This is what the UK's Sunday Times said of The Man Machine, towards the end of 1996

"IT’S good, but is it rock?" wailed the headline in an American music magazine. It was 1974, the disorientating year of the petrol crisis, Ted Heath’s travails in parliament; of long hair, flared jeans, guitars and grinning pop in the charts. Kraftwerk had just released their third album, Autobahn, the centrepiece of which was the title-track, a 22-minute slice of ambient, computer-generated minimalism, sung in robotic, toneless German. At the time, many imagined the quartet, the key members of which had met at a jazz improvisation course at the Dusseldorf Conservatory in 1968, to be an eccentric novelty act. What they were witnessing, in fact, was the emergence of the most radical and influential pop group of the next 20 years. The Man Machine, released in 1978, is still widely regarded as the finest electronic album ever made. At a time when the computer was throwing people out of work and beginning to be used as a tool of the state, it cleverly embodied and expressed something of the ambivalence society was feeling towards technology. On the one hand, tunes such as The Robots delivered a chilling Brave New World vision of :he future. On the other, The Man Machine’s combination of modernistic aloofness and naive, classically inspired melody suggested a future in which the machine becomes an exciting aid to human expression. Now, we may prefer to focus on the still unparalleled clarity of Kraftwerk’s pioneering synthesized sound, or the stark beauty of their tunes. Released as a single in 1981, The Model became the first record by a German act to reach No 1 in the British chart.