‘A road trip like no other’: my epic drive on Kraftwerk’s Autobahn

Ask people what the most iconic musical road trip is and they’ll most likely direct you towards America: take Highway 61 through the birthplace of the blues, they’ll say, or head to California on Route 66. They may even mention vintage T-Birds or Cadillacs. Yet there’s a road trip arguably more important to the history of popular music than any other, one that tells its story not just via the cities it visits but through the sounds of the journey itself – and the hum of the engine that’s powering you. And the best way to ride it is in a humble Volkswagen.

Fifty years ago this month, Kraftwerk released Autobahn, a 22-minute 43-second song about the German road network. Astonishingly for a 22-minute 43-second song about the German road network, it somehow managed to change the musical landscape forever. Indeed, look back at the soundtrack to the last few decades – with its abundance of pristine synths, robotic vocoders and repetitive beats – and you’d be hard pressed to find a road that doesn’t somehow lead back to Autobahn.

Inspirational … a section of autobahn c1970. Photograph: Interfoto/Alamy

Kraftwerk in 1975 … (l-r) Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos, Wolfgang Flür and Ralf Hütter. Photograph: Heilemann/CAMERA PRESS

The song achieved chart success at the time of its release – it became the band’s biggest American hit in 1975 after being edited down to three minutes 28 seconds – but record buyers seemed unsure how to view it. Was it a novelty record? A quirky Beach Boys pastiche? Some kind of experimental in-joke? Melody Maker’s Keith Ging declared it to be “spineless, emotionless sound with no variety, less taste … for God’s sake, keep the robots out of music”. Acquaintances of the band were equally wary. “We played it to our friends and a few of them said, ‘Fahren auf der Autobahn!? [we drive on the Autobahn] You’ve gone crazy!’” the band’s Ralf Hütter told the NME in 1991.

These days we see it with clearer eyes: this song is the point where electronic pop music truly began. Where did it come from? What were the band trying to say? And why did it have such a transformative effect – not just on music but on the band themselves? Before Autobahn, Hütter and Florian Schneider were a long-haired, experimental duo, trying to figure out a new German sound alongside krautrock peers such as Can, Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream. Afterwards, though, they had transformed themselves into a smartly dressed four piece – cropped hair, suits – who seemed to be travelling on a completely different road to everyone else.

It felt like there was only one way to truly understand this remarkable record. To get in a car and drive the autobahn itself – to hear what the band heard, see what the band saw and feel what the band felt on a road trip quite unlike any other.

The section of the motorway frequently attributed to the song is the A555 that links Bonn to Cologne. The band would have used it frequently on their travels – it was close to the studio of their iconic producer Konrad “Conny” Plank, and a major road towards Düsseldorf from southern Germany.

Schneider’s father Paul was a renowned architect responsible for the brutalist Terminal 1 building in Cologne Bonn airport – and it is here that I pick up an early morning hire car and drive the short distance Potsdamer Platz in Bonn, the most southerly point of the A555.

I wind the window down and let the sounds of the road fill the car. It’s something we should all do more often, for the sound of driving, with its engine revs and speeding traffic, is unbelievably musical. The tarmac hums, the wind whistles and the tyres play various rhythms as they bump up off the asphalt.

Hütter viewed the car – and indeed most things in everyday life – as an instrument in its own right. Autobahn even begins with a car – we hear a door slam, a few throaty roars of the engine and then a parping horn. You can’t recreate this effect so well in modern cars – the engine in the Hyundai I’ve been assigned purrs so quietly it’s barely audible – but Hütter was driving the altogether more rustic VW Beetle. Many believe this to be the car sampled in the song, but it appears to be taken from library music: Karussell’s Anlassen von Automotor und Abfahren.

Shortly before Autobahn was recorded, Hütter – who, along with Schneider, came from a well-to-do background – purchased a Minimoog synthesiser. It was, he recalled, just as expensive as the car, and just as essential: “I had to have that synthesiser and I wanted that Volkswagen – both meant freedom to me.”

