Which two revolutionary artists Kraftwerk namecheck in ‘Trans-Europe Express’
For the last nearly 50 years, the enduring image of German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk has been the red-shirted, black-tied mannequins poised motionlessly behind their various synthesisers, evolving to the cybermen automatons led by the last remaining founding member, Ralf Hütter, since the early 1990s. So committed to Die Mensch-Maschine bit, Kraftwerk often present the press their prop robot likenesses to handle the rare occasion they agree to an interview.
Yet, the futurist direction the band pursued after 1978’s The Man-Machine arrived late in their classic album run. After the early krautrock jams in their prior denimed and long-haired experimental phase, tailored suits and smart haircuts would serve as uniforme de rigueur for 1974’s Autobahn, the first fully realised Kraftwerk record and their official debut, having pushed aside the first three LPs outside their back-catalogue canon. Scoring Germany’s famed motorway, they imbued their ode to high-speed travel with a romanticism for their home country’s technological advances that brought Deustchland’s vast hinterlands together.
While deploying a modernist approach to songcraft and instrumentation, thematically, Kraftwerk was far removed from the robotic aesthetic that’d define them. But it wedded them to Germany’s cultural history around The Third Reich’s blight, in love with Bauhaus’ dynamic functionality during the Weimar era and jumping to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seminal musique concrète academia inspiring West Germany’s music schools and campuses.
Born after Nazi Germany’s collapse, Kraftwerk’s conceptual explorations looked to the past to forge a new identity, immersing themselves in the Volksempfänger home radio for 1975’s Radio-Activity as a wry vehicle exploring the mass-media nostalgia of many German adults at the time, suffused with motifs of radiation and nuclear decay.
While their success was slowly picking up, they remained a cult band and, even for a moment, were tagged with the one-hit wonder tag by the music press. Ever the restless creative, David Bowie had been keenly paying attention, enamoured with Kraftwerk’s fierce, European identity and electronic arrangements as well as the broader West German krautrock underground populated by the likes of Neu!, Faust, Can, and Cluster. Amid a cocaine blitz in Los Angeles, Bowie lifted elements of mechanised electronics for 1976’s Station to Station, the title track and ‘TVC5’ offering synth-coated pointers to the creative and geographic realm his intuitions were pulled to.
Shortly before the band entered Düsseldorf’s Kling Klang studio to cut their sixth album, Hütter and Florian Schneider had met Bowie and his Berlin comrade Iggy Pop during the ‘Starman’s’ 1976 Isolar Tour and then again a month later at a Paris after-party. Appreciating Bowie’s public appraisal of Kraftwerk and the mainstream attention his extolling had brought them, the electronic quartet sought to namecheck the two in 1977’s Mittleuropa magnum opus, Trans-Europe Express.
A love letter to the continental railway service that served as an optimistic gateway to their beloved European landscape, Hütter and co-writer Emil Schult dropped a cameo of their celebrity fans in the title-track centrepiece’s lyrical transit: “From station to station, back to Düsseldorf City / Meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie”.
While never imitating Kraftwerk’s sonic austerity and minimal constructivism, Bowie took a huge creative pointer from their eschewing of America’s musical foundations and similarly embraced a series of albums with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti that sought to shake off rock conventions, an ethos poured into his production efforts for Iggy Pop’s The Idiot during the same detox years in Berlin.
Bowie would offer a nod to the synth stalwarts on 1977’s Heroes, titling the predominantly instrumental piece that opens the record’s second side, ‘V-2 Schneider’, in honour of Kraftwerk’s key founding member.
