Kraftwerk vs. The Jesus and Mary Chain

Background: Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider of Cologne, Germany met at a musical academy and began their quest for electronic music dominance in 1970, using German heavy industry as a template for their music. They are the most influential and successful electronic music group in history. Jim and William Reid grew up in the small town of Kilbride, Scotland. They used their dad's severance pay to buy a four-track and apparently acquired their vintage Gibson and Gretsch guitars from a neighbour who did not know their worth. As voracious music fans, their stated mission was to beat their forebears at their own game '” to be louder, brasher and more controversial than The Velvet Underground, The Stooges and Bo Diddley were in their time. Their influence on noisy guitar music and not-so-noisy guitar music (à la Mazzy Star and Mojave 3) cannot be easily calculated.

Isolation: The music of Kraftwerk and the Mary Chain was born out of isolation from the machinations of the pop music industry. As Ralf Hutter explained: 'œAfter WWII, German entertainment was destroyed. The German people were robbed of their culture, putting an American head on it.'? Unlike their contemporaries they did not share Tangerine Dream's (and to a lesser extent, Can's) need to sing in English and display an Anglo-American identity to curry the favour of English speaking prog-rock fans (ironic, considering that 1975's Autobahn is probably to this day the most popular German language album in the history of the American pop chart, peaking as it did at #5).

Far from London and other meccas of British pop the Reid brothers would plot world domination from their bedroom. They did not seem to care that they would be in direct competition with Duran Duran and Depeche Mode (whom they went on a world tour with) for the allowances of young pop fans. The isolation of these two acts allowed them to fuse heretofore disparate influences: Kraftwerk were obsessed with electronic classical music and '˜60s American pop and JAMC had honed their fanaticism for early American rock'n'roll and garage rock to the point that (along with the work of Van Morrison and early AC/DC) the point could be made that Scotland was an ancestral home of the blues.

Common Ancestors: The Beach Boys and The Velvet Underground.

Two Main Guys: Although these are both four-member bands, they are essentially the vision of two main members with the onstage assistance of two others. Ralf and Florian dismissed their guitar player when he was no longer necessary and would not allow the other two to take part in interviews. Jim and William have always constantly changed collaborators (among them a very young Bobbie Gillespie, later the leader of Primal Scream, and bassist Douglas Hart, who only had two strings on his bass because 'œthose are the two I use'?) but never used one that had a great influence on their own deranged vision of pop.

Menschmaschine: One of Kraftwerk's mandates was the fusion of man and machine through the use of technology. To a lesser extent this is what JAMC did on Psychocandy: they let the amplifiers and fuzzboxes do the talking, utilizing the seemingly random phenomenon of feedback in a way no one before (or since) has attempted (much less succeeded as grandly as they did).

Smokey Highly Recommends: Kraftwerk: Ralf & Florian (1973), Autobahn (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), Computer World (1980). Jesus and Mary Chain: Psychocandy (1985), Darklands (1987), Honey's Dead (1992). If you can find it, I highly recommend viewing Daniel Richler's (recent host of high school quiz show Reach for the Top) 1985 interview with a very young and drunk JAMC on The New Music. It is the greatest example of smart playing stupid ever and if I hadn't seen it, I would probably would not be writing these words right now. See also Lester Bang's article 'œKraftwerkfeature'? from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. It displays the same sort of earned yet blasé arrogance that JAMC perfected 10 years later.