Previous Kraftwerk albums had been based around Hütter’s organ playing and Schneider’s decidedly un-rock’n’roll use of the flute. Autobahn still features the flute, as well as other acoustic instruments in its more bucolic passages. But, unlike previous recordings, it is largely electronic. Hütter’s Minimoog was used to play the bass line, which bounces up and down the octave like the repetitive bounce of the wheels. Other early synths – including an EMS Synthi and ARP Odyssey – were used to provide the song’s futuristic-sounding phased chords. The Doppler effect you hear when vehicles pass by you was achieved by using tape-reversed bursts of white noise. Perhaps most impressively of all, Schneider built a programmable speech synthesiser called a Robovox to achieve the vocoder-effect on the lyrics.

Masterminding the whole thing was Plank. He’d recorded the band’s first three albums and, according to Wolfgang Flür at least, was instrumental in the giant strides taken on Autobahn. The way Flür recalls it, Plank would create various car noises using the array of instruments while Hütter and Schneider sat on a sofa approving or rejecting them. “It was like going shopping,” said Flür. “They bought songs.”

Despite his contribution – Flür has called him the true “visionary” behind what became the Kraftwerk sound – Plank was bought out by the band for DM 5,000 and never made anything from the subsequent success of the song nor the album of the same name from which it comes from. The band produced all future recordings in their studio Kling Klang and Plank never worked with the band again. It’s an unsavoury pit stop in the journey of Autobahn, perhaps, and Plank should be remembered as instrumental in helping locate this eureka moment for the band. From this point on, all Kraftwerk albums would be entirely electronic.

Fancy time-travelling back to the future? Then head to YouTube where you will find a 1975 transmission of the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World. On it are a strange German band determined to perform a different kind of live show. They talk about electronic body suits that would allow them to trigger music from their clothing. And their recently hired drummer (Flür) is using metal drum sticks to his six metal pads – each one triggers sounds from a modified Maestro Rhythm King drum machine.

It’s about as far-removed from an energetic Keith Moon performance as you can imagine – Flür is calm and composed as he goes about triggering his sounds. As Hütter liked to boast about Kraftwerk: “Our drummers don’t sweat.” And yet the technological leap happening here – and on Autobahn – is astounding. Kraftwerk had worked out a way to “free” the preset rhythms of the drum machine so that they could be manipulated by a human being. It was a perfect example of the Mensch-Maschine in action.

Feel the thrill … for Kraftwerk, the autobahn could represent travel, freedom, exchanges of culture. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

Why did Kraftwerk decide to write a song about a road? When I spoke to Hütter in 2017, he told me that Autobahn was simply supposed to be “an environmental composition, a sound painting”. Ever evasive, he refused to ascribe the meaning given to it by many critics: that it was an attempt to reclaim the story of German infrastructure from the country’s horrifying recent Nazi past. The A555 was actually a product of Weimar Germany – it was the first section of the autobahn to be built, officially opening on 6 August 1932, months before Hitler gained power. But that hasn’t stopped a false narrative growing that the Nazis invented the autobahn, partly because they did build a huge chunk of it during their reign (around 2,400 miles completed, with another 1,550 under construction). It proved advantageous for them during wartime, helping them to fight on two fronts.

Were Kraftwerk hoping to write a more optimistic story of their home country? For the band the autobahn didn’t have to mean war and nationalism and genocide. It could represent travel, freedom, exchanges of culture. The outdoors have always been of importance to German culture, from Goethe’s poems about the Harz mountains to the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich.

Even today – when motorways are loathed for their pollution and congestion – it’s hard not to feel the thrill of speeding down two clear lanes towards some faraway destination. From Cologne I take the A57 and then join the A46 to cross the glorious Fleher Brücke and make my entrance into Düsseldorf, the home of all things Kraftwerk.

Turning the tables … Kraftwerk pose for a portrait in New York City. Photograph: Maurice Seymour/Getty Images

Imagine going to Liverpool and there are no Beatles museums, no walking tours down Penny Lane, no buskers singing Help!, no gift shops selling plastic yellow submarines. Unthinkable, yet you can easily visit Düsseldorf without ever knowing that the city’s most iconic band exist.

“Kraftwerk?” repeats a waitress looking puzzled. “I don’t think so. We do have a band called Die Toten Hosen.”

