If you like Kraftwerk and cycling … well, let’s just say there’s an estate auction for you, full of bikes, weird instruments, sound equipment, and memorabilia.
In the late 1970s, the German electronic group Kraftwerk picked up a new hobby. Looking for something to do together that fit the ethos of the band, the four members of the time – including co-founders Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter – decided that cycling was going to be their thing.
The bug bit hard. Hütter and Schneider, the band’s backbone, were soon cycling up to 200 kilometres a day, being dropped off from the tour bus early so they could ride the rest of the way to gigs. By 1982, the band began work on the song ‘Tour de France’ – an expression of the group’s love for the event, and for the activity it hinges around. By 1983, after a hiatus while Hütter recovered from a bike crash that had left him in a coma, the song was released as a single. And re-released, and re-released.
There are so many alternative versions of the song, different remixes and variants from over the decades, that there is not really a definitive version. But it is Kraftwerk’s definitive cycling song – and one of the most definitive cycling songs of all time, full of heavy breathing, French lyrics about the sport, and freewheel buzz panning from ear to ear.
By 2003, the band had expanded the concept of the Tour de France song to an album, Tour de France Soundtracks. It’s 55 minutes of weird, rhythmic, chugging music about cycling’s biggest race, with a representation of the four Kraftwerk members on the front cover riding through a tilted tricolor. It was to be Florian Schneider’s last album with Kraftwerk: there was a falling out with Hütter, with a possibly apocryphal tale of a dispute over a bike pump as the genesis. Schneider kept creating and collecting outside of the constraints of the band; Hütter kept the Kraftwerk paceline rolling.
In 2017, Tour de France bigwig Christian Prudhomme got the band to perform at the Grand Depart of that year’s race, in the group’s hometown of Düsseldorf. (There was a French connection, because of course there was: the influential French electro duo Air played support, which is a hell of a step up from the usual dire Grand Depart entertainment.)
A famously taciturn band that gave few interviews, the glimpses of personality that Kraftwerk have shown are often centred around cycling. “We know that from cyclists, when they listen to our music, they understand; they listen, and they understand how the music is composed,” Hütter once said. “It’s important when you move with your bicycle to listen to the environment, the surroundings, the wind and your own breath. At least that’s the way we see this.”
Schneider with his bike.
In 2020, Florian Schneider died after a short battle with cancer. Five years later – it probably took about that long to sort through his colossal archive – his estate is up for auction, giving Kraftwerk fans (and even just the curious) a chance to look through what one of the world’s most influential electronic music artists left behind. It’s a fascinating collection.
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