocal advocate in Britain, publishing his now-(in)famous compendium, Krautrocksampler, in 1995.Footnote 1
This essay focusses on several main issues. First, it addresses the question of how to define ‘post-punk’ in the first place, a vague term often simply used as a catch-all for the creative explosion and intermingling of genres that occurred in alternative British popular music, as punk was on the wane. Second, it considers how Krautrock contributed to the aesthetic of post-punk music. Finally, it reflects upon Krautrock as part of a broader and arguably constitutive Germanophilic impulse in the British post-punk movement.
The End of Punk and the Birth of Post-Punk
The historiography of popular music tends to privilege the punk era in Britain, focusing narrowly on the years 1976–77 as a period of musical revolution during which youth culture, driven by a general feeling of nihilism and ennui over socio-economic conditions, sought to challenge – if not overturn – the musical status quo via angry, irreverent, and often amateurish stripped-down rock. Epitomised by the Sex Pistols, whose proclamation of ‘no future’ and clarion calls for ‘anarchy in the UK’ characterised the genre, punk rejected much of what it saw in the popular music of the early 1970s – the self-indulgent virtuosity of progressive rock, the worn-out leftovers of blues-based hard rock, the banality of disco – in favour of the raw authenticity found in the simple, loud, sped-up garage rock already popularised in the United States by bands like MC5, Iggy and The Stooges, and The Ramones. Punk in Britain inspired a youth fashion movement comprised of ripped clothes and spiked hair, a club scene that featured primitive and punitive dancing, and a DIY approach to music that gave birth to a host of bands that could barely play their instruments as they noisily antagonised their audiences.Footnote 2
Punk is well-known for its ‘back-to-basics’ aesthetic, focusing on rudimentary rock beats, a limited harmonic palette, self-produced recordings and a loose approach to pitch, rhythm, and ensemble playing. But rather than being a revolutionary movement, from a musical perspective punk was a decisive regression: in effect, it was something of a revivalist movement, its primary elements based firmly in the roots of rock. It was arguably the years immediately after punk that were truly radical and transformative, with young British musicians orienting themselves towards experimentation, hybridisation and, in sharp contrast to punk’s nihilism, the future.
What Is Post-Punk?
The primary challenge presented by the concept of ‘post-punk’ as a genre is the stylistic diversity – or rather, the stylistic ‘inconsistency’, as musicologist Mimi Haddon insistsFootnote 3 – of the music associated with it. The label ‘post-punk’ denotes a time period after punk, spanning roughly 1978–85, but also suggests a surpassing of punk with respect to its aesthetic characteristics. Haddon offers the following summary of post-punk, as it is commonly described in scholarly and journalistic discourses:
The music is oriented toward the radical, the new, and the experimental. It is not as mainstream as punk … And the genre displayed more ‘musicianship’ than punk, and assumed a kind of ‘mature theatricality’. In addition to these tendencies, we might also think of post-punk in terms of its sonic characteristics … dour (male) vocals with erudite or self-conscious lyrics, accompanied by metallic-sounding, distorted electric guitars playing texturally, not melodically; an accelerated disco beat or dance groove; a melodic bass line; and echoing sound effects borrowed from dub-reggae.Footnote 4
While this by no means encapsulates the totality of the post-punk movement, it provides a place to start. A key point – and directly applicable to Krautrock as well – is the paradoxical identity of the genre as diverse yet somehow coherent: post-punk is a recognisable genre that is at the same time highly fragmented and diasporic, comprising a kaleidoscope of subgenres emerging out of the rubble of punk. Also paradoxical is post-punk’s supposed modernist turn towards radical newness, in which moving forwards to reject punk’s conservativism – a rejection in fact catalysed by punk’s energy and attitude – also meant looking backwards to the music of the pre-punk era, to borrow from the genres that punk had rejected, including disco, funk, and progressive rock. In so doing, post-punk was at once anti-punk even as it was saving punk from itself, allowing it to expand and diversify.Footnote 5
Post-punk is a genre too large and too diverse to survey here, but there is a handful of representative bands that will be the focus of this chapter and will serve to demonstrate the affinities between post-punk and Krautrock, including Public Image Ltd., Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Bauhaus.