Ah yes, Die Toten Hosen. Ask about famous local bands in Düsseldorf and they’ll happily chew your ear off about Die Toten Hosen, a four-decade old German rock band whose name translates as “dead trousers” (it’s slang for “uneventful”). The hotel receptionist? A bierhaus server? A group of guys drinking in the street? When faced with the Kraftwerk question they all look blankly before saying: “No, but we have Die Toten Hosen.”

My hotel’s barman has at least heard of Kraftwerk – but he isn’t overly impressed. Other bands from the area give back, he says. When an earthquake devastated parts of Turkey and Syria in 2023, Die Toten Hosen – those guys again – organised a benefit show to raise funds. Kraftwerk, he implies, are cold and aloof when it comes to connecting with their home city.

For almost four decades – from 1970 to 2009 – Kraftwerk operated out of their Kling Klang studio on Mintropstraße 16, an unassuming street in what used to be an industrial area of Düsseldorf. This is where they recorded groundbreaking albums such as Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine and Computer World. It’s also where work started on Autobahn, although much of it was also made at Plank’s studio, which was situated in a former pig sty in an old farm in Wolperath on the southern outskirts of Cologne. The studio was renowned for its unique, handmade 56-channel mixing desk mounted on a wooden base made from Plank’s own cherry tree. Plank had designed it so that it could be detached and taken on the road to record on location. For Autobahn, Plank would drive his 16-track mobile recording truck to Kling Klang, park in the yard outside and run wires from his mixing desk directly into the building.

The site of the Kling Klang studio … ‘I suppose it’s entirely possible that this isn’t even a Kraftwerk reference at all and simply a traffic cone.’ Photograph: Tim Jonze/The Guardian

Head to Mintropstraße 16 today and there are no plaques commemorating the impact of Kling Klang. Instead there is a yellow and beige tiled building with fading signage for electrician services Elektro Müller GmbH. Walk through the entrance and you come to a plant-filled courtyard and another Elektro Müller sign above the door where the band once entered. The only nod to Kraftwerk is an extremely niche one – an orange traffic cone, as featured on the sleeves of their debut album, sits on the steps outside. I suppose it’s entirely possible that this isn’t even a Kraftwerk reference at all and simply a traffic cone.

Back on the street an emergency vehicle’s siren builds then fades. A motorbike rider lets his engine rip. But the area is largely unremarkable. The only trace of Kraftwerk I’ve seen so far on this whole trip has been in a Cologne brauhaus stuffed with vintage music contraptions – put a euro in the slot and you can watch a duo of accordion and tuba-playing puppets perform the band’s biggest hit The Model. Fun, of course, but not the most towering of tributes to the godfathers of dance music.

It doesn’t seem right that our autobahn journey should end here. For a start, I’ve barely been on the autobahn. The A555 was a rather unspectacular piece of road whose entire length could be driven in 15 minutes. That’s not even enough time to play the song in full. Bonn, Cologne and Düsseldorf are all so close that each leg has barely begun when it’s time to pull off the road – and that’s just not how a record as expansive as Autobahn feels.

A quote by Flür sparks inspiration. He described Autobahn as “the musical description of a car journey from Düsseldorf to Hamburg, if you know the route, you’ll recognise the sounds: the mechanical sounds represent the Ruhr valley, the conveyor belts of the mining towns of Bottrop and Castrop-Rauxel. Then you have the stretch through the rural Munsterland, where the countryside is symbolised by the flute and the song is completely different in feel.”

I set the satnav for Bottrop – A52, A3, A42 – in the hope of hearing the sounds of industry. But it is a mining city no longer – Prosper-Haniel was the last coal mine in the whole of Germany to shut when it closed its doors in 2018. Instead, the nearby Volkspark rests in almost complete silence, stirred no longer by the noise of 20th-century industrial Europe.

A grand memorial to Germany’s industrial heritage … LWL Industrial Museum Zollern. Photograph: Tim Jonze/The Guardian

Rusting bucket … ‘I realise I can make my own industrial sounds by banging my fingers on its shell.’ Photograph: The Guardian

Instead I move on to Castrop-Rauxel near Dortmund, and the next best thing to industry: the LWL Industrial Museum Zollern. This former coal mine is an exquisitely grand memorial to Germany’s industrial heritage – with its stained-glass art nouveau entrance, climbable pithead frame and vast engine hall. It’s quiet here, too. But while examining a rusting sinking bucket outside, I realise I can make my own industrial sounds by banging my fingers on its shell. The noise sounds instantly familiar – it reminds me of the wobbly bass notes that appear over the song’s grinding rhythm around the nine-minute mark. Creating music out of the everyday: it feels like a very Kraftwerkian thing to do.

