Wolfgang Flür

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Wolfgang Flür (born 17 July 1947) was a member of the Kraftwerk electro-pop group from 1973 to 1987, playing electronic drums. Flür also built much of the group's studio and stage equipment in his workshop below the band's Kling Klang studio.

Previously he had played a conventional acoustic drum kit in the Düsseldorf band The Spirits of Sound. (Another member of this band was guitarist Michael Rother, who also spent a few months as a member of Kraftwerk in 1971, before forming Neu! with then Kraftwerk drummer Klaus Dinger.)

Flür is now the founding member of Yamo, who released an album Time Pie in 1997, produced in collaboration with Mouse on Mars. Flür's next release, the 12" and remix 12" "I was a robot" climbed to number 6 in the German club charts. Collaborations with Pizzicato 5 and Der Plan founding member Pyrolator have been announced, and the lyrics to the song "Greed" are in Flür's autobiography, but this material remains unreleased.

Flür also wrote an autobiography, published in the year 2000, called I Was a Robot, showing the inner workings of Kraftwerk from the beginning. This book met with hostility and litigation from his former Kraftwerk colleagues Hütter and Schneider. The original Hannibal Verlag edition was soon withdrawn, following an injunction, but the book was republished in English and Japanese, with removal of a couple of embarrasingly homoerotic photos of Schneider and Emil Schult and re-wording of certain sections, for instance, Flür no longer claims that Metal on Metal was his idea; the idea was "probably" Hütter's, and he must have got the idea when he heard Flür banging away building stuff. However, most of the court attention centred round the recording of the song Autobahn, and this point was decided in Flür's favour: The German court found that Flür does play drums on Autobahn - it is odd that Hütter and Schneider would take offence at this claim, since they credited him for doing so on the original edition of the album, and even later, credit-less, editions carry a band photo with Flür and his drumkit centre stage.

Kraftwerk

Ralf Hütter | Florian Schneider

Karl Bartos | Wolfgang Flür | Fritz Hilpert | Henning Schmitz | Emil Schult

Discography