Kraftwerk – The Robots

Red shirts, black ties, Düsseldorf, 1978

On 28 April 1978, Kraftwerk released Die Mensch-Maschine on their own label, Kling Klang. The English edition, The Man-Machine, followed on Capitol on 19 May. The first song is Die Roboter, issued in English as The Robots. On the album it runs about 6 minutes and 11 seconds. Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider and Karl Bartos wrote it. Hütter and Schneider produced it. They recorded at Kling Klang in Düsseldorf through 1977 and 1978, then mixed at Studio Rudas in the same city, with Joschko Rudas and the Detroit engineer Leanard Jackson. It was the first Kraftwerk album that credited Bartos as a co-writer.

The German single came out on 12 May 1978, catalogue 006-32 941, with a 4-minute-20 edit of Die Roboter and Spacelab on the other side. The English single on Capitol, CL 15981, used a shorter edit of about 3 minutes and 42 seconds, again with Spacelab. Some pressings put Trans-Europe Express on the back instead. The single reached number 25 in West Germany, number 23 in Austria, and number 39 on Billboard’s dance club chart. The album reached number 9 in Britain.

The lead voice goes through a vocoder, so the words stay clear and the tone stays flat. A counted line in Russian comes in: “Ya tvoy sluga, ya tvoy rabotnik”, “I am your servant, I am your worker”. Then the English line, “We are the robots”. The beat is even and does not sway. Günther Fröhling photographed the four of them, Hütter, Schneider, Bartos and Wolfgang Flür, in red shirts and black ties. Karl Klefisch designed the sleeve after the Russian artist El Lissitzky. At the Paris press launch, the band stood next to mannequins that had their faces.