To get back on to the autobahn for my final four-hour drive to Hamburg I check the road signs for the iconic blue and white autobahn sign. It’s the same sign that features on the Autobahn album sleeve – although this was not the album’s original artwork. For its initial German release the band used a painting created especially for them by their trusted artistic adviser Emil Schult. The poet and painter was a star pupil of the legendary German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys who had been professor of monumental sculpture at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art before a sit-in protest he was leading resulted in him being escorted from the building by police and subsequently fired.

A ‘total work of art’ … Kraftwerk on the Autobahn album’s inner sleeve. Photograph: Franz Perc/Alamy

Featuring a photograph of the band members on the dashboard and the same sun and mountains imagery that he would later reuse for the band’s 3D film, Schult’s painting is simultaneously childlike and loaded with reference points. Was the VW Beetle in which the viewer was situated driving towards a bright future? And was the Mercedes – a favourite vehicle for Nazi party members – travelling in the other direction supposed to signify the country’s past disappearing into the distance?

The sleeve united Kraftwerk’s visual and musical ideas and was the first step in a lifelong ambition of theirs to make a gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art”. This idea – that various artforms should all be utilised to create an even greater whole – has been a key theme running through German culture from Wagner to the Bauhaus. And it reached its pinnacle in Kraftwerk’s world when, in 2012, they played a series of shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, during which viewers watched specially made films through 3D glasses. The footage that played during Autobahn was especially absorbing, based as it was on Schult’s original painting (and, indeed, designed with input from Schult himself).

When the show came to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall the following year, I got my first taste of driving on the autobahn. There I stood as Volkswagens, Mercedes and enormous lorries passed by my side, and the 800 or so passengers riding with me reached out to touch them. It was a perfect synthesis of music, art, technology, design and film. And it all grew from the seed of Schult’s painting.

‘A perfect synthesis of music, art, technology, design and film … Kraftwerk perform at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2013. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Almost as an afterthought, somebody – perhaps Schult, maybe designer Barney Bubbles, nobody appears to know for certain – added a sticker to Schult’s original album sleeve featuring the blue and white autobahn symbol: two white lines converging towards the horizon, interrupted midway by a motorway bridge. The band liked the simple, Warhol-like usage of this everyday symbol so much that they decided to use it for the UK album’s release. They have since used it for all Autobahn releases including the 2009 catalogue remasters.

As with the song, this simple design was enormously influential. Famed designer Peter Saville claims that when he first saw it in 1975 it “had a markedly profound and enlightening influence upon me … I saw the vast landscape of past, present and future Europe unfold in my mind.” When, in 1978, Saville was tasked with creating a brand signifier for Factory Records, his appropriation of the hearing protection symbol was “a direct consequence of the Autobahn sign”.

In my case, the sign has a more utilitarian meaning – it leads me towards Autobahn 1, which runs all the way to my final destination. Itching to get on the open road, I crank the song up on the stereo and put my foot to the floor.

It’s often said that there are no speed limits on the autobahn. That’s not entirely true – limits of 70 or 80mph are common on some parts – but vast stretches remain thrillingly, terrifyingly anarchic. I wind down the windows, head north of 150km/h and listen to the cars zipping past me in the opposite direction. I pass green fields and red-bricked farm houses, remote churches and towering wind turbines. This is flute-solo country.

Is the autobahn less symbolic of freedom now than it was in the 1970s? Between Bonn and Dortmund there are frequent roadworks to navigate, a result I am told of a lack of investment in infrastructure since the 2008 crash. Elsewhere, a proposed extension to the A100 in Berlin has led to protests by ravers and environmentalists – the fact it threatens the future of several nightclubs in the east of the city is grimly ironic given Kraftwerk’s influence on the dance scene that has thrived there.

But such things won’t have been strangers to Kraftwerk even at the time they were writing it. In 1973, an international oil crisis was so severe that Germans were banned from driving the autobahn on Sundays for a month – instead people took strolls on it. Yet such tumult is noticeably absent in the song’s nursery rhyme lyrics, which were written by Schult.