One Path to Post-Punk: David Bowie and Krautrock in Berlin
Post-punk owes an enormous debt to David Bowie, who was in turn indebted to Krautrock during a key moment of artistic crisis and change. As Simon Reynolds observes, Bowie’s propensity for reinventing himself, for ‘always chasing the next edge’ made him the primary ‘inspiration for post-punk’s ethos of perpetual change’.Footnote 6 In addition to a penchant for black music styles – especially reggae, ska, and dub – post-punk bands drew heavily from Bowie’s personae and musical style. Bowie’s glam era inspired many post-punk musicians and groups, including early goth bands like Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees, which whole-heartedly adopted his early 1970s theatricality and playful androgyny as a means to both transcend the musical limitations of punk and to imaginatively explore the possibilities of popular music as a kind of gender-fluid, transmedial art form. But it was arguably Bowie’s radical musical shift during his time in Berlin in the later 1970s – a shift strongly marked by the influence of Krautrock – that most significantly shaped the aesthetic of British post-punk.
Bowie moved from Los Angeles to Berlin in 1976 with Iggy Pop, in part to overcome a debilitating drug habit but also to flee the American music scene. Between 1976 and 1978, Bowie wrote and recorded his so-called ‘Berlin trilogy’ – the albums Low, ‘Heroes’, and Lodger – and produced Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot. These albums are celebrated for their experimental ethos, formal variety, and sonic richness, in sharp contrast to the contemporaneous back-to-basics monochrome of punk in Britain. Indeed, the sound of the revolutionary drum production on Low (which is also clearly audible on some tracks on The Idiot, such as ‘Funtime’) – facilitated by experimentation with processing the drums through an Eventide Harmoniser – has been characterised as almost single-handedly helping to sonically shape the post-punk aesthetic, and was sought after by drummers in seminal post-punk bands.Footnote 7 While in Germany, Bowie became enamoured with Krautrock: during the Berlin period, Bowie recounts being ‘a big fan’ of Kraftwerk, Cluster, Can, Neu!, and Harmonia – regarding Krautrock as ‘where the future of music was going’ – and he actively sought collaborations with Krautrock musicians, perhaps most notably (if unsuccessfully), Michael Rother from Neu!.Footnote 8
Bowie chronicler Nicholas Pegg suggests that the singer’s interest in new German music is already evident on the title track of the 1975 album Station to Station, with its ‘chilly Teutonic beat’.Footnote 9 But the Krautrock influence on Bowie becomes fully manifest on 1979’s Lodger, the final album in the Berlin trilogy: tracks like the galloping ‘Move On’, and especially ‘Red Sails’, with its droning harmonies and brisk motorik beat, was immediately identified by critics like Jon Savage as derived from Neu!; Bowie himself acknowledged his debt to ‘that Neu! sound’, and also seems to have borrowed heavily from Harmonia’s song ‘Monza’ for the chords and beat of ‘Red Sails’.Footnote 10
Bowie also connected with Krautrock via composer and producer Brian Eno, his main collaborator for the Berlin albums. Eno was influenced by the experimental techniques of German art music composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, as were a number of Krautrock musicians (including Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay of Can, both of whom studied composition with Stockhausen in the early 1960s). Drawing on Stockhausen, Eno – like Schmidt and Czukay – helped to build bridges between avant-garde art music and pop music. But Eno also worked directly with the Krautrock ‘supergroup’ Harmonia – comprised of members of Cluster and Neu! – in the early autumn of 1976, immediately before joining Bowie in Berlin to record Low at Hansa Studios (Eno would go on to record another ‘Krautrock’ album, Cluster & Eno, in 1977).
The influence of Krautrock, via Bowie’s personal affinity for Kraftwerk’s electronic experimentation and Eno’s immediate experience composing and performing with important Krautrock musicians, is readily apparent on Low, through its emphasis on moody ambient sound, long instrumental tracks, heavy reliance on electronics, and a shift towards more abstract and intermittent lyrics. As Sean Albiez has observed, Bowie’s Berlin albums were ‘a crucial conduit through which travelled Krautrock and pre-war hedonistic and post-war geopolitical German myths and memes that fascinated British fans and musicians’.Footnote 11
Musical Teutonism? A ‘German Sound’?
