On the inside sleeve of the Computer World record, you can see Kraftwerk frontman Ralf Hütter playing a Mattel toy. Specifically, it is Mattel’s Bee Gees Rhythm Machine, which was released in 1978 in an effort to capitalise on the success of Saturday Night Fever. The electronic music keyboard looked deceptively rudimentary but boasted 20 keys to play Latin, pop and disco sounds.
The toy came complete with a tuning knob designed to adjust the pitch by a few octaves and ran on a 9-volt battery. While brothers Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb declined to use it despite displaying their names, the toy did find a spot on a Kraftwerk song. The novel keyboard got its own dedication in the line: “By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody.”
In ‘Pocket Calculator’, Kraftwerk took a leaf out of The Bee Gee’s book and used a Casio VL-80 as a promotional item. Casio had been experimenting with the wiring to their typical pocket calculators, which allowed the VL-80 to play synthesised sounds on different keys, and Kraftwerk encouraged audiences to play them with them during live sets.
The limited edition Kraftwerk model came with their name above the screen just as The Bee Gee’s toy had, except Kraftwerk’s also boasted a lengthier word, namely ‘Taschenrechner’ (‘Pocket Calculator’ in German). The first single from the tech-focused Computer World was a surprising commercial hit. It was only the third single of Kraftwerk’s to ever crack the German Top 100, and it managed to amazing feat of going to number two in Italy. That might have been a bigger shock if Kraftwerk hadn’t recorded an Italian version of the song – ‘Mini Calculatore’.
While it appeared like little more than a shrewd marketing gimmick, the integration of technology was naturally very much in Kraftwerk’s wheelhouse. The entire Computer World album dealt with the bands’ reservations and reverence for rapidly developing technology; as Hütter said: “We live in a computer world, so we made a song about it.”
Serving as both a celebration and a warning about tech, it was a fitting choice to utilise the Casio VL-80 in the way that Kraftwerk did. It was an explorative way of making music that also became part of a marketing move. “There are stores and societies which control your financial situation so the whole computerization gets more like a 1984 vision,” Hütter told the NME.
“Our idea is to take computers out of context of those control functions and use them creatively in an area where people do not expect to find them. Like using pocket calculators to make music, for instance. Nobody knew you could do that, we always try to do things to break the normal order,” he said. “It’s about time technology was used in resistance, it shouldn’t be shunned, reviled or glorified.”
