Kraftwerk: Robots v Communists

Kraftwerk had been due to play a festival in China...

Hang about, let's just pause there. China does full-on, three-day, Reading-Leeds style festivals these days. Remember when Wham! playing a gig there was a news item in itself?

So, Kraftwerk was supposed to be at this festival. But they've had their invitation withdrawn. Why?

Tibet. It's always Tibet. The Guardian reports:

According to reports in Beijing, the ministry of culture denied the German quartet a visa because they were scheduled to perform at a pro-Tibetan independence concert in 1999. In fact, Kraftwerk's performance at the Washington DC fundraiser was ultimately cancelled because of a lightning storm.

So what will the organisers do now?

The festival has replaced Kraftwerk with the British pop band Travis.

You see, China? Censorship only ends up hurting the censors.

And if you're thinking "blimey, swapping out Kraftwerk for Travis is a bit like replacing an iMac with a ten year-old Nokia phone", well... even the Chinese realise that:

"I can't say we are 100% confident with Travis as headliners," Zang Keyu, Modern Sky's director of performance and operations, told the state-run Global Times newspaper. "But it's a fact we have to accept."

I bet Zang Keyu is desperately combing online biographies of Fran Healy in the hope he might have called for independence for Macau.

[Thanks to Gary White for the tip]

We are the robots.txt

All you need to know:

7.30am: Tate Modern puts Kraftwerk tickets on sale. 7.31am: entire site crashes.

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) December 12, 2012

Gordon in the morning: Coldplay under the influence

Coldplay held a press conference yesterday to launch their new album Fido Dido, and Gordon went along. That it was in Madrid might have added to the allure.

One of the big surprises was that Brian Eno tried hypnotising the band during the recording sessions:

Bass player Guy Berryman admitted yesterday that the band have reached a stage where they are open to outrageous ideas from the talented team around them to tap into new writing veins.

I'd have thought that was an admission they've more or less run out of steam, isn't it? "What can we do? How about if we dress up in wetsuits and stare at photos of kittens to see if that creates an idea?"

"Brian suggested we try playing together when we were hypnotised. One of his friends came down and we tried it out. Nothing came of it but at least we tried it."

I'm suprised none of the hypnosis tracks are on the record, because when I listen to it, I do find I feel sleepy, sleepy, very sleepy.

Meanwhile, Chris Martin was fuming at the idea that people think Coldplay little more than a reworking of other people's ideas:

He also hammered any suggestion that the band would ever copy other people's music.

He said: "It's fine not to like our band, but making up shit about us is not on. There's a difference between criticism and accusation. People who accuse us of stuff like that are *****, quite frankly."

I'm guessing that's going to be "cunts" - partly because it's clearly such a shocking word Gordon couldn't bring himself to even print the first letter, and partly because having been lazily homophobic and misusing disability language over the last couple of days, he's probably going for the clumsy sexist insult to get the treble.

Still, it's interesting that Chris gets so angry about people who accuse them of copying other bands. So much as to call them *****.

One of the biggest *****s would be, erm, Chris Martin who told Rolling Stone in 2005:

"We’re definitely good, but I don’t think you can say we’re that original,” he notes. “I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists.”

He might also want to have a word with his bandmate Jonny Buckland, who admitted ripping off Kraftwerk:

"We've never so directly stolen off anyone before. We've never paid for our plagiarism."

What a *****.

Mind you, at the same time, Martin also chimed in with this:

"Fix You came directly from Elbow's Grace Under Pressure."

Hold up there, Chris: don't you know that there's a difference between admiration and plagiarism?

A kind of tribute

Although it's hugely unlikely that Kraftwerk will ever appear on stage working their way through a Simple Minds album, there is something pretty pleasing about the planned tour event where OMD and Simple Minds will join forces to cover Neon Light.

Two bands, who slumped into perhaps-less-good work and pomped-up meaninglessness respectively, reclaiming their early electronic heritage with a knee-bend to their inspiration? It almost makes the idea of a joint OMD/Simple Minds tour a cultural landmark.

Tour dates:

Newcastle Arena - Nov 30
Birmingham LG Arena - Dec 2
Manchester MEN Arena - Dec 3
Sheffield Arena - Dec 5
Cardiff CIA - Dec 6
London Wembley Arena - Dec 7
Glasgow SECC - Dec 11
Aberdeen Exhibition & Conference Centre - Dec 12

Karftwerk delayed at Fabrik

Never mind The Beatles box set, the big cardboard-packaged event this year is set to be the Kraftwerk collection. Assuming the make it, as the release has just been pushed back to November. The constituent parts of the set - the individual records - get a re-release, as planned, on October 5th.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - Kraftwerk

Metafilter offers everything you might need to know about Kraftwerk's influence, and influences.

