I was watching BBc4's Krautrock documentary last night - when you have a baby in the house, iPlayer is a boon - and something struck me. If we're meant to be grown-ups, shouldn't we stop sneering at other peoples' tastes like the bullying cool kids in the school playground?
The easy target for this programme was Schlager - mid-tempo, jolly, apolitical, vaguely oompah mainstream German pop music from the late 60s. Tee hee hee, how very dad-like and not down with the kids, who truly know the score. The sort of thing Eurotrash sniggered at frequently.
Now look at this UK chart from 1968 - more or less the one played on Radio 2 last Saturday afternoon. Leapy Lee, Engelbert Humperdinck - basically Schlager but sung in English. Not only is island-race smugness misplaced, but maybe we should now accept that our parents bought records too.
This aside, I'm still glad that someone actually makes television programmes on these subjects and shows them at 9 in the evening (or at your leisure if you're an iPlayer user). Sometimes interviewing people in their second language can backfire; it can make people seem inarticulate or, at the other end of the spectrum, cliché machines (Renate out of Amon Düül saying that she "used her voice as an instrument" as if we've never heard that said before). Go on BBC4, you know your audience can do subtitles.
Also... Wolfgang Flür again, after being on Synth Britannia last week. He used to play drums (or hit an electric tea tray with knitting needles, if you're a purist) for Kraftwerk. I know Florian Schneider's buggered off, but does Ralf Hütter not give television interviews?