Bowie’s move to Berlin and the attendant Krautrock-inspired aesthetic changes in his music can be seen as reflecting a rather un-British Germanophilia, which, I argue, is an essential element of British post-punk: even as punk was still in full swing as of 1977, the music Bowie and Iggy Pop were recording in Berlin was already poised to cast a huge shadow over the alternative popular music scene in Britain. As Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti has recounted, the Berlin albums were positively imbued with a ‘Teutonic ambience’, derived in part from the atmosphere and acoustics of the Hansa studio, but also, he insists, from simply being present in Germany and absorbing Berlin’s ‘manic energy [and] … manic aggression’, which he associates with the city’s (Nazi) history.Footnote 12 Simon Reynolds likewise has remarked on Bowie’s shift away from American rock ’n’ roll towards a Germanic aesthetic characterised as ‘a cool and controlled sound modelled on the Teutonic motorik rhythms of Kraftwerk and Neu!’.Footnote 13
Reviews of Krautrock albums in the British music press in the early 1970s – many of which were decidedly ambivalent – first inscribed many of these tropes. Bands like Can are commonly described as ‘spare and stark’, possessing a ‘German sound’ and ‘Teutonic heaviness’ that is ‘often frighteningly cold’.Footnote 14 Kraftwerk, presumably because they foregrounded the use of electronic instruments, were especially singled out by the press for their perceived Germanic peccadillos, including austerity, emotionlessness, repetition, and regimentation in their music.Footnote 15
These tropes of coolness and detached Teutonism shape much of the discourse surrounding post-punk music: influential post-punk and proto-goth bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, and Joy Division are sometimes given the generic designation ‘coldwave’,Footnote 16 with the heavy use of reverb, trebly and dissonant guitar sound effects, bass-dominated textures, and mechanistic rhythms contributing to the notion of a somehow cold, innately German sound.
Punk to Post-Punk: From Germanophobia to Germanophilia
Post-punk musicians, looking further afield for influences and inspiration, turned not only to Bowie but to Krautrock directly. It is now certainly becoming more common for contemporary mainstream bands to name-check Krautrock as a formative influence – U2 and Coldplay, for example – and for pop and hip-hop artists to sample from Krautrock songs – in recent years, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Daft Punk, and A Tribe Called Quest, among others. However, in the 1970s Krautrock was, as David Stubbs notes, overshadowed by disco and punk, and ‘marginal’ at a time when, especially in Britain, ‘Germanophobia still held sway, though now it took the shape of condescending amusement, rather than outright hostility’.Footnote 17 The very appellation ‘Krautrock’ makes this quite clear: it is a dismissive, if not outright offensive sobriquet, invented by British music journalists to denigrate German music.
The historian Patrick Major observes that ‘British identity in the late twentieth century appeared to have been profoundly and negatively informed by its encounter with Germany’, and that Germany ‘was the nation Britons apparently loved to hate’. He links anti-German sentiment to post-war animosity but also sees it as the core of a more generalised Euroscepticism fostered by Cold War and reunification anxieties.Footnote 18 Furthermore, as Uwe Schütte has argued, ‘perceptions of Germans and German culture in the UK continue to be dogged by old stereotypes’.Footnote 19 Today, the perpetuation of these ‘old stereotypes’ are made possible, according to Schütte, by contemporary German bands such as Rammstein, ‘who peddle silly Teutonic clichés about Germany’ and turn the German language in which they sing ‘into the parodic representation of the Nazi Germans seen in war films’.Footnote 20
In the mid-1970s, the punk movement in Britain traded directly on Nazi-themed Germanophobia, thanks in large part to the efforts of punk impresario and Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren, whose infamous London boutique Sex sold Nazi regalia. Swastikas became de rigeur fashion for controversy-seeking punk rockers, notably Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols. The Pistols would also flirt with Nazi history by writing and recording songs that blended clumsy social critique with provocative references to the Holocaust, including ‘Holiday in the Sun’ and ‘Belsen Was a Gas’.
As a fashion statement, punk’s use of Nazi symbolism and paraphernalia hinted at Susan Sontag’s fascinating fascism – the aesthetic allure of totalitarianism, which she described in the New York Review of Books in 1975Footnote 21 – but much of it was merely tasteless, anti-establishment provocation, trading in part on reflexive anti-German sentiment in Britain and, in the case of McLaren and The Sex Pistols, simply ‘us[ing] the swastika as an instrument of boorishness and to profess total ignorance about the events and political movements referenced by their clothing’.Footnote 22 Indeed, McLaren himself was Jewish, as was Sid Vicious’ girlfriend Nancy Spungen.Footnote 23 John Lydon has since disavowed ‘Belsen Was a Gas’ as a nasty song that never should have been released. In the immediate wake of punk, much of the music that sprung to life was, though catalysed by punk, in fact Germanophilic: while Stubbs characterises this impulse more generically as ‘Europhilia’, part of a turning away from the strictures of British culture, I would argue that it is clearly German music that is attractive to the early generation of post-punk groups, who are ultimately responsible for Krautrock’s resurrection in the late 1970s as a ‘legend, a posthumous phenomenon’.Footnote 24
Punk Rock versus Krautrock, I: Public Image Ltd.
