Kraftwerk

• 1. Introduction

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  Kraftwerk formed in Düsseldorf in 1970, built by two students named Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. They had met at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in the late 1960s, drawn into the experimental music and art scene that a British magazine, Melody Maker, jokingly labelled krautrock. One day they visited a local exhibition about the visual artists Gilbert and George. There they saw two men in suits and ties, claiming to bring art into everyday life. The encounter stuck. As the band later put it, that same year Hütter and Schneider started bringing everyday life into art, and formed Kraftwerk. How does a group that began with flutes, violins, and audio-tape tricks become one of the most influential acts in pop history? Why would a song built from bicycle chains and breathing matter, and why would matching suits and life-size mannequins become a signature? The answers run through robots, trains, computers, and a studio whose telephone never rang.

• 2. From Krautrock To Robot Pop

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  Tone Float arrived in 1970, the only album by a quintet called Organisation, issued on RCA Records in the UK before the group split. Out of that wreckage Schneider and Hütter kept going. The earliest Kraftwerk line-ups, from 1970 to 1974, kept shifting, with roughly half a dozen musicians passing through, among them guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger, who left to form Neu!. Two free-form experimental rock albums, Kraftwerk in 1970 and Kraftwerk 2 in 1972, captured this period. They were mostly improvisations on guitar, bass, drums, organ, flute, and violin, then warped in post-production through tape manipulation and layered dubbing. Both records are purely instrumental. Ralf and Florian, released in 1973, leaned harder on synthesizers and drum machines. It marked the band's first use of the vocoder, in a track called Ananas Symphonie, or Pineapple Symphony, which became one of its signatures. The producer Konrad Conny Plank shaped these early years, co-producing the first four albums. Plank also worked with members of Can, Neu!, Cluster, and Harmonia, and his studio near Cologne grew into one of the most sought-after rooms of the late 1970s. By the mid-1970s the band had named its new direction. They called it robot pop, an electronic sound built from pop melodies, sparse arrangements, and repetitive rhythms, a long way from the flute the band started with.

• 3. The Autobahn Breakthrough

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  Autobahn, released in 1974, peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Top LPs and Tape in the United States. It was the last album Conny Plank engineered, and it moved Kraftwerk away from its first three records. Hütter and Schneider had invested in newer machines, the Minimoog and the EMS Synthi AKS, giving the group a more disciplined sound. The painter and graphic artist Emil Schult joined as a regular collaborator, designing artwork, cowriting lyrics, and travelling with the band. The year 1975 reshaped the live shows. With financial support from Phonogram Inc. in the US, the band toured the United States, Canada, and the UK for the first time, settling into a stable quartet. Hütter and Schneider sang live for the first time, with Schneider processing his voice through a vocoder on stage. Wolfgang Flür and the new recruit Karl Bartos played home-made electronic percussion, and Bartos also used a Deagan vibraphone. This Hütter-Schneider-Bartos-Flür formation held until the late 1980s and became the classic live line-up. Radio-Activity followed, sung around the central theme of radio communication. It sold less than Autobahn in the UK and US but opened the European market, earning a gold disc in France. David Bowie was a fan and invited the band to support his Station to Station tour, an offer Kraftwerk declined.

• 4. Trains, Machines, And Computers

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  Trans-Europe Express arrived in March 1977, recorded at the band's Kling Klang Studio and mixed at the Record Plant Studios in Los Angeles. EMI France marked the release with an extravagant train journey staged as a press conference, and the album won a disco award in New York that year. The Man-Machine came in May 1978, its cover produced in black, white, and red, inspired by the Russian artist El Lissitzky and the Suprematism movement. Gunther Frohling photographed the quartet in red shirts and black ties, a now-iconic image. It was the first album where Karl Bartos was cocredited as a songwriter. Computer World arrived in May 1981 on EMI Records, recorded at Kling Klang between 1978 and 1981. Computer Love was released as a single backed with the Man-Machine track The Model. Radio DJs preferred the B-side, so EMI repackaged the single with The Model as the A-side, and it reached number one in the UK, the band's most successful song there. In a twist that fit the album's theme, Kraftwerk did not own a computer when recording it. On the 1981 tour the band packed up the entire Kling Klang studio and carried it on the road, using back-projected films and replica mannequins of themselves to perform during The Robots.

