Trivia / Kraftwerk

• Approval of God: Played straight and inverted.
  • The main riff from "Computer Love" was used in Coldplay's song Talk, which Hütter, as Coldplay puts it, appreciated them asking his permission, "unlike that bastard Jay-Z".
  • Florian Schneider thought that Señor Coconut's (an alias for German electronic musician Uwe Schmidt) El Baile Alemán, an album which covered Kraftwerk songs in a Latin style, was Actually Pretty Funny. They only had a problem with the "Radioactivity" cover, mostly because of the Lyrical Dissonance.
• Banned in China: They weren't allowed to tour in China due to supporting the "Free Tibet" movement.
• Billing Displacement: Unofficial reissues of "Tone Float" by Hütter and Schneider's previous band Organisation (official issues being unforthcoming) tend to credit "Kraftwerk / Organisation" or even just Kraftwerk.
• Bury Your Art: Despite nonstop reissue campaigns throughout the group's entire career, nothing prior to Autobahn has been officially re-released since 1980, nor played live after 1976. Tone Float was never officially re-released, period. Ralf Hütter disowned their first three albums as "prehistoric", although he hinted that they might be reissued if/when Kraftwerk puts out a new studio album.
• Channel Hop: The band were originally signed to Philips Records, with Autobahn being distributed in the US by the Vertigo Records sublabel. For Radio-Activity, they shifted to EMI under their vanity imprint Klink Klang, with distribution in various other regions (including the US) being handled by Capitol Records. In the '80s, EMI would take over from Capitol everywhere except North America, where the band switched to Warner (Bros.) Records, who then moved them over to Elektra Records in 1986; Elektra would reissue the Warner albums in the wake of this. For Tour de France Soundtracks, the band moved over to Astralwerks in the US and back to EMI in Canada and Mexico. Finally, Parlophone Records would inherit the rights to the band's catalog worldwide following the dissolution of EMI.
• Development Hell: Kraftwerk has been teasing a new album since 2003. While long absences aren't uncommon for the band (for instance after 1991's The Mix they basically went missing for nearly a decade), the fact that in the time since their last album, founding member Florian Schneider both quit and died leaves this new album's fate uncertain, as much as Ralf Hütter insists it's coming year after year.
• Follow the Leader: Kraftwerk is, by and large, considered the first electronic band: their influence can be heard in electronic music to this very day.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For want of an official release, bootleg CDs of the band's early work are quite common — a German outfit called Crown Records released superb, vinyl-dubbed CDs of the first four albums, Tone Float included (and re-credited to Kraftwerk).
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Downplayed, while Kraftwerk have never claimed The Mix, their album of remixes of their best-known songs, as their Magnum Opus, they^note aside from Karl Bartos, who left during production did think it was a good idea, and it receives the same esteem from the band as albums like The Man Machine and Computer World do, to the point that, in concert, they play the remixed versions of the songs who appeared on said album as opposed to their original versions. Contrast that with the fans' reception of The Mix, which can range from unimpressed to outright vitriolic.
• One-Hit Wonder: In the United States, they only have one Top 40 hit: A severely edited version of their 22-minute opus "Autobahn".
• Real Song Theme Tune: "Ruckzuck", the first song on their debut album, became the theme song for the long-running PBS Science Show Newton's Apple. After using the original recording without permission, the show switched to a Cover Version after a while to avoid legal action.
• Reclusive Artist: They rarely give interviews. They usually use dummies or custom-made robots for promo photo shoots instead of themselves. All we know about their studio is its name and the address in Düsseldorf where it used to be. They are also extremely hard to contact. For example, their studio telephone didn't have a ringer because they considered it "noise pollution" during recording. If you really wanted to contact them they would instruct you to call precisely at a certain time, and Ralf Hütter would answer the call himself even though there was no phone ring. Allegedly, when Chris Martin contacted them (through their lawyers) to request permission to sample "Computer Love" for the Coldplay song "Talk," they responded by mailing him a piece of yellow legal paper with nothing but the word "Yes" written on it.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Michael Jackson asked Kraftwerk for a collaboration at one point, but Kraftwerk rejected his proposal.
  • Likewise, another collaboration with Jean-Michel Jarre.

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