Kraftwerk – Radioactivity

Kling Klang, 1975: a song about radio and the atom

In 1975, at Kling Klang Studio in Düsseldorf, Kraftwerk recorded Radioactivity for their fifth album, Radio-Activity. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider produced it and wrote it with Emil Schult. The album came out in October 1975. It was the first Kraftwerk record made by the quartet that stayed in place for the next few years: Hütter, Schneider, Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür. It followed Autobahn (1974), the album that had taken them outside Germany. The album version of Radioactivity runs 6 minutes and 42 seconds. It comes straight out of the short piece Geiger Counter and runs on into Radioland.

The British single came out on 14 February 1976, on Kling Klang through Capitol, with Antenna on the other side. The radio edit is 3 minutes and 18 seconds. In Germany the label was EMI Electrola. The song is sung in English and in German. The German title is Radioaktivität. A Minimoog plays a steady line of short bass notes. Over it, a voice speaks and sings. Beeps in Morse code spell the word radioactivity, then the line “is in the air for you and me”, then “discovered by Madame Curie”. A last run of beeps spells Kraftwerk. The lyric treats two things as one word: radio waves, and the radiation Marie Curie named.

Hütter and Schneider told Rock & Folk, in November 1976, that the album started from an idea they had carried for about three years. On their first tour of the United States they had visited independent radio stations and thought of the group as a station of its own. In Germany, radio was a state monopoly, so the record was the way to send the signal. The 1975 lyric does not tell the listener to stop nuclear power. That wording comes much later.