• 5. The Cycling Obsession

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  Tour de France was released as a single by EMI in 1983, born from the band's new obsession with cycling. After the demanding Computer World tour, Ralf Hütter sought exercise that fit Kraftwerk's image, encouraging the group to become vegetarians and take up cycling. The track wove in bicycle chains, gear mechanisms, and the breathing of the cyclist, with vocals recorded on the Kling Klang stairs to capture the right atmosphere. It appeared in the 1984 film Breakin', a sign of the band's influence on West Coast hip hop. Hütter wanted a whole album built on cycling, but the rest of the band was not convinced, so the theme stayed with the single. In May or June 1982, during the recording, Hütter suffered a serious cycling accident, with head injuries and several days in a coma. The album that grew slowly through these years began with the working title Technicolor, became Electric Café for its 1986 release because of trademark issues, and was later retitled Techno Pop for a 2009 reissue. Wolfgang Flür drifted away as sequencers reduced his role as a drummer. His playing does not appear on Computer World or Electric Café. He made his last appearance in the 1987 music video for The Telephone Call, and declined to perform at the band's 1990 Italian concerts, where Fritz Hilpert replaced him on stage.

• 6. Reinvention And The Catalogue

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  The Mix came in 1991, after Karl Bartos left following a few secret shows in Italy in February 1990. Hütter and Schneider wanted to keep the four-man synth-pop presentation and recruited Fernando Abrantes, who left shortly after, before sound engineer Henning Schmitz completed a new quartet that lasted until 2008. In 1997 the band made a famous appearance at the dance festival Tribal Gathering in England, and in 1998 toured the US and Japan for the first time since 1981, along with shows in Brazil and Argentina. Tour de France Soundtracks followed in August 2003, the first album of new material since Electric Café. For the Minimum-Maximum world tour the band used four customised Sony VAIO laptops, leaving the Kling Klang studio at home and replacing its projection screens with transparent video panels. Florian Schneider was absent from the touring lineup by 2008, and on the 21st of November the band confirmed his departure. The Independent observed that it had apparently taken Schneider and Hütter four decades to discover musical differences. In 2009 the band staged 3D concerts in Wolfsburg, Manchester, and Randers, handing out 3D glasses. At Manchester, four members of the GB cycling squad rode around the Velodrome while the band played Tour de France.

• 7. A Studio That Kept Secrets

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  The phone in Kling Klang Studio had no ringer, because the band did not want to hear noise pollution while recording. Callers were told to telephone at a precise time, when Ralf Hütter would answer despite never hearing it ring. Karl Bartos relayed this to Johnny Marr of the Smiths, one of many stories about a notoriously reclusive group. Kraftwerk gave rare and enigmatic interviews, used life-size mannequins and robots in official photo shoots, refused fanmail, and kept the studio's exact location secret. The band treated Kling Klang as a single instrument and a sound laboratory. Florian Schneider in particular grew fascinated with music technology, and sound generation became his main field within the group. Kraftwerk used a custom-built vocoder on Ralf and Florian and Autobahn, built by engineers P. Leunig and K. Obermayer of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt Braunschweig. Hütter and Schneider received a patent for an electronic drum kit with sensor pads, filed in July 1975 and issued in June 1977, struck with metal sticks to trigger synthetic percussion. Flür first played such a device in public in 1973, on the ZDF television program Aspekte. When Chris Martin of Coldplay wrote asking to use the melody from Computer Love, weeks later he received a handwritten reply that simply said yes.

• 8. The Influence Machine

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  Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force interpolated Trans Europe Express and Numbers, one of the earliest hip-hop and electro hits, helping ignite the New York electro movement. The reach runs wide. The music journalist Neil McCormick suggested Kraftwerk might be the most influential group in pop history, and NME called them, alongside the Beatles, one of the two most important bands in music history. Techno was created by three Detroit musicians known as the Belleville three, Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May, who fused Kraftwerk's repetitive melodies with funk rhythms. Depeche Mode's Martin Gore called Kraftwerk the godfathers for anyone of his generation in electronic music. David Bowie's V-2 Schneider, from the 1977 album Heroes, was a tribute to Florian Schneider, and New Order sampled Uranium in its biggest hit, Blue Monday. The honours arrived late. In 2014 the Recording Academy gave Kraftwerk a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the live album 3-D The Catalogue won the 2018 Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album, the band's first Grammy win. In 2021 Kraftwerk entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the early influence category. Florian Schneider died on the 21st of April 2020, at age 73, after a brief battle with cancer. On the 27th of July 2024, at the Fuji Rock Festival in Naeba, the band played a cover for the first time, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence by Ryuichi Sakamoto, a friend of Hütter since 1981.