Ralf Hütter

Ralf Hütter
Ralf Hütter by Ueli Frey, 1976
Background information
Birth name	Ralf Hütter
Born	(1946-08-20) 20 August 1946 Krefeld, Rhine Province, Allied-occupied Germany
Genres	Electronic synthpop krautrock experimental
Occupation(s)	Musician, singer
Instrument(s)	Synthesizer, keyboards, vocoder, guitar, bass guitar, drums, percussion, vocals
Years active	1965–present
Website	http://www.kraftwerk.com

Ralf Hütter (born 20 August 1946) is a German musician and composer best known as the lead singer, keyboardist, founding member and leader of Kraftwerk. Since the departure of Florian Schneider in 2008, he has been the band's sole remaining founding member.

Biography

Hütter was born in Krefeld, Germany. In 2009 he lived near Düsseldorf.

He met Florian Schneider while studying improvisation at the Robert Schumann Hochschule. He is a vegetarian. Hütter is a secretive musician who avoids interviews; throughout Kraftwerk's long career he has been notoriously hard to pin down for an interview. He has a wife and a daughter.

Cycling interests

Ralf Hütter is an enthusiastic cycling fan, a fact reflected in some of the band's work. It was widely claimed that, when he was on tour, the group's bus would drop off Hütter 100 miles away from the next venue and he would cycle the rest of the way, a story that Hütter later confirmed. The band members took up cycling when recording the album The Man-Machine in the late 1970s. Ralf Hütter had been looking for a new form of exercise. The single "Tour de France" includes sounds that follow this theme, including bicycle chains, gear mechanisms and the breathing of the cyclist. At the time of the single's release Ralf Hütter tried to persuade the rest of the band that they should record a whole album based around cycling. At the time this did not happen, but the project eventually was released as Tour de France Soundtracks in 2003.

Hütter was involved in a serious cycling accident in May or June 1982, during the initial period of recording for the 1986 album Electric Café. He was in a coma as a result. Karl Bartos stated the first thing Hütter said when he awoke from his coma was "Where is my bicycle?", a story Hütter later disputed in a June 2009 interview in The Guardian.