The Robots

Released as a single in 1978 with Spacelab on the B side, both shortened from their album versions, it reached number 25 in West Germany, 23 in Austria and 39 on the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart. The lyrics are about robots as the subservient workers of humans. Russian lines, "Ya tvoy sluga, ya tvoy rabotnik" (I am your servant, I am your worker), are spoken in a pitched-down voice and point to the Slavic origin of the word robot. The main lyric, "We're charging our batteries and now we're full of energy," was produced by vocal synthesis and processed through a vocoder.

Billboard heard an unstoppably funky electro riff that points to dance music's mechanized future. The Guardian wrote in 2013 that the song became particularly influential on the dancefloor and in the breakdancing scene, and LCD Soundsystem's Get Innocuous! is built on a sample of it. A re-recorded version on The Mix was issued as a single in 1991 and reached number 52 on the Eurochart Hot 100.

Live

From the 1981 Computer World tour the band has used replica mannequins of themselves to perform the song. Reviewing the Manchester Velodrome show in July 2009, the Guardian noted robot doubles taking the band's places for The Robots. It closed the set at the Teatro Apollo in Florence on 19 May 1981. Wolfgang Flür called his autobiography Ich war ein Roboter, published in English as I Was a Robot.