Let’s be honest: cycling isn’t necessarily the coolest of sports. Maybe it’s because of the funny outfits, or the obsession with kit, or – and I suspect this is the main factor – the MAMILs. But, in 2003, when Kraftwerk’s Tour de France album hit the top of the charts, cycling was, for a brief moment, cool, zeitgeisty, and avant garde.
If you’ve not heard of them, Kraftwerk are a legendary German electronic music group, widely regarded these days as the grandfathers of techno music. They were touring the world in the 70’s and 80’s, playing their experimental, computer generated music to thousands of edgy youngsters. No one had heard anything like it before – their music was completely different from the outlandish rock and roll of the day. Instead of leaning into cliches by smashing up instruments and singing about love, they made robotic, politically charged music about modern life, technology and consumerism – the group were genuinely surprised that anyone liked to dance to their songs. As musicians, their goal was to bring ‘man and machine together in a friendly partnership’. So they manipulated computers, keyboards and synthesisers to create new, digitally generated sounds.
But in the early 80s, they put the big, political topics on hold, and started writing about cycling instead. The fruit of their labour was their single, titled Tour de France, which went on to be the title track of an album of the same name. The album is, for my money, the best musical testament to the sport of cycling there is. In the repetitive electronic rhythms, Kraftwerk have captured the motion of the bike; the whir of the cassette; the heavy breathing of the rider. You get the sense that somewhere, an echelon of fast-moving riders are seamlessly shuffling places as an alpine road changes gradient.
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This album was a love letter to the sport that the members of the band were so obsessed with. Their enthusiasm makes total sense: ‘cycling is a dance of man and machine’, founding member Ralph Hütter once said. And so, back when they were relentlessly touring, they would demand to be dropped off the bus hundreds of kilometres away from music venues, so they could get a ride in before the evening’s performance. On and off the bike, they wore black lycra cycling clothing and, like true roadies, they kept their legs shaven. They even started their own Radsportgruppe, which met regularly in a windowless basement in Frankfurt. Basements; electronic music; all black, skin tight outfits: Kraftwerk put a very German, very techno spin on cycling, that seems to mirror the dark, exclusive and sexually liberated nightclubs that German cities, especially Berlin, have become famous for. Kraftwerk made cycling far sleeker and sexier than it had been before, or would ever be since.
