Do we like them?

Do we like Ralf Hütter?

Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words or acts turned up and there's an anti-nuclear streak, but a very private man leaves too little on record to score higher.

Ralf Hütter is the last founding member standing in Kraftwerk, the German electronic outfit that more or less wrote the playbook for synth-pop and techno. He's now the one steering the ship, and the band announced a UK and Ireland run for 2026, their first UK tour since 2017.

The tour is a multimedia show with 3D visuals, and demand was strong enough that extra dates were added. That's the freshest news on him, and it's a gig announcement rather than a stoush. Nothing new on him lately in the controversy department.

On the harm check, we found nothing: no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, no conspiracy theories, no climate denial, no dodgy company. He's famously media-shy, so the absence of evidence cuts both ways. We can't tell you his politics because we found no statements from him on those issues.

On the planet, the band's work points the right way. The BBC has traced how Kraftwerk's 1976 track Radio-Activity became an anti-nuclear anthem, with the band reworking it over the years. That's a band-level record rather than a quote from Hütter himself, so weigh it accordingly.

Honest limits: our page-reading tools were knocked out by rate limits while we researched this, so we couldn't open the court stories. That includes the long-running sampling fight with producer Moses Pelham. It's a copyright dispute, not a character issue, so we've left it out of the boxes. Nothing found says he's anything but a decent, if reclusive, artist.