D.A.F. - Der Mussolini

Scary but witty German track that ticks the following boxes:

1. It's got a brilliant title. Scary, but the presence of the definite article provides comforting distance from fascism.

2. It's got brilliant lyrics: "Get up. shake your hips! / Clap your hands and dance the Mussolini! / Dance the Adolf Hitler! / Move your ass and dance the Jesus Christ!" Meaningless (or is it about the tyranny of the dancefloor?) but, again, pretty scary. But no one could possibly take offence ... could they?

3. You can dance to it - indeed you should dance to it. It predicts the future, 80s techno. But its lyrics make it subversive. Dictators (and Jesus) are equated to dance moves.

4. It's post-punk (recommended by the excellent Simon Reynolds). Retains the shock, disposability and instant gratification of punk, but is experimental in instrumentation and genre. Post-Krautrock might be a better description, in that DAF were from Kraftwerk's hometown Dusseldorf.

5. D.A.F. also had one of the best names ever. Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft means German-American friendship. According to Wikipedia its"a satirical reference to the DSF, the East German Deutsch-Sowjetische Freundschaft (German-Soviet Friendship Organisation)".

Kraftwerk 1973

Me and the lovely Mrs 50p Bloke saw Kraftwerk in 2004 at the Brixton Academy. Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter were the only two from the classic 'Werk line-up. But reading I Was A Robot by Wolfgang Flür, it's clear that it was always Ralf and Florian's band. And Kraftwerk live are still simply phenomenal, and in fact seem to have spent the last 20 years simply honing and fine-tuning their gizmos to deliver the hits as technologically perfectly as possible. In that respect, it's probably a better show now that it was in their 70s-80s pomp.

But even if Kraftwerk are a two-man operation, it's Interesting to see this clip from 1973, which shows them minus Karl Bartos, who was yet to join, and also without the mid-20th century animations and graphics. The newly-joined Flür is there, though, nervously tapping his homemade electronic drum pads. He describes the excitement he felt at this performance in his book - required reading for any Kraftwerk enthusiast, despite the comments posted by YouTube viewers.