I’ve been reading this book for more than a year.
It’s a brick of a book, but that’s not the reason it’s taken me this long. I’ve had it planted on the kitchen table, and I’ve been reading a couple pages now and then while waiting for the potatoes to boil and stuff.
The other day, I’d made it halfway through, and I thought it was time to switch it out with some other book, so I read the last half tout de suite.
For a musician autobiography, it’s not a typical book. These are usually (half-)ghostwritten by journalists that are interested in goosing up the stories, and there’s no goosing here. And if not, they’re usually written by a musician that has some sort of agenda — usually complaining about how stupid everybody else in the band was (or something), and those grievances permeate the book, so you get typical sentences like “and that’s the first time I saw Richard, but I didn’t know at that time what a sleazy weasel he’d turn out to be”.
Instead the methodology Bartos seems to have used is to describe everything that happened solely from the point of view of who he was and what he knew at that time. That is, he’s not using the book as a way to collect evidence for some grand show down, but is telling everything in as straight-forward a way as possible.
So we don’t get to any serious grievances about how money was divided in the band before on page 450, when he confronted Ralf and Florian about it.
I’ve never read anything quite like it, but on the other hand — there’s a reason these books are written in the way they’re written — because this methodology is for serious Kraftwerk fans only.
Of which I’m one! My favourite parts of the book was there Bartos goes through the recording process, track by track.
The gruelling five year process to get Electric Cafe made was interesting — every time some other band released something that sounded more modern that what they had, they wanted to tinker further with the album, which meant that it was finally released, it sounded kinda old.
Here’s the dramatic showdown between Bartos and Ralf & Florian. Yes, really. This is how dramatic it gets.
So is the book any good? Well, it worked well reading it the way I did, and there are really interesting bits about recording, but… Now I can read something else while waiting for the potatoes to boil!
It took five years for the English translation to be published.
There are virtually no negative reviews on Goodreads, but then again — the readership is pretty self-selected for something like this.
The Sound of the Machine (2017) by Karl Bartos (buy new, buy used, 4.28 on Goodreads)