“The Telephone Call” by Kraftwerk

"The Telephone Call" first surfaced on Electric Café, Kraftwerk's ninth studio album, in 1986, and the next year it followed "Musique Non-Stop" out as the record's second and last single. Karl Bartos wrote it with Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, and it's the only Kraftwerk song with Bartos singing, a rare human wrinkle in the machine. The album take trails off into telephone sounds and operator voices.

For the single, François Kevorkian and Ron Saint Germain remixed it, and the clubs took the bait: it became the group's second number one on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Play chart and held the top spot for two weeks. The 2009 remaster, finally carrying the album's intended title, Techno Pop, swaps that album take for the shorter seven-inch mix and fills the phone-and-operator coda's place with a remix called "House Phone".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.