Watch Klaus Dinger and Neu! performing live in 1974

As the first drummer with Kraftwerk and a founder member of the band Neu!, Klaus Dinger was a seminal figure in the development of the groundbreaking electronic pop music that emerged in Germany in the early 1970s, widely referred to as “Kraut-rock”. His propulsive drumming with its machine-like, repetitious groove came to define a style known as “Apache beat” or “motorik” and was an influence on a wide range of artists from David Bowie to John Lydon in his post-Sex Pistols group, PiL.

Born in Germany in 1946, Klaus Dinger joined the Düsseldorf-based Kraftwerk in 1970 and played on their debut album, adding a primal pulse to the group's fusion of man and machine. Within a year Dinger and multi-instrumentalist Michael Rother had left Kraftwerk to form Neu!. Working with the producer Conny Plank, the duo recorded their self-titled debut album in less than four days.

While their former partners in Kraftwerk set about producing their own unique brand of electronic pop music, Neu! (1972) revealed a sound that was radically different in concept and execution. Mixing heavily phased and flanged guitars with a trance-like beat, industrial rhythms, minimalist melodies and ambient textures, the long, anarchic tracks could hardly be described as songs as Dinger's feral vocals were used not to convey a narrative but as another instrument in the sonic storm.

The follow-up, Neu! 2 (1973), was different again, partly because of the duo running out of money while recording it. With only half an hour of music in the can, they enterprisingly filled out side two of the LP by remixing the tracks Super and Neuschnee at different speeds. Other tracks featured such bizarre sound effects as a cassette being eaten by a tape machine. The results were disorienting, subversive and quite brilliant in their way, presaging by many years the time when different remixes of the same piece of music would become the norm.

Both albums caused a flurry of excitement when they appeared in Britain but Neu!'s reluctance to play live, because of the difficulties of reproducing their studio sound, prevented them from gaining a higher profile. After a period of inactivity, in 1975 they added Dinger's brother, Thomas, and Hans Lampe to the line-up to record a third album in order to fulfil a contractual obligation to their German record company, Brain. With Dinger and Rother each taking charge of one side, Neu! 75 was an unexpected masterpiece. In effect it was two different records with Rother on side one exploring the group's more ennui-laden ambient leanings while on side two Dinger launched a mesmerising sonic assault.

After splitting with Rother, Dinger formed La Dusseldorf, with his brother and Lampe, recording three albums between 1976 and 1980 which broadly continued in the style forged by Neu!. Dinger's later career was somewhat more erratic and the one attempt to reunite with Rother to record new music in 1985-86 was abandoned as a failure. The tapes subsequently appeared as Neu! 4 in 1996, the lack of sufficient material to fill the disc masked again by a series of remixes.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Neu!'s core work was unavailable because of a series of legal disputes, not least between Dinger and Rother. Scarcity helped the band's reputation and by the 1990s bands such as Sonic Youth, Stereolab and Death in Vegas were name-checking Neu! as a significant influence. After Dinger and Rother settled some of their longstanding differences, which enabled the belated rerelease of the group's first three albums on CD in 2001, many fans hoped for a reunion, but it was not to be.

Klaus Dinger, drummer, was born on March 24, 1946. He died of heart failure on March 20, 2008, aged 61