Trans-Europe Express (album)

• 1. Introduction

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  Trans-Europe Express, released in March 1977 by the German electronic band Kraftwerk, arrived with a cover that told you everything you needed to know. Four men in suits, posed like mannequins, stared out from a heavily retouched photo-montage taken in Paris. No guitars. No drumkit. No sweat. In 2014, pop music critic Randall Roberts wrote in the Los Angeles Times that this record was the most important of the last forty years. So how did a group from Düsseldorf, working in a custom studio with a 32-step analog sequencer, end up making something that reshaped hip-hop, post-punk, and electronic pop across the following decades?

• 2. From Krautrock to the Continent

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  Karl Bartos once described the rules that Kraftwerk had started drawing up during the tour for their previous album, Radio-Activity. "It's not easy to turn knobs on a synthesizer if you are drunk or full of drugs," he wrote. "We always tried to keep very aware of what we were doing while acting in public." That sense of disciplined control ran straight through the making of Trans-Europe Express. In mid-1976, the band began work on a project then called Europe Endless. French music journalist Paul Alessandrini suggested they write a song about the Trans Europ Express railway service, arguing that "with the kind of music you do, which is kind of like an electronic blues, railway stations and trains are very important in your universe". Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider took the advice. They also took a field trip to railway bridges near Düsseldorf to record the actual sounds a train produced, only to find those sounds were not danceable, so they adjusted them. Before recording began, Hütter and Schneider met with David Bowie and Iggy Pop, an encounter that fed directly into the album's lyrics.

• 3. The Machine in the Studio

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  At the center of the album's sound was a piece of custom hardware: the Synthanorma Sequenzer, a 32-step, 16-channel analog sequencer built specifically for Kraftwerk by the company Matten and Wiechers. It freed the band from playing repetitive keyboard figures by hand and enabled the elaborate layered synthesizer lines that run through tracks such as "Franz Schubert" and "Endless Endless". Artistic control remained firmly with Hütter and Schneider; Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür contributed sequenced electronic percussion. Unlike Radio-Activity, which had mixed German and English lyrics in the same versions, Trans-Europe Express was recorded as two fully separate editions, one in English and one in German. At the recommendation of Maxime Schmitt, a French version of "Showroom Dummies" was also cut, titled "Les Mannequins". It was the band's first song in French and pointed the way toward later recordings in that language. After tracking in Düsseldorf, Hütter and Schneider travelled to the Record Plant Studio in Los Angeles to mix, but parts of those sessions, including more upfront vocals, were ultimately discarded in favor of further work done back in Düsseldorf and Hamburg.

• 4. Themes of Mirrors and Motion

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  Wolfgang Flür traced Kraftwerk's aesthetic roots to the culture of Weimar Germany: "we were children who were born straight after World War Two... we had no musical or pop culture of our own... there was the war, and before the war we had only the German folk music". The band were also acutely aware that British and American critics linked them to Nazi Germany, partly because of tracks like "Autobahn" and the road-building campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s. Trans-Europe Express was a deliberate move away from that association, toward a new pan-European identity. AllMusic grouped the album's themes into two strands: songs about the gap between reality and appearance, represented by "Hall of Mirrors" and "Showroom Dummies", and songs that celebrate Europe itself. "Hall of Mirrors" features deadpan vocals pondering how celebrities confront their own reflections; Hütter and Schneider called the song autobiographical. "Showroom Dummies" had a more specific origin. The idea came directly from a British concert review that compared Bartos and Flür to shop-window mannequins, and some versions of the track open with a spoken count of "eins zwei drei vier," a parody of the Ramones' habit of counting in their songs. The second side of the record forms a continuous suite. The title track bleeds into "Metal on Metal" and "Franz Schubert" before ending with a brief reprise of the "Europe Endless" theme, and the lyrics name-check David Bowie's album Station to Station alongside Iggy Pop.

• 5. Covers, Cameras, and a Chartered Train

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  Maurice Seymour, a celebrity photographer based in New York, shot the image that ended up on the English version of the album cover: four members of Kraftwerk from the shoulders up, dressed in suits, styled to resemble mannequins. The original plan had been a monochrome shot showing the group reflected in a series of mirrors, but that idea was abandoned. The inner sleeve used a color collage, designed by Emil Schult, of the group seated at a small cafe table. The photo came from the same Maurice Seymour session, taken on the band's American tour. Other frames from that session showed the group laughing and smiling; none of those appeared on the record. With the help of Günther Fröhling, the band filmed a promotional video for the title track, in which they ride a train from Düsseldorf to the nearby city of Duisburg, wearing long coats. Stills from that shoot were later repurposed for the single sleeve of "Showroom Dummies". To introduce the album to the French press, EMI Records hired a vintage train with carriages from the 1930s to travel from Paris to Rheims while songs from the album played over the train's announcement system.

• 6. Reception and the Critics

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  Robert Christgau reviewed Trans-Europe Express in The Village Voice, writing that its "textural effects sound like parodies by some cosmic schoolboy of every lush synthesizer surge that's ever stuck in your gullet, yet also work the way those surges are supposed to work". The album placed at number 30 in The Village Voice's 1977 Pazz and Jop critics' poll. It did not make a dramatic commercial splash in its first years. On the Billboard Top LPs and Tape chart it peaked at number 119, though that was still higher than Radio-Activity had charted. The album entered the UK charts only in February 1982, peaking at number 49 after seven weeks. The re-released remix of "Showroom Dummies", which added drums to the original arrangement, followed it in, reaching number 25. Over subsequent decades, the critical position hardened into near-consensus. AllMusic's Steve Huey described it as "perhaps the archetypal and most accessible Kraftwerk album". Q magazine wrote in 1995 that it "changed the face of American dance music". Slant Magazine placed it at number one on their list of the greatest electronic albums of the twentieth century. Rolling Stone ranked it at number 253 on their 2003 list of the five hundred greatest albums of all time, with that position later adjusting to 256 in 2012 and climbing to 238 in the 2020 revision.

• 7. An Influence Without Borders

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  Peter Hook, bassist of Joy Division, recalled that singer Ian Curtis insisted the band play Trans-Europe Express over the venue's PA before every show. Hook described the first time: at Pips, a Manchester club known for its Bowie Room, Curtis was thrown out for kicking broken glass around the dance floor in time to the music. Drummer Stephen Morris confirmed the ritual and added his own gloss: "It reminds me of Cabaret, the film, with all of the 1920s singing. When you get that marriage between humans and machines, and you get it right, it's fantastic." In the mid-1980s, Siouxsie and the Banshees recorded "The Hall of Mirrors" for their album Through the Looking Glass. Ralf Hütter called their version "extraordinary," one of the very few cover versions he praised in those terms. Slant Magazine's Sal Cinquemani captured the wider reach of the album's influence, citing Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock," Jay Dee's "Big Booty Express," Radiohead's Kid A, and Madonna's Drowned World Tour, which incorporated samples of "Metal on Metal". Drowned in Sound's Chris Power, writing in 2009, put it plainly: "Trans-Europe Express is all at once antique, timeless, retro and contemporary. Its status as modern electronic music's birth certificate is well-earned." The 2009 remastered edition, released on EMI in Germany, Mute Records across the European Union, and Astralwerks in the United States, presented a new cover design: a black background with a white Trans Europ Express train at center, and restored "Abzug" as a separate track alongside "Metal on Metal".