Occasionally on the Solid Steel radio show I present another part of an ongoing series I call the Kraftwerk Kover Kollection. Each mix is an hour long collection of cover versions, tributes and songs that heavily sample the German four piece.

After the luke-warm reception of the 'Electric Cafe' album in 1986 it was another 14 years before they released anything new and even then Expo 2000' sounded like a rework of 'Musique Non-Stop' ('The Mix' doesn't really count in my book). During these years Electro, Hip Hop, House, Techno and Ambient happened amongst other things, all of which owed some form of debt to Kraftwerk. Such is their influence and appeal that, over the years, albums of cover versions have appeared in place of any new Kling Klang product to fill the public's need for more perfect 'robot pop' as Ralf Hutter once called it. As well as these, many high profile bands have added a song here or there to albums in tribute or interpolated Kraftwerk's melodies into their own compositions (ie: Coldplay's 'Talk' single).

When I started seriously researching these cover versions, I couldn’t quite believe how many there were and how diverse the bands were who were doing them. I’ve now completed my 8th Kover Kollection mix, each with an average of 35 tracks in it, that’s 280 covers and they’re just the good / weird ones that I liked enough to use. For every eastern European rendition on woodblocks there are five pumping euro trance versions that sound horrible. What I try to do is filter the best of these and find the weirdest, most leftfield covers because Kraftwerk’s songs are so simple that it seems they can be transposed into nearly any style you can think of. Balanese, gamelan, country, death metal, classical, rockabilly, even played by an orchestra of instruments made entirely of vegetables (see part 2 for this one). There seems to be no end to their influence over today’s music makers.