Klaus Dinger: Pioneer of the 'motorik' beat

In the Seventies heyday of German experimental rock – a once-maligned genre dubbed "Krautrock" – the musician Klaus Dinger pioneered a hypnotic, robotic style of drumming which became known as the "motorik" beat.

Dinger drummed on Kraftwerk's eponymous début album in 1970 before co-founding the group Neu! with the guitarist Michael Rother, who had briefly been a member of Kraftwerk. Dinger also played guitar and keyboards and formed La Düsseldorf in the mid-Seventies. The recordings of Neu! and La Düsseldorf inspired the soundscapes of Low, Heroes and Lodger, the trilogy of albums recorded by David Bowie in the late Seventies with Brian Eno, who said: "There were three great beats in the 1970s: Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, James Brown's funk and Klaus Dinger's Neu! beat."

Born in 1946, Dinger admitted he was a rather badly behaved child at school but he enjoyed singing in the choir. He began drumming at 17 and played in various bands while studying architecture at university. After discovering LSD in 1969, he dropped out during the last year of his course and took part in various performance art experiments in Düsseldorf.

The following year, he replaced Andreas Hohmann as drummer in Kraftwerk, the group headed by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, and helped them complete the sessions for their first album. When Hütter dropped out for a few months, he was replaced by Rother and it was that line-up which appeared on Beat Club on German television in 1970. After Hütter's return, he and Schneider decided to carry on as a duo.

Dinger and Rother formed Neu! and made three albums, Neu! (1972), Neu! 2 (1973) and Neu! 75 (1975). Much bootlegged, these recordings, and in particular extended pieces like "Hallogallo", the opening track on Neu!, turned the group into the European equivalent of the Velvet Underground, in that everyone who heard Dinger and Rother's music seemingly formed a band. The ingenious way they completed Neu! 2, after spending most of the budget on new instruments, by simply manipulating previous recordings, also anticipated the advent of remixing.

The two fell out in the mid-Seventies and a brief attempt at reconciliation a decade later proved unsuccessful, although the sessions were eventually released as Neu! 4 in 1995. The tensions between Dinger and Rother were still palpable when they promoted the official reissues of the Neu! catalogue in 2001.

Dinger's next project, La Düsseldorf, was as successful as it was influential and their three albums reached combined sales of a million copies. Later, he worked under the name La! Neu?

Dinger sported an amazingly long grey beard. He had a mischievous sense of humour but he did not have much time for critics who referred to his insistent drumming as the motorik beat. "That sounds more like a machine, and it was very much a human beat," he said. "It's essentially about life, how you have to keep moving, get on and stay in motion." His preferred definition would have been "the apache beat".

Pierre Perrone

Klaus Dinger, drummer, guitarist, keyboard player and singer: born Scherfede, Germany 24 March 1946; died 20 March 2008.