Why were Kraftwerk such a colossal success?

Everything about Kraftwerk was odd. They had no front man, they seemed to play no instruments and their strange, electronic music owed nothing to blues, soul or any of the other forms of music that underpinned 20th-century pop. Instead, a Kraftwerk gig consisted of four rather gauche-looking fellows from Düsseldorf standing in a row, each poking at a synthesiser, as a strange, apparently unconnected series of images appeared on screens behind them. A Kraftwerk album could be just as confounding. The cover of the 1977 album Trans Europe Express featured a portrait of the band. In suits and ties, they looked more like the partners at an accountancy firm than an electronica band.

Odd they may have been, but Kraftwerk were revelatory for being the first group in history to make purely electronic music and their sound — a torrent of synth sounds, drum machines and electronically mangled voices — was so different as to sound almost alien. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, the founders of the band, who met in 1968, called their sound Industrielle Volkmusik, which David Bowie — a big fan — translated as ‘folk music of the factories’.

Perhaps the most surprising thing of all about Kraftwerk was that they turned out to be such a colossal success. The Autobahn album, released in 1974, should by any reckoning have been a commercial disaster. Side one consisted of a single 22 minutes and 43 seconds track about the joy of German motorways. The cover art was, you’ve guessed it, a motorway sign. Almost unbelievably the album went to No. 5 in the US and stayed in the charts for more than four months.

Stranger still was the resonance that Kraftwerk’s rather buttoned-up European style had with black communities in the US.