MICHAEL ROTHER It all starts with the fact that I don’t really like the name.

ULRICH RÜTZEL ‘Krautrock’ sounds better than ‘Deutschrock’, at least.

JULIAN COPE A very brilliant term, something like punk insofar as it both takes the piss AND shows tremendous self-awareness.

JAKI LIEBEZEIT I don’t mind ‘Kraut’. ‘Rock’ is much worse! Rock doesn’t stand for anything at all. You get Nazis doing rock. If [the schlager singer] Heino sings Rammstein, is that rock? Rock is a problematic term, and Can never made typical rock music. That’s why we never got really famous in Germany. They wanted rock here, and rock comes from blues, but we had nothing in common with blues. I’d call Can more of a pop group than a rock band.

NIGEL HOUSE As a record dealer, I’m very grateful for the word ‘krautrock’, because I can put all the interesting German music from back then in one section. I know Tangerine Dream don’t have much to do with Can, but from the seller’s point of view, the krautrock label is useful. All that these German bands really have in common is the point in time when most of the records were made. It’s the same with the so-called ‘Manchester bands’. But the pigeonholes help.

SIMON DRAPER I’d even say we invented the term ‘krautrock’ at Virgin, though some people see that differently. When I started there in the early seventies, I was in charge of purchasing for the mail-order department. We used to get loads of letters from customers and there was huge demand for records from Germany. It was usually bands we’d never heard of. We were aware of Can, Kraftwerk and Faust, but people kept asking for things we had no idea about. One name that kept cropping up was Tangerine Dream. So I got in touch with Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, the head of their record label Ohr. He sent us everything they’d ever released: Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, etc., about thirty albums. I took them home for the weekend to my flat in Ladbroke Grove, listened to them all with my younger brother and a friend, made notes and thought about how to sell them. What genre should I put them in, for our newspaper ads? If I’d just listed them alphabetically, no one would have noticed most of them. So we thought up this new name: ‘krautrock’. Maybe someone else had the same idea at the same time, but we did too! And it worked: all thirty krautrock records sold like hot cakes.

GERHARD AUGUSTIN John Peel established the name ‘krautrock’ for this strange music. But it’s completely wrong for bands like Can or Kraftwerk.

WINFRID TRENKLER The term came from one of those arrogant British music journos; there were plenty of them around in those days.

BRIAN ENO I never liked the word because for me it has associations with the war: British soldiers called their German counterparts ‘Krauts’, and it sounds quite offensive to me. I had been aware of German avantgarde music from the late sixties, although my preference was for the stuff that was coming out of America – the minimalists. But I knew there was a unique music scene and sensibility in Germany and I was paying attention to it.

HARALD GROSSKOPF ‘Krautrock’ is a wonderful name. Sure, it threw a lot of things together that don’t go together: from random German bands that were just copying British and American acts to the craziest electronic musicians. The only thing that really ties them all together is the fact that they all deny having anything to do with krautrock. And it was definitely a term of abuse, originally. I remember an article in the British press when Kraftwerk were first getting successful. They’d printed above it in runic letters: ‘MUZAK FROM GERMANY’, with the Brandenburg Gate and flaming SA torches, really pretty bad. And the Brits didn’t even know that sauerkraut is really healthy food. Whenever I heard the word ‘Kraut’ in England, I’d think: you come over to Germany, I’ll treat you to a bratwurst and sauerkraut. And that’s only fair when you’ve been subjected to an English breakfast.

HELLMUT HATTLER I grew up in Ulm. There were lots of US Army barracks there, and whenever you passed one of them, you’d hear the word ‘Kraut’. We were still the enemy.

MANI NEUMEIER I quite like the name actually. It doesn’t come from sauerkraut, the food; it’s from the word Kraut – weed, for smoking.

DANIEL MILLER I didn’t like the name at the time. The whole idea of lumping all these completely different musicians into one genre made no sense to me. I can hardly imagine two bands more different than NEU! and Amon Düül. And neither of them had anything in common with Kraftwerk. The name ‘krautrock’ didn’t even sound like music to me, more like geography and politics. It was typical quick-fire British nonsense. These days it’s an established term, of course, but I still don’t feel comfortable saying it.

THOMAS KESSLER If I’d known back then that I’d fall under the term later, I’d have been very surprised.

IGGY POP It’s a loathsome, stupid term but like my own first name it has eventually become a kind of affectionate positive, because the music is so good.

JÜRGEN DOLLASE Krautrock was never a particular style, the field was far too broad for that. There was exciting new music coming out almost every week at the end of the sixties. No one knew where the journey was heading.

SIGGI LOCH Everything that came out of Germany was labelled ‘Kraut’. For the Brits, we’ve been the Krauts for more than two generations, and it’s not a term of endearment.

STEVEN WILSON For me, krautrock was always a particular serious artform, with a precise ideology and philosophy, not something staged by the media. I presume none of the bands themselves see themselves as krautrock. The fact that the Faust track is called that is pure irony.

JEAN-HERVÉ PERON Our ‘Krautrock’ song came about by coincidence. We thought: ‘You want krautrock? You’ll get krautrock!’ These days, the press and young audiences think the name is cool. And we even got to play in a museum. But still, it’s annoying that everything that’s somehow German and hip got filed under ‘krautrock’. The word’s history is about as complicated as our band’s. At the time, we called what we were doing ‘multimedia music’ or ‘progressive music’. But the Brits are known for their sense of humour, sometimes brilliant and sometimes rock-bottom, just like the word ‘krautrock’: a little bit Nazi, a little bit icky.

HOLGER CZUKAY The name is nonsense. But I never thought it referred to me anyway. Presumably like everyone they’ve ever lumped together under it. Whenever we went to the UK with Can, I always felt like we were respected as one of their bands.

IRMIN SCHMIDT It’s not a term of abuse, for me. We were just the Krauts, for the Brits. You can’t take it as an insult. The French have two names for the Germans: Les Boches, that’s from the war and it’s not that nice, and Les Chleus, which is much nicer. ‘Chleurock’ would be a great name.

STEPHEN MORRIS An ugly name that probably came about something like: ‘From Germany? Just put that it’s bloody krautrock, innit?’ These days they’d have a whole marketing concept for it.

KLAUS SCHULZE I thought ‘krautrock’ was a horrible name, but it didn’t matter in the end. We made electronic music – neither kraut nor rock.

PAUL WELLER I feel the term ‘krautrock’ doesn’t do the music justice. A lot of it isn’t ‘rock’ for a start and certainly not rock ’n’ roll. It has a different groove of its own and no swing as such. It is absolutely Northern European and couldn’t have come from anywhere else. There’s a detachment and feeling of isolation to the music. The feeling of a new generation working outside of what was expected and finding their own path. As someone who was brought up on soul, pop and rock ’n’ roll, the German music from this time has a very different form of expression and body to it, to my ears.

CHRISTIAN BURCHARD The Sun once wrote about Embryo: ‘Some low-flying Messerschmidts.’ Maybe it was meant to be funny, but it was also a bit mean. We played with Ginger Baker’s Air Force in the Grugahalle in Essen, once. He...