Trans-Europe Express — Kraftwerk’s train-inspired track travelled far and wide

Popular music and railways are inseparable. The boogie-woogie tunes of the 1920s and ’30s, and songs such as Louis Jordan’s “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” (1946), made an explicit connection between their rhythms — in Jordan’s song, the “clickety-clack” — and the sound of steel wheels on a track.

In 1977, Kraftwerk brought trains and music into the electronic age with “Trans-Europe Express”. It was themed around the first-class rail network that criss-crossed Europe from the 1950s, a manifestation of the vision of a new borderless postwar continent. The network ran close to Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang studio in Düsseldorf, where the four members of the group, founded in 1969 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, worked. (They said of themselves: “We are not artists or musicians. We are workers.”) Kraftwerk were not universally admired: rock purists, suspicious of anything to do with synthesisers and electronics, denigrated their supposed lack of “authenticity”. But by the mid-1970s Kraftwerk, with their modernist, forward-moving music, were winning admirers globally.

Their groundbreaking 1975 track “Autobahn” had, in its deadpan way, documented the experience of driving on Germany’s motorways. Two years later, Kraftwerk boarded the “Trans-Europe Express” (in the German version, “Trans Europa Express”). In neutral tones, they chanted the title phrase like robot-monks, their voices treated at times with vocoders. Snippets of spoken narrative told of a cosmopolitan lifestyle: “Rendezvous on the Champs-Elysées.” A promotional video showed the four men in a train compartment dressed as if en route to a business meeting, smoking and relaxing, Schneider dapper in his trilby, a typically Kraftwerkian retro-futurist scenario.

Chugging rhythms simulated, in a simplified way, the movement of wheels on tracks, consciously echoing, and referencing, the previous year’s “Station to Station” by David Bowie — in which he had announced that “The European canon is here” (indeed, because of a fear of flying, Bowie had arrived back in London from the US in 1976 by boat and then train). Later in “Trans-Europe Express”, the travellers meet Bowie and Iggy Pop, by then collaborating in Berlin, in Düsseldorf.

It was the title track to Kraftwerk’s 1977 album (edited down and released as a single) and its synthesiser motif runs through the album. Side two of the album is a “suite”, with three consecutive tracks at its heart: the song itself, followed by the clanging “Metal on Metal” and the pure rhythm of “Abzug”, a journey lasting more than 13 minutes. The metal-bashing of “Metal on Metal” was achieved, according to Uwe Schütte’s book Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany, by hammering wheelbarrows and banging zinc shelving. This was the sound of Germany’s industrial Rhine-Ruhr heartland. This was also explicitly European music.

How strange, then, that before long it had made its way across the Atlantic to New York and Detroit, where young, predominantly black clubbers on a nascent electro/techno scene danced to “Trans-Europe Express” and “Metal on Metal”. Kraftwerk were delighted.

In the US, it was picked up by a producer and a key figure in the rising hip-hop scene, Afrika Bambaataa, and he and fellow producer Arthur Baker — with the help of a Roland drum machine — created the groundbreaking “Planet Rock”, on which Bambaataa and others rapped over a version of “Trans-Europe Express”, interpolated with another Kraftwerk track, “Numbers”. Its impact was electrifying, and “Planet Rock” has been acclaimed as a key driver of hip-hop music and culture. Remixes by artists such as Paul Oakenfold have prolonged its life.

Meanwhile back in Europe, Kraftwerk were influencing a new British electro scene that gave rise to bands such as Depeche Mode and New Order, whose “Blue Monday” sampled Kraftwerk’s “Uranium”. “Metal on Metal” was also an engine of growth driving German industrial bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten.

Over the ensuing decades, “Trans-Europe Express” has travelled far and wide. Washington DC go-go band Trouble Funk made it, well… funky in their “Trouble Funk Express” (1984). In US hip-hop it has been sampled by acts such as 2 Live Crew on “Drop the Bomb” (1988) and Jurassic 5 on “Unified Rebelution” (1995) — though many artists seemed to miss the essence of Kraftwerk’s original, which is that it uses empty space so effectively.

Covers have come from esoteric acts such as Slovenian band The One You Love, whose creepy ghost-train-like ride features on a niche 1994 compilation album of Kraftwerk covers by Slovenian metal and industrial bands. German electro-troubadour Uwe Schmidt recorded a sparky “electrolatino” version in 2000 under one of his alter-egos, Señor Coconut y su conjunto, with cumbia rhythms. Australian band 8-Bit Arcade applied their vintage video-game shtick to the track in 2016, making it bleepy and hyperactive.

Kraftwerk themselves re-recorded it for their 1991 album The Mix, with punched-up digital sound, the bangings and clangings of “Metal on Metal” created electronically rather than through manual labour. The Trans Europe Express itself ceased to exist in the 1990s, eclipsed by the continent’s growing network of high-speed trains. But Kraftwerk persist — they tour Europe and North America this spring and summer, Hütter the one original member in the line-up — with this trailblazing, groundbreaking suite at the heart of their set.

What are your memories of ‘Trans-Europe Express’? Let us know in the comments section below.

‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.

Music credits: Retrospective; Parlophone; Jones/Tintoretto; Essential Media Mod; Tommy Boy Music; Luke Records; Mass Appeal