Florian flounces out

Florian Schneider has formally left Kraftwerk, for reasons unexplained. I think it might be because they've stopped making spares for his robot double. Ralf Huetter is now the only original Werkman in the band.

Kling Klang klarify Kraftwerk klash

Last week, Kling Klang;s management responded to Kraftwerk's attempts to ban their name. This week, Kling Klang's management have had to issue a statement detailing their charges' disquiet at the statement they issued on their behalf last week:

“They have decided to issue this statement as they felt that some members from their management failed completely to represent correctly their ideas about the entire matter. And blaming them for a misrepresentation that sprung from an ill informed employee is not right.”

The band continue:

“In Cologne on Sunday 6th April the UK band Kling Klang were issued with a document by representatives of Messrs. Ralf Hutter & Florian Schneider of the German band Kraftwerk. The document is an order to cease and desist using the name "Kling Klang" as the name of the group. Since Messrs. Hutter & Schneider own the single-word trademark "Klingklang" (the name of Kraftwerk's studio, and publishing/merchandising companies), they feel that use of the two-word term "Kling Klang" as a band name is an infringement of their trademark rights.

“The UK band Kling Klang arrived at the name by way of an onomatopoeic reference to a guitar improvisation of binary structure, and were under the impression that "klang" is a German word for sound, with "kling klang" meaning "bell-sound" (similar to "ding dong" in English). The term appears to be in popular usage in more than one language, including Swedish, and the band in no way thought they would be infringing upon the trademark rights of Messrs. Hutter and Schneider in utilizing this term as a name for the group.

“Kling Klang holds Kraftwerk in the highest esteem as musicians and hope to resolve this matter quickly and amicably.”

Lets hope everyone involved has signed this one, otherwise they're going to have to do another clarification in another seven days.

Kraftwerk: "Our humourless faces are not a pose"

Kraftwerk's carefully nurtured reputation is looking slightly shabbier today: they're suing Kling Klang, seeing a band named after their studio named after an onomatopoeia as some sort of risk to their business. No, really:

“It is not like ‘Kling Klang’ is a brand name, like ‘Xerox’,” [says Kling Klang] manager Stefania Paolini. “It is an idiomatic German phrase, so we really don’t see the substance of their claim. We were aware of Kraftwerk’s notorious bent in sueing people and we were expecting the notice from one moment to another since we first stepped on German soil.

“And they way they have notified the claim was even funny… We received the letter in the form of a fax from some random promoter and the notice had all our addresses on it, kinda ‘we know where you live’ style.”

Kraftwerk have registered klingklang as a trademark, although - the sharper eyed amongst you will spot - that's not quite the same as the unregisterable kling klang.

Krautrockobit: Klaus Dinger

Co-founder of Neu!, Klaus Dinger, has been buried in a private ceremony in Germany.

Briefly taking the drummer role in Kraftwerk in 1970, he appeared on debut album Kraftwerk before leaving to concentrate on other projects. With fellow Kraftwerk escapee Michael Rother he founded krautrock touchstone Neu! and with it, the Motorik sound. Although considered the creator of the genre, Dinger never succeeded in getting his preferred term, Apache Beat, to stick.

By the time of Neu! 75, the very different approaches of Dinger and Rother was tearing the band apart - in effect, the album was a shared record by two separate bands. A hiatus became, in effect, a split disc by two separate groups, and Dinger set off to create a band in which he would hold more sway.

The result, La Dusseldorf, carried much of the Neu fanbase with them, and although not perhaps causing the McCartneys and Bonos much concern in terms of competition, the band managed sales into seven figures.

An attempt at a Neu! reunion in 1985 managed to reignite the creative spark of the band, but also regenerated many of the conflicts; the band fell apart again after a few months, although they had recorded enough for an album's worth of material, Neu! 4, which wouldn't see a release for almost a decade.

After the failure of Neu!, Dinger moved on to what was almost a Krautrock version of the Bucks Fizz/Dollar hybrid - La Neu, fusing Neu with La Dusseldorf; he was given a sub-label by Captain Trip record to try out ideas which saw about eight albums of varying invention and quality. The label, Dingerland, and La Neu both ceased to work in 2001.

Dinger suffered a fatal heart failure on March 20th.