In the late 1980s, the children’s TV series C.O.P.S. depicted an elite police squadron, ‘fighting crime in a future time’.  That future, the year 2020, was one in which tall mirrored buildings are interconnected by space-age highways and populated by laser-toting enforcers, who we’re encouraged to think of as the good guys. In the first episode, the C.O.P.S (Central Organisation of Police Specialists), track down a villain who sounds like a drum & bass DJ — ‘Dr Bad Vibes’ — at an address that sounds like a Vaporwave compilation; 819 Peripheral Plaza, Empire City.

While most of Empire City is Abu Dhabi-like, gleaming and clinical, there is evidence of humanity at Peripheral Plaza. It is lived-in and unpoliced, a space of clandestine encounters — the kind of real-world spaces that would be crushed by the neoliberal paradise.  As C.O.P.S. was being aired, American imperialism was at its zenith, Reagan’s war on drugs had been waged, and Thatcherism had transformed Britain. The USSR crumpled, and Francis Fukuyama’s infamous essay ‘The End of History?’ was published.  During this period the German art student Uwe Schütte was reacquainting himself with a future he once experienced in the past, through the music of Kraftwerk, a band who could have easily passed for villains in C.O.P.S. Perhaps the vision of the future Kraftwerk symbolised filled a creative void in the late 1980s in a way it didn’t during the 1970s, but it set Schütte off on an obsession that eventually resulted in a timely new book.

There is little gossip in Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany.  Facts are presented, and wider contexts are drawn upon, none more compelling than the idea that Kraftwerk’s recordings are ghost traces of a murdered future; ‘an odd transmission from a future-past’. 2020 marks half a century since Kraftwerk formed, and in Schutte’s book there is the unsettling feeling that the band’s output in the 1970s and 1980s still sounds, looks and feels more avant-garde than anything the last three decades have given us.

Kraftwerk aren’t the only musical outfit celebrating their fifty-year anniversary. Shortly before Schütte’s book was published, The Ebony Steel Band — one of the oldest steel drum organisations in Europe — gave us the very definition of ‘a repacked version of the past’, with a steel-drum interpretation of some of Kraftwerk’s most well-known compositions in Pan Machine. Anybody who remembers Paul Anka’s syrupy swing interpretations of Soundgarden and Nirvana on 2005’s Rock Swings, or the awful slew of middle-class indie kids doing ironic guitar versions of gangsta rap, might feel hesitant, and conceptually there is certainly a shade of the gimmick in Pan Machine.

But what is important to the future is how and where the past is being repackaged. Schütte’s book reminds us that Kraftwerk didn’t just emerge from nowhere; they were born in the rubble of post-war Dusseldorf, and swallowed up everything from Bauhaus to Russian Suprematism, Italian Futurism, French cycling culture, and US Pop Art. Their German futurism was always encoded with the international and the out-of-date. The Ebony Steel Band work out of a community centre in the heart of the Notting Hill Carnival route, and use an instrument borne out of anti-colonial defiance in Trinidad and Tobago, to interpret melodies and concepts that were trying to move German identity forward after National Socialism. Kraftwerk often did this by suggesting a German identity that was part of a wider European project, with works such as Trans Europe Express and ‘Europe Endless’ hinting at the mobility offered by federalism. There has always been disjuncture between European futures and what might constitute a future for black people, who Paul Gilroy has called a ‘counter-culture to modernity’; both central to and subjugated by Western expansionism and ‘progress’.

There is beauty in this blur. Black artists have often subtly shed light on the inherent ironies and paradoxes of ‘the future’, leading to new pathways; Chuck Berry felt so free riding along in his automobile because it was in the wake of segregated bus journeys, Afrika Bambaataa latched onto Kraftwerk’s European futurism in a decimated inner-city New York, while the Chicago House and Detroit Techno scenes fused and fashioned the band’s legacy into a music that hinted at a shadow side of the future, in a place with no future. Pan Machine also sounds like some weird reverberation of something lost, a haunted echo that displaces the embodied energy in Kraftwerk’s original recordings. Does the record invoke a bold new future?  No.  But during this period of isolation (and, hopefully, reflection) it does contain a trace of a past future in an unexpected location in the present, in the place where the future always has a chance: the peripheral plaza, where nobody is looking.