I’m sitting on the downstairs deck of the No.1 bus going up the Royal Mile with my mother, heading home from our trip to the Edinburgh department stores. I had just bought the new Kraftwerk album, Autobahn, which was sitting flat on my knees, and I was staring at the cover design of the motorway symbol with anticipation. This music seemed pretty exotic and mysterious to me at the time.
On most Saturday mornings, there was always something my mother needed to buy from these stores: Goldbergs, P.T.’s, Binns, Forsyth’s and Jenners. It was a required excursion, to go ‘up the town’ to these vast stores. They sold everything we needed including school uniforms, underwear, household things… and records. I bought a lot of random records from these stores. The Goldbergs store in particular was a unique experience. It stood on its own at Tollcross with huge sculptures fixed onto its façade. It was also exotic; there were parrots in cages and a top floor canteen. You could go outside onto the roof garden, and find more birds in what seemed like bright-white modernist structures. Very European, not like Scotland in the 1970s, which felt brown and grey, and maybe some orange.
Florian Schneider who was one of the founding members of Kraftwerk, died recently; it made me think of their music and how and where I heard it. To add to my Autobahn record, my Dad used to bring me back records from his school football Easter trips to Germany, so I have some odd German issue releases of Kraftwerk and Neu! albums. I still play them now as they still sound like the future. I’m drawn to the machine-like drumming and the relentless beat. I also admire the musicians’ inventive DIY attitude and direct sound. My own drumming is all 4/4, no infills and intuitive. I learnt to read drumming music at school, to play it correctly but I really rely on my instinct when I play. It makes me feel good.
Iain Irving 