Kraftwerk have invented genres, influenced thousands, had a mythical recording studio, and a back catalogue that is almost perfect. You'll probably know them as being a kind of electronic version of The Beatles, such is their more hi-tech influence on the music of the last five decades.
What you might not know, though, is how many unusual gadgets the band have used over the years, and particularly for their Computer World album.
The Bee Gees, the kings of camp disco, influenced Kraftwerk who influenced everyone else. You really couldn't make it up.
Kraftwerk released the album with a theme – you guessed it – about computers in 1981. But it was also a theme that could embrace all the gadgets the band could possibly lay their hands on, which turned out to be a lot, including various toys and calculators. The album therefore featured a number of tracks with unusual equipment contributing to its electronic sound.
The track Pocket Calculator, for example, included an actual calculator, a Casio FX-501P, which could play melodies and be programmed. When they played the track live on their 1981 tour, Kraftwerk would play parts of Pocket Calculator with small musical devices and dance, a little like your dad would if he were a robot, as this amazing live clip from 1981 shows.
It's these devices that we're focussing on here, and one especially that you can see the band play above. That's because it turns out that Kraftwerk were using a Bee Gees-branded toy drum machine. Yes, the Bee Gees, the kings of camp disco, essentially influenced Kraftwerk who influenced everyone else. You really couldn't make it up.
To reiterate, a band you considered at the forefront of synth technology, gods of cutting edge sounds and legends of sonic layering, used a toy drum machine. And a pretty terrible one at that.
Specs wise, you're not exactly talking 'synth workstation' here. It had one preset sound – a sine wave, basically.
The device, played by Ralf Hütter in the band, is called a Bee Gees Rhythm Machine and was made by toy company Mattel in 1978. Specs wise, you're not exactly talking 'synth workstation' here. It had one preset sound – a sine wave, basically – and three preset rhythms, Latin, Disco and Pop, with adjustable tempo.
Like we say, not exactly one for modular synth fans to start drooling over, yet extraordinarily used by Kraftwerk, not only on the track Pocket Calculator but on their 1981 tour as well.
Theirs was painted black for its live outing, as you can see in the video, so they obviously didn't want to reveal its Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb background, although looking back, surely there might have been a deal to be done Mattel for a Kraftwerk version?
Which leads us nicely back to the calculator part of the story, because for the 1981 tour, Kraftwerk took another leaf out of the Bee Gees marketing book and released their own Kraftwerk-branded Casio VL-80 calculator. The band even issued instructions on how to play their songs on it (by pressing various number keys, basically).
Here's a demo of the non-branded VL-80 in action…
Other unusual gear that featured on the 1981 Computer World album included a Texas Instruments Language Translator (for the vocoded vocals in different languages on the tracks Numbers and Pocket Calculator), and a Dubreq Stylophone.
And it looks like these instruments were also used when the band played Pocket Calculator live, as you can see close up in this superb, rare clip of Kraftwerk playing the track live in Italy.
To give you all the information you need for a possible pub quiz question (and answer), Ralf Hütter is on the left playing the Bee Gees Rhythm Machine and Karl Bartos is next to him playing the stylophone – a sentence you might not have thought you'd ever read.
Florian Schneider is playing what initially appears to be a pocket calculator – the subject of the song, right? Wrong…
As to the other two, well Wolfgang Flür is hitting what looks like a DIY drum pad with some gusto, which leaves Florian Schneider playing what initially appears to be a pocket calculator – the subject of the song, right?
Wrong! A bit of sleuthing on our behalf – aka Google – reveals that this is actually the Texas Instruments Language Translator. Because we haven't got anything better to do, we took a still from the video above of Florian using the device and lined it up with an actual Texas Instruments Language Translator from an old ad on Reverb.
It proves our point right?
So there you have it. You now know each piece of hand-held gear Kraftwerk used live during the track Pocket Calculator in 1981, and if nothing else, you can very smugly tell any Kraftwerk fans you know, that an actual pocket calculator was not one of them.
