Kraftwerk

Düsseldorf

Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider met as students at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf in the late 1960s and played together in a quintet called Organisation, which made one album, Tone Float, in 1970. That year they formed Kraftwerk, a name that means power plant, after seeing Gilbert and George, two men in suits and ties who claimed to be bringing art into everyday life. They also started a studio, Kling Klang, in an empty room in a workshop in an industrial part of the city.

Three experimental albums followed: Kraftwerk (1970), Kraftwerk 2 (1972) and Ralf & Florian (1973), mostly instrumental, with the first use of the vocoder on the last of them. Line-ups fluctuated and at times included Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, who left to form Neu!. The producer Conny Plank co-produced the first four albums. Schneider later called the early music history and archaeology.

A drive on the motorway

Autobahn came out in November 1974. One side is the title piece, more than twenty minutes long, written with Emil Schult, a painter who had studied under Joseph Beuys and became a regular collaborator, and recorded mostly at Plank's studio outside Cologne. Wolfgang Flür played percussion and Klaus Röder violin and guitar. Cut down to a single, Autobahn reached number 25 in the United States and 11 in Britain, and the album went to number 5 in the United States. Karl Bartos, a music student at the Robert Schumann Hochschule, replaced Röder when the band took the album on the road, and Hütter, Schneider, Flür and Bartos became the line-up now regarded as the classic one. British reviewers were not always kind: in Newcastle a Melody Maker writer told readers to keep the robots out of music.

Radio-Activity followed in November 1975. It was their first fully electronic album, a concept album about radio communication and radioactive decay, and its title song, Radioactivity, was a hit in France.

Europe, robots and computers

Trans-Europe Express (March 1977) was made at Kling Klang with a custom-built sequencer and mixed at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. It celebrates European rail travel, its title song names David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and it was released in separate English and German versions. The Man-Machine followed in May 1978, the first Kraftwerk album to credit Bartos as a songwriter, with a cover inspired by the Russian artist El Lissitzky. The Robots and The Model came from it. Radio DJs preferred The Model to the song it was paired with, Computer Love, and the two were re-released together as a double A side that reached number one in Britain in February 1982, four years after the album.

Computer Love was from Computer World (May 1981), whose tour carried the band's entire Kling Klang studio on the road. In 1982 Hütter was seriously injured in a cycling accident.

Departures and the Catalogue

Flür left in 1987 and Bartos in 1990. Henning Schmitz joined in 1991, the year of The Mix, which reworked older songs. Tour de France Soundtracks followed in 2003, and Schneider left in 2008. He died on 21 April 2020, aged 73. A 2009 box set, The Catalogue, collected eight remastered albums from Autobahn to Tour de France Soundtracks, and the band played all eight in turn at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2012. Demand for the same show at Tate Modern in London, announced for February 2013, crashed the gallery's website. The live album 3-D The Catalogue won the 2018 Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album, and the band entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021.

Influence

Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock (1982) was built on the melody of Trans-Europe Express and the rhythm of Numbers. David Bowie named an instrumental on Heroes, V-2 Schneider, after Florian. New Order sampled Uranium on Blue Monday, Cybotron looped Hall of Mirrors, and Coldplay's Talk borrowed the Computer Love melody with Chris Martin telling Q in 2007 that he wrote to ask permission. Martin Gore of Depeche Mode said that for anyone of their generation involved in electronic music, Kraftwerk were the godfathers. The Guardian put Trans-Europe Express first in its 2020 list of the band's 30 greatest songs.