Meanwhile, Kraftwerk has been awarded the special prize "Early Influence Award" and has also been found in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame since the official induction ceremony in 2021 in Cleveland. So let's take a look at the history of the famous "Robot Quartet".
It was in Paris where Kraftwerk became the European band and electronic music seemingly became German. It must have been sometime in the spring of 1976, although it cannot be precisely dated, as much remains unclear in the history of this enigmatic Düsseldorf band. But at least one photo exists from that evening in Paris. It shows Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, the founders and heads of Kraftwerk, together with their French label manager Maxime Schmitt, the friendly journalist Paul Alessandrini, and his wife Marjorie.
The five are sitting around a round table at "Le Train Bleu" on the first floor of the Gare de Lyon, from where they could see long-distance trains departing and arriving at the station. They were discussing Kraftwerk, and Alessandrini later recalled that he had said to Schneider and Hütter during the evening: "The music you make is a kind of electronic blues, and train stations and trains play an important role in your world, and therefore you should write a song about the Trans Europa Express."
At that time, Kraftwerk was a band with only one hit, "Autobahn," whose influence on other musicians, people like David Bowie, had been far greater than the sales figures of the single released in 1974 and the album of the same name. The follow-up album "Radio-Activity" (1975) was considered to be not very catchy, although it had been quite successful in France. What Kraftwerk lacked in 1976 was a new hit and a refined, more internationally understandable band concept. At its founding in 1970, the group was more just another German Krautrock band, comparable to CAN, Tangerine Dream, or Amon Düül, but Kraftwerk had gradually moved away from its improvisational beginnings towards a stricter, minimalist, and soon fully electronic music.
"Autobahn" was the celebration of a quintessentially ambivalent German topos, and in this respect, Schneider and Hütter had to see the idea with the TEE as a logical continuation of their theme of machines and mobility, just as a European variant. The first verse of "Trans Europa Express" then read "Rendezvous on the Champs Élysée, leave Paris in the morning with the TEE"; it was the next and simultaneously the first truly international hit for Kraftwerk, and yet this band continued to play so successfully with their origins that for a while one thought: If there were no Jean-Michel Jarre, one would have to regard the nature of electronic pop music as actually German, corresponding to the German cliché of an efficient, disciplined industrial nation of engineers – so much did Kraftwerk occupy this musical field with the corresponding band-corporate identity.
Paris, in fact France as a whole, seemed to be a romantic place of longing for Kraftwerk in an old German tradition. The album "Trans Europa Express" was presented to the world press on a train ride from Paris to Reims; and the next album, which was to further enlarge and change the Kraftwerk myth, was presented in 1978 in the newly completed Tour Montparnasse: For "Die Mensch-Maschine", the robot and space flight concept album, Kraftwerk had mannequins made with the facial features of the band members, and apart from a five-minute photo call with the real Kraftwerkers, the silent dummies took on most of the nonexistent promotional work for the record.
Kraftwerk's fixation on France continued in 1983 with the single "Tour de France", which was followed twenty years later by the corresponding concept album of the same name, the band's latest studio album to date. On this album, Kraftwerk also celebrates the connection between man and machine, now in the team sport of cycling: The individual is nothing but an interchangeable functional unit, a "Robotnik" (Russian for "worker") of a larger enterprise called Kraftwerk. The almost unchanged powerful myth of this strangely absent yet still existing band as the founders of electronic music even justifies their positively "inhuman" image.
What continues to impact today's electronic music, however, is primarily the sound of Kraftwerk, their simple construction principles of songs as tracks, less their thematic superstructure with highways, trains, robots, human machines. Although no German electronic musician today has to relate to the overwhelming Kraftwerk as they did in the past, their early definition of electronic pop music as rather minimalist largely still holds: without Kraftwerk, no techno and specifically no minimal techno.