The shift from punk to post-punk as a shift underwritten by Krautrock-inspired Germanophilia can readily be seen in the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Public Image Ltd. (or PIL, John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols project). PIL is perhaps the UK post-punk band most often directly linked with Krautrock. Lydon left the Sex Pistols in 1978, forming a new band with bassist Jah Wobble, guitarist Keith Levene, and drummer Jim Walker. PIL eschewed the controversy and increasing commercialism of punk, focusing instead on music-making, bringing to the fore two of Lydon’s great musical interests: dub reggae and Krautrock (Stubbs calls Lydon a ‘Krautrock fanatic’Footnote 25).
The band’s first album, First Issue (1978), is rough, with the band’s direction clearly not yet certain. The second album, however, Metal Box (1979), saw the band take a decisive turn towards the avant-garde. The group’s sound is bass-dominated, reflecting the influence of dub, but also drawing from Krautrock: bassist Jah Wobble was, along with Lydon, a Krautrock enthusiast whose bass playing was directly inspired by Can bassist Holger Czukay. Wobble would indeed leave PIL after recording Metal Box, and would go on to collaborate with Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit on the 1982 record Full Circle.Footnote 26
The utopian ethos of PIL – a band determined to improve the world with their emphasis on a liberal worldview and democratic creative processes – was well aligned with Krautrock’s political optimism, desire for social change, and emphasis on self-expression. In his desire to experiment with unconstrained creativity – and especially, in pursuit of a freedom from rules and what Albiez describes as an ‘avant-garde noise aesthetic’ that The Sex Pistols failed to achieve – Lydon negotiated a path through a disparate array of stylistic influences, chief among them Krautrock, looking especially to Can and Neu!.Footnote 27 Lydon’s other key collaborator, guitarist Keith Levene, was likewise a Krautrock devotee, developing anti-rock, quasi-improvisational, noise-based guitar techniques derived from both prog rock and Krautrock; moreover, as Albiez notes, ‘Levene also had an interest in technical innovation, synthesisers and, with Lydon, new studio recording strategies and techniques antithetical to punk notions of immediacy (but sharing much in common with progressive Krautrock).’Footnote 28
The first song on Metal Box, ‘Albatross’, reflects the shared aesthetic vision of Lydon, Wobble, and Levene while pointing towards Krautrock with its repetitive, droning bass line, strict four-on-the-floor drums, Lydon’s cryptic, doomily intoned lyrics, and metallic, ambient guitar noise. It is the antithesis of punk in many ways, especially with respect to its length: it is nearly eleven minutes long, with virtually no formal changes, similar to many Krautrock tracks. Other songs, like ‘No Birds’, drive forward rhythmically, hinting strongly at Neu!, while ‘Socialist’ recalls some of the proto-punk freneticism of Can. ‘Memories’ and ‘Graveyard’ sound like a bizarre merger of Krautrock, dub, and disco. Julian Cope tacitly suggests an organic link between PIL and Krautrock, citing Lydon’s gnosticism and unconstrained creativity and self-exploration: Cope ultimately proposes a compelling counterfactual, namely that ‘Krautrock is what Punk would have been if Johnny Rotten alone would have been in charge.’Footnote 29
Punk Rock versus Krautrock, II: Siouxsie and the Banshees
Siouxsie Sioux’s rise to fame began with her membership in the so-called ‘Bromley Contingent’, a group of die-hard Sex Pistols fans and early leaders of the British punk movement. Siouxsie (née Susan Janet Ballion) formed Siouxsie and the Banshees in late 1976, with bassist Steve Severin, drummer Kenny Morris, and guitarist Peter Fenton (soon replaced by John McKay). The group began gigging in early 1977, and released their first album, the critically-acclaimed The Scream, in late 1978. Early on, Siouxsie rode the punk wave of Germanophobia as a self-confessed proponent of Nazi chic: in 1976, she could be seen dressed as a Nazi dominatrix, wearing leather bondage gear with a swastika armband, admitting: ‘I have to be honest but I do like the Nazi uniform. I shouldn’t say it but I think it’s a very good-looking uniform.’Footnote 30 In addition, as the cultural historian Roger Sabin recounts, Sioux’s ‘goose-stepping and right-arm salutes on stage’ likewise brought a Nazi-inspired aesthetic to the fore.Footnote 31 She had originally included the line ‘Too many Jews for my liking’ in the Banshees song ‘Love in a Void’ before the lyrics were changed so it could be recorded for Polydor and released as a single in 1979. Like John Lydon, Sioux would later minimise her – and punk’s – flirtation with Nazism, asserting:
It was always very much an anti-mums-and-dads thing … We hated older people. Not across the board, but generally the suburban thing, always harping on about Hitler, and ‘We showed him’, and that smug pride. It was a way of saying, ‘Well, I think Hitler was very good, actually’; a way of watching someone like that go completely red-faced.Footnote 32
Turning away from Nazi symbolism as a means to provoke, Banshees bassist Steve Severin would insist that the band’s musical aesthetic was in fact derived in large part from the influence of 1970s German popular culture, and specifically from Kraftwerk, Can, and Neu!Footnote 33 The band would further eschew their earlier promotion of Germanophobia by recording songs like ‘Israel’, which seems rather like a hymn of atonement and a disavowal of Nazi chic (Siouxsie took to wearing a Star of David around this time), and ‘Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)’, which was inspired by and celebrated the anti-Nazi German cartoonist John Heartfield.
