Radioactivity

The only single from Radio-Activity, released in 1976. It was a commercial success in France and Belgium and did not chart elsewhere. A Minimoog plays a bass line of eighth notes, and Morse code signals spell out radioactivity, and the closing signal spells Kraftwerk. The Vako Orchestron supplies the choir voices. Billboard wrote that heavenly yet inhuman choral voices rise in intensity as a Geiger counter keeps time, and that it was one of Iggy Pop's favorite tracks to lull him to sleep.

For The Mix in 1991 the band re-recorded it with new anti-nuclear lyrics naming Chernobyl, Harrisburg, Sellafield and Hiroshima, with a new hook, "stop radioactivity." Bartos said that in 1976 they had no general concept about nuclear technology, and that the idea of changing the song came with The Mix. At No Nukes 2012 in Japan, Hütter sang new Japanese lyrics translated by Ryuichi Sakamoto that refer to Fukushima, and that version appears on 3-D The Catalogue. On 27 July 2024 at the Fuji Rock Festival, Kraftwerk played Radioactivity with Sakamoto's lyrics straight after their first ever cover of another artist's work, his Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.

Andy McCluskey of OMD has described Electricity as a faster, punkier version of Radioactivity with a chorus. The song appears in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films Chinese Roulette and Berlin Alexanderplatz, and in the 2010 documentary Into Eternity.

Live

On the 1976 tour the band tried an experimental light-beam percussion cage, which frequently failed. It was in the sets in Amsterdam on 11 September 1976 and in Florence on 19 May 1981.