Kraftwerk named themselves after a power plant and invented robot pop
Düsseldorf’s Kraftwerk, launched in 1970 by Florian Schneider with Ralf Hütter, remade electronic pop. Autobahn, Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine, and Computer World sold a cool “robot pop” of machines and melodies. Synth-pop, hip-hop, techno, and house borrowed the toolkit; a 2014 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award admitted the debt.
Florian Schneider, who played flute, violin and synthesizers, and Ralf Hütter, on organ and synthesizers, met as students at Düsseldorf's Robert Schumann Hochschule in the late 1960s, amid the experimental scene Melody Maker teasingly labelled krautrock. They first played in a quintet called Organisation, which made one album, Tone Float, in 1970 and then broke up. A local exhibition about the suited artists Gilbert and George, who claimed to bring art into everyday life, prompted the pair to do the reverse and found Kraftwerk, German for power plant.
Early line-ups kept changing; guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger passed through before leaving to form Neu!, and Hütter took eight months off to finish university. The first two albums, Kraftwerk (1970) and Kraftwerk 2 (1972), were instrumental improvisations on guitar, organ, flute and violin, bent afterwards with tape tricks. On stage the duo often leaned on a basic preset drum machine borrowed from an electric organ. Wolfgang Flür (from 1973) and Karl Bartos (from 1975) later completed the classic line-up.
Their mid-period run, from Autobahn in 1974 through Trans-Europe Express and The Man-Machine to Computer World in 1981, defined what they called robot pop: synthesizers, drum machines and vocoders serving catchy melodies over spare, repeating rhythms, delivered in matching suits. Flür quit a year after Electric Café (1986), and Bartos went in 1990. Tour de France Soundtracks (2003) is their latest studio album, and Schneider departed in 2008 and died in 2020, leaving Hütter to lead the touring band.
Their fingerprints are on synth-pop, hip-hop, post-punk, techno, house and ambient. Honours include a 2014 Grammy for lifetime achievement, a 2018 Grammy for the live set 3-D The Catalogue and a 2021 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame place as an early influence.
Source: Kraftwerk