‘Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)’, which is included on The Scream but was first heard in December 1977, recorded for the BBC’s John Peel radio show, points musically at Krautrock roots through its metronomic – if not motorik – drumming, and drone-like oscillation between two chords. Other songs on The Scream, like the opening track, ‘Pure’, is a haunting instrumental, strongly reminiscent of some of Harmonia’s ambient tracks, with dissonant guitar effects and glissandi, some rattling percussion, and a repetitive, melodic bass line. An early review of The Scream in the New Musical Express immediately recognised Krautrock’s influence on the Banshees, identifying its ‘anti-rock ’n’ roll’ ethos, and drawing a direct line to Can’s 1971 Tago Mago album, with some Velvet Underground mixed in for good measure.Footnote 34
The slow-building song ‘Tenant’, from the 1980 Banshees’ album Kaleidoscope, sounds unmistakably like Neu!, with Siouxsie Sioux intoning lyrics over a drone-like bass line, a tinny guitar part repeating muted chords, and a steady, unembellished medium-tempo drum track that seems haunted by a motorik pattern that almost, but never quite fully emerges. ‘Lunar Camel’, from the same album, uses a drum machine and synthesiser, creating a spare and icy sonic landscape suggesting an admixture of Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. The Banshees’ anti-rock ethos and signature sound from this period – tribal drumming featuring steady eighth note patterns on the tom-toms, a guitar sound moving away from standard chording to thinner, atmospheric, increasingly dissonant parts, and the bass guitar shifting into the foreground to become a melodic instrument – was a key element of the sonic paradigm shift of post-punk, and of the nascent gothic rock movement, discussed in the next section (though the Banshees insist they were never a goth band). This shift was shaped by Krautrock.
Joy Division and Bauhaus: From Krautrock to Goth Rock?
An additional example of a Krautrock-inspired Germanophilic shift in post-punk music can be seen and heard in the evolution of the Manchester band Joy Division, arguably one of the most influential bands of the post-punk era.Footnote 35 Inspired by The Sex Pistols and David Bowie, the group began performing as Warsaw in 1977, later adapting the name Joy Division – a reference to Nazi concentration camp brothels – from the pulp novel House of Dolls.Footnote 36 The band’s Germanness/Germanophobia-via-Nazism was initially very provocative, clearly intending to shock, in the punk vein: the band not only adopted gratuitous umlauts on their early albums, but infamously invoked Rudolf Heß at gigs and in songs (as in the early single ‘Warsaw’), adopted a fascistic style of dress, and used Nazi-inspired imagery for the cover of their first EP as Joy Division, An Ideal for Living.Footnote 37
But the band’s final album, Closer, reflected a much subtler ‘Holocaust piety … rather than the more impious approach to Holocaust representation that characterised early punk bands’, in the form of a powerful expression of empathy for the victims of the Nazi genocide, abstracted into the band’s signature general suffering and existential angst, which served in part to emphasise the necessity of an historical reckoning with the atrocities of the past in order to confront violence in contemporary society.Footnote 38
In terms of Joy Divison’s musical sound and style, the band’s former drummer, Stephen Morris, avers that, like many young musicians in the mid-1970s, he was excited by American proto-punk, and was actively seeking alternatives to shop-worn, blues-based rock. Ultimately, however, he turned to Krautrock, and bands like Can, Neu!, and Amon Düül for inspiration.Footnote 39 Indeed, Morris’s playing with Joy Division represents perhaps one of the strongest examples of Krautrock’s influence on the aesthetic of post-punk, as it blends looping motorik patterns with the cool, detached sound of a drum machine (achieved in part by recording each drum in the kit separately).
