Model musicians

ASK any of the icons at the arty, determinedly modern end of rock - David Bowie, the Pet Shop Boys, the Chemical Brothers - and they'll probably agree that Kraftwerk, the veteran synthesiser group from Dsseldorf, are among the most important musicians ever to release a record. That Kraftwerk don't release a record very often - their last album of completely new material, Electric Caf, came out in 1986 - has only served to increase the reverence in which the group are held.

Now, following the Top 20 success of their recent single, the 2003 remixes of the 1983 single Tour de France, Kraftwerk are releasing an LP of new work, Tour de France Soundtracks (4 August, EMI), and pretty much anyone interested in the future of pop music is eager to hear it.

To add to the enigma, Kraftwerk have made few live appearances in recent years and the group's founders, Ralf Htter and Florian Schneider-Esleben seldom talk to the press.

Since the mid-1990s, a handful of European concerts and a rapturously received performance at the Tribal Gathering festival at Sutton Hoo in 1997 have been the extent of the group's live shows. In the meantime their enthusiasm has been directed towards cycling - hence Kraftwerk's sublime Tour de France remixes.

During the current Tour de France, Htter and Schneider, both 56, have been following the race in a support vehicle, and the only interviews Htter has granted in the past couple of years have been on condition that he only answers questions about cycling.

There is an intense, seductive secrecy surrounding Kraftwerk. Its extent can be gauged from both the high security of their studio in Dsseldorf, Kling Klang (a name that could be drawn from a Futurist pantomime), and the legal lengths to which Htter and Schneider went in 1999 to oppose the publication of a memoir by a former member, Wolfgang Flr.

They were unsuccessful in their suit, but the memoir I Was a Robot simply reinforced what the fans had always known - that Htter and Schneider have sustained a determined project to translate themselves into the enigmatic representatives of a totally machine aesthetic: "die Mensch Maschine", or "man machine".

Another favourite Kraftwerk phrase to describe the "man machine" is "robot music" - an all-embracing philosophy of composition, image and performance which routes every aspect of being in a musical group through electronics and computers.

The name Kraftwerk means "power station", and they present their robot music as an atmospheric but strangely joyous celebration of the past, present and future of industrial technological society. It's one of the strangest paraby Michael Bracewell doxes that robot music about repetition, mundanity and functionalism, has an effect so deeply physical, erotic even, in both the world it describes and its highly disciplined fusion of beats, pulses, echoes and computergenerated vocals. Kraftwerk's conceptual brilliance lies in their suggestion of a nostalgia for archaic visions of the future.

It wouldn't be stretching a point to say that they rank with Andy Warhol, Gilbert and George and Gerhard Richter as artists who have described the very consciousness of the modern urban world. Kraftwerk deliver a mesmeric music of electronic beats and simple pop harmonies, that has the sheen and precision of factory-fresh machine parts.

CLASSICAL music students Htter and Schneider got together in 1968, as a reaction against the drug-sodden epics of German progressive rock.

After a brief spell in the band Organisation they formed Kraftwerk in 1971.

The line-up of the band went through several changes over the next four years, until by 1975 it had settled at Htter, Schneider, percussionist Wolfgang Flr and Karl Bartos.

This quartet remained together until Flr's departure in the early 1990s, but all sources agree that the authorship and control of the group rests with the two founders. Today they make up a four with recent recruits Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz.

Their first charting single, Autobahn, in 1975, gained Kraftwerk transatlantic fame as the smartly groomed purveyors of a new kind of electronic music. In its way, Autobahn was as shocking as Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel had been in 1956, prompting the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs to write: "Autobahn is more than a record, it's an indictment!" He was referring to a kind of "anti-pop": the album version of Autobahn clocked in at a little over 22 minutes, and its chorus, "Wir fahr'n, fahr'n, fahr'n, auf der Autobahn" ("We're driving, driving, driving, on the autobahn"), sounded like a Dalek singing the Beach Boys.

A hymn to function and efficiency, but as steeped in romantic notions of the sublime as Goethe or Wagner, what we were hearing was nothing less than the doo-wop of the German Economic Miracle.

To imagine the impact of Kraftwerk, one has to remember that they first charted at a time when pop and rock were divided between, say, the laidback, feelgood factor of country rock - think Steely Dan, dope and lots of denim - concept albums by Genesis and Yes, or the operatic flamboyance of Queen and Roxy Music.

Pop and rock music were supposed to be about rock 'n' roll lifestyles, high romance, wild states of mind or strange fantasies. In a stroke, Kraftwerk defined a new brand of pop: an ambiguous, aloof austerity that appeared to embrace the serene impassivity of a dehumanised, robot world of total conformity, of boredom, even.

Their music echoed both Warhol's pronouncement of "liking boring things" or "wanting to be a machine", and, more subtly, Gustave Flaubert's ultramodern insight: "You must be natural and regular in your habits like a bourgeois in order to be violent and original in your work." The group's reclamation of German Futurist styling lent them a sinister, almost Aryan image of cold discipline.

Whereas for the cover of their great middle-period album, Trans- Europe Express (1977) their image is that of technicians in a German research laboratory of the 1930s, for The Man-Machine (1978) they are posed on a staircase dressed in a uniform of red shirts and black ties, their faces made-up like gentlemen's outfitters' dummies - slicked back hair, red lips, darkened eyebrows.

As with Warhol or Gilbert and George, there is an edge of humour to Kraftwerk's sensibility that touches on camp. At their most extreme, they present themselves as a caricature of their own image.

During their legendary Die Mix tour of the late 1980s, for instance, the group's show at the Brixton Academy was billed to start at 8pm. Kraftwerk appeared on stage at five minutes to the hour, waited until bang-on eight, and then - with exaggerated, stereotypically German punctuality - Htter checked his watch and announced: "We start now."

HUTTER and Schneider - both from wealthy families - continue to wear the robust good humour of a Dsseldorf bank manager like a bullet- proof mask - impenetrable, resistant to both enquiry and irony.

Their principal biographer, Pascal Bussy, envisages the two of them enjoying a cycling holiday in the Alps, launching a world tour - a dozen concerts, simultaneously performed around the world by robots - from a laptop computer.

If the single is anything to go by, Kraftwerk's new album of cycling soundtracks will be a transcendental merger of man, machine and mountain scenery.

. Michael Bracewell is author of The Nineties: When Surface Was Depth (Flamingo). He is currently working on a biography of Roxy Music.

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