Recognise this man?
No, thought not. This is Wolfgang Flur as he appears on the cover of Kraftwer's Trans-Europe Express album. Some years back, having been dropped from Kraftwerk - where he seemed to excel at playing little electronic drums with what looked like knitting needles, and not a great deal more - Herr Flur wrote a book about his years in the band titled I Was A Robot. Putting to one side the fact that his prose style suggested he still was a robot, this unintentionally hilarious book was a folly of gross proportions in which Flur talked up his importance in the group while trying to impress us with the shock revelations that in fact Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider (who are, in essence, Kraftwerk) are not soulless andriods who pluck genius melodies from a radiant ether but are in fact mere humans blessed with genius and a talent for melody who have bad days, can be grumpy and don't mind the odd gift of a Rolex watch from record company executives. Now I certainly won't deny that they are also exacting control freaks who don't even give out their telephone number to the head of their record company (no, not even for a precision engineered watch) and therefore Ralf and Florian tried to take out an injunction to prevent the book from ever seeing light of day, probably fearing it might break the unique mystique that is The World's Greatest Band.
Presumably in the same way that knowing the intimate details of the Beckhams' private life can be ruled to be in the public interest, so I Was A Robot duly appeared. In it we learn a little about Kraftwerk, such as that Ralf is a careful driver, and we learn a lot more about Flur himself. He was a former porn model, was a hit with the ladies, and had a few post-Kraftwerk solo records that are discussed at length in a huge section at the end.
All of which is to suggest that this is a book with a rather limited audience and therefore a rather limited shelf-life. So it was to absolute astonishment that I saw it in the new release section of Borders yesterday, in a snazzy new cover featuring the back of someone's head with a computer chip on the neck. Shouldn't it have been on the shoulder, surely? However, turn to the back and drink in the opening sentence of the author blurb - which I shall give a line of its own and perhaps some striking bold type:
Wolfgang Flur is an artist of internationally recognised importance ...
Oh well - beats being a robot any day.