Tracks like ‘She’s Lost Control’ and ‘Isolation’ exemplify this: quasi-motorik beats are played on a drum kit that includes Synare synthesiser drum pads and heavily effected acoustic drums, with Morris effectively becoming a human drum machine, his rigid rhythmic patterns underpinning repetitive, harmonically static melodic bass lines. The first three minutes of the early track ‘No Love Lost’ from the An Ideal for Living EP, comprising a noisy, one-chord vamp over a clear motorik beat, could easily be mistaken for Neu! Moreover, one of Joy Division’s best-known tracks, ‘Atmosphere’, sounds uncannily like Neu!’s ‘Seeland’, with its washy synthesisers and droning harmonies oscillating between tonic and subdominant chords. As the music journalist Chris O’Leary has noted, Bowie and Iggy Pop provide here a key link in the chain between Krautrock and post-punk: ‘Atmosphere’ is itself a distillation of the 1977 Pop/Bowie song ‘Mass Production’, which obviously takes its structural, harmonic, and textural cues from Neu!’s ‘Seeland.’ As O’Leary asserts, ‘Joy Division, and others, starts here.’Footnote 40
Joy Division are sometimes credited with the advent of gothic rock, due in large part to the band’s lyrics and sound: through performance and production, the group, along with producer Martin Hannett, organically blended lyrics about alienation, isolation, and suicidal ideation with musical analogues created through experimental production effects. However, the Northampton band Bauhaus, formed in 1978, would become famous as the originary goth band – the ‘godfathers of goth’ – courtesy of their first single, the vampire rock anthem ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, which combines clattering drums, heavily treated with dub-inspired echo, chilly, reverberant vocals, and swirling guitar effects, held together by a lugubrious descending bass line.
While the band’s singer, Peter Murphy, along with guitarist Daniel Ash were openly channelling glam-era Bowie, the influence of Krautrock is also clearly audible: Bauhaus’ drummer, Kevin Haskins, took his cue directly from Krautrock-inspired post-punk drummers like Joy Division’s Stephen Morris and Kenny Morris, the original drummer of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Haskins, like Morris, incorporated Synare pads in his drum kit, and emulated Krautrock’s patterned loops and mechanistic rhythms and tempi. Bauhaus – again, evidently seeking to channel Bowie – also looked to Brian Eno, recording a cover of his song ‘Third Uncle’, itself audibly Krautrock-inspired, with its up-tempo motorik drum track, nonsensical droning vocals, echoing bass guitar, and repeating two-chord vamp.
Bauhaus may be one of the most Germanophilic bands of the post-punk era – as the group’s name suggests; the band also drew heavily on German Expressionist cinema for their visual aesthetic – but perhaps also best exemplify the Krautrock ethos in the post-punk scene, insisting on the primacy of simple musical ideas, the purity of improvisational and collaborative composition, and the ideals of newness, of starting with a blank page and eschewing rock traditions; or, as Bauhaus bassist David Haskins insisted, making future music from out of the ‘void’.Footnote 41
Conclusion
I have argued here that post-punk clearly owes a debt to Krautrock, but it is also obviously the case that Krautrock owes something to post-punk: namely, to the raft of British post-punk bands – the ones I have discussed in this chapter, but also other important post-punk groups like Killing Joke, Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall, Simple Minds, and U2, and perhaps especially Julian Cope via his Krautrocksampler book – that helped to bring Krautrock to the ears of anglophone audiences. There is, moreover, a powerful synergy that exists between Krautrock and post-punk, which manifests itself in the stylistic diversity that characterises both genres. It is also clear that both genres have in common a strange and enduring influence, as they continue to shape the sound of popular music well into the twenty-first century.
Essential Listening
Bauhaus, In the Flat Field (Beggar’s Banquet, 1980)
David Bowie, Lodger (RCA, 1979)
Joy Division, An Ideal for Living (Enigma, 1978)
Public Image Ltd, Metal Box (Virgin, 1979)
Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Scream (Polydor, 1978)
