17 - Krautrock and British Post-Punk

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.