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17 - Krautrock and British Post-Punk

from Part III - Legacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2022

Uwe Schütte
Affiliation:
Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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Summary

This chapter describes the influence of Krautrock on post-punk music in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and argues that this influence marks a ‘Germanophilic‘ shift in British pop music, in the wake of punk‘s ‘Germanophobia‘. While post-punk was a diasporic and stylistically fragmented genre, it is possible to identify key musical elements clearly drawn from Krautrock bands like Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Neu!, and Can in the music of seminal post-punk groups, including Public Image Ltd., Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Bauhaus. For some of these groups, David Bowie, and especially his ‘Berlin-trilogy‘ albums, provided an indirect connection to Krautrock, which in turn helped to catalyse an aesthetic shift that would lead to the development of new genres, like gothic rock; for others, like former Sex Pistol and PiL frontman John Lydon, Krautrock provided the means to escape the strictures of punk, and would lay the foundation for radically new structural and sonic possibilities in pop music.

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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Recommended Reading

Albiez, S, Know History!: John Lydon, Cultural Capital and the Prog/Punk Dialectic, Popular Music 22:3 (2003), pp. 357–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, A, The ‘Ground Zero’ of Goth: Bauhaus, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ and the Origins of Gothic Rock, Popular Music and Society 35:1 (2012), pp. 2552.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellis, I, Post-Punk: The Cerebral Genre, PopMatters (17 April 2019).Google Scholar
Haddon, M, What Is Post-Punk? Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977–1982 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pegg, N, The Complete David Bowie (London: Titan, 2016).Google Scholar
Reynolds, S, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (London: Faber, 2005).Google Scholar

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