Another interesting area where Kraftwerk seems separate from what we might call rock'n'roll culture is that people in rock are very attached to a band having the same line-up. Whereas for the music that you make it may not be necessary the membership stays the same. The Ramones changed members because in a sense it didn't matter who was up there, the sound was important.

Yes, it is a strong concept. Kraftwerk is a concept for electronic music and when I started with Florian in 1970, even before that when we were students actually, we always worked a lot with different musicians and many other people like artists, painters and poets, and we have technicians or computer programmers, cameramen and animators, and people who do the album covers. We work with people in the printing stage. And graphic people.

So we are involved in all different levels which makes it for me very interesting. When I was a kid I never liked being at the piano, I hated that. So we keep alive by working these different fields.

You studied architecture didn't you?

At one point I did, and constructing music and live performance comes from the same spirit.

It makes sense that you would want to be involved in album covers in that you have an eye for design.

Yes. Because sometimes, as you know, some people just make the music and somebody else is developing the video concept for them. That's not the case with Kraftwerk, we do everything ourselves. And that is how we worked right from the beginning.

One of things about Kraftwerk is that you have remained largely anonymous in that you don't do too many interviews and people don't go to your studio. Which makes me wonder - but thank you very much anyway - why are you talking to me right now? You probably don't need to do this.

We do once in a while when there are things to be said or when there are things to make clearer. When there is something to say, then why not say it? But in general show business people are being used for their image. For us part of our work is exchanging creative ideas and travelling into different cultural contexts. Like we go from Poland into Ukraine now for the first time, and after New Zealand we perform in Singapore. We've never been in that part of the world and so we are also curious to communicate with our music into different cultural contexts.

It is the minimum/maximum concept.

I think people in popular culture talk too much about themselves and the more they do that, the less important the work becomes. For many people the interview is the most creative thing they do.

Exactly, for us it doesn't make sense because we have visual media.

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