Kraftwerk had never sung words on their music before. Hütter’s sprechsingen (talk-singing) covered awe-inspiring valleys, repetitive white lines, green ditches – and what sounded to anglo-centric ears like a Beach Boys lift. But Hütter isn’t singing “fun, fun, fun on the autobahn”, rather “Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn” (“We drive, drive, drive on the motorway”). If it was intended as a Beach Boys reference – the phrasing does resemble Fun, Fun, Fun and Barbara Ann, after all – then it was a decidedly German twist on it.

Singing in German was a radical – and risky – move for a band operating in the early 1970s. Many of the band’s German peers preferred to use English as a way to distance themselves from their country’s past, but Hütter was adamant that German words made the most sense for Kraftwerk: “The German language, like our own rhythms, is more machinelike, more abrupt.”

It was also part of the band’s desire to tackle their history directly. The Nazi regime, with their shunning of “degenerate” artists, had eradicated the Weimar’s thriving avant-garde scene. Kraftwerk wanted to connect back with it and build the Germany that had originally been promised.

When I spoke to Hütter in 2017 he told me how the band would travel hundreds of miles, from clubs to art galleries, on the autobahn. “And when we played in other cities, we didn’t have money to stay in hotels. So we were always driving on the autobahn, going somewhere and coming back at night all the time.” Their experience of the autobahn would often have been in darkness.

Sunset reflecting in a wing mirror … ‘I turn up the volume and let the beat propel me towards the shimmering lights of Hamburg.’ Photograph: Tim Jonze/The Guardian

As it turns out, the sun is starting to set as I approach Bremen. Its reflection looks glorious in my wing mirrors, while ahead of me the leaves on the trees are bathed in a brilliant red light. As evening falls, the track’s hypnotic finale, powered by the motorik beat, seems especially resonant. This 4/4 rhythm was once described by Brian Eno as one of the three most influential beats of the 1970s alongside Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat and the funk of James Brown. It was pioneered by German musicians – initially by Can’s Jaki Liebezeit and then built upon by Neu!’s Klaus Dinger. But it was only on Autobahn that its propulsive rhythm was married directly to the experience of driving. The rhythm conveys not just a sense of constant, forward motion but also the repetitive, trance-like state induced by long road trips. It is no wonder that Schneider once claimed that the band played faster if they’d travelled to the gig by autobahn. I turn up the volume and let the beat propel me towards the shimmering lights of Hamburg.

The German autobahn has taken me from the birthplace of Beethoven in Bonn to arguably the birthplace of the Beatles in Hamburg. Joining these two places is the story of one of music’s equally loud big bangs, with after-shocks that are still being felt.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s Andy McCluskey says that the release of Autobahn was like news of JFK’s death – everybody remembers where they were when they first heard it. In his case, he was in his bath listening to a little transistor radio. A year after its release, he found himself at the band’s Liverpool show, still only 16 and thinking: “I want to do this.”

Germany was suddenly on the musical map. David Bowie – who used to ride the autobahn while listening to the record – moved to Berlin to make the electronically influenced Low, “Heroes” and Lodger. Brian Eno relocated to the rural village of Forst to record with the influential avant-garde band Harmonia. Conny Plank became a leading producer of electronic pop music, working with the likes of Ultravox, DAF and the Eurythmics.

The world took a while to catch up – it would be another three years before the next similarly seismic release in electronic music arrived in the form of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s I Feel Love. Eventually, though, the track became regarded as a launch-pad for countless genres – from new wave to electronica. Juan Atkins credited it as part of his journey towards pioneering techno. Underworld and Stereolab are just two of the artists to have sampled it.

Autobahn did more than just influence the direction of pop, though. Speaking to Uncut in 2017, Flür said that the song had given postwar Germany something it desperately needed: “Something positive and youthful, that freed us from the stench of the past.”

I turn off the autobahn for the last time, drive my car to its final destination and kill the engine. Following the roads Kraftwerk once took has been a thrill – and an education. But there’s only so much it can really teach you about their music. We can all follow the blue and white signs to the next city, but only some of us know the directions to the future.