Still sounding cool at 70? Ja!
Kraftwerk 3D Tour Royal Albert Hall
It’s hard to believe that Kraftwerk are a Seventies band, that most of their masterpieces were released in a time when Abba and Showaddywaddy were in the charts and the shaggy perm was the height of fashion for men.
As we now know, that’s because their records contained the future of music. Radiocarbon dating of the vinyl grooves would discover the seeds of all electronic dance music and even modern computerised pop. Yet, as their world tour celebrating the release of a new collection, 3-D The
Catalogue – featuring full live performances of eight of their albums – reached the Royal Albert Hall, it seemed that Kraftwerk are finally becoming a heritage act, albeit a brilliant one.
They took the stage, four men in “futuristic” body suits, behind four consoles, and the crowd donned 3D glasses for their opening number, Numbers, from their 1981 album
Computer World, accompanied by The Matrix-like images of moving digits on a giant screen behind them.
Oddly, while much of their music still sounds as if it could have been rushed back earlier that day from a test pressing, nothing dates faster than computer graphics and, while some of the 3D effects, such as the satellite moving slowly antenna-first towards the audience during Spacelab, have a spectral beauty, some were showing their age. Other effects, such as the more geometric forms, are simply not that interesting.
But Kraftwerk have an astonishing back catalogue – and the beautiful textures of their music, which Björk once described as “very cold but also very, very warm”, are remarkable for the clarity with which rhythm and melody – lots of melodies – are at once separate and combined in their sound.
Watching them always feels like a genuinely live performance, that the music is being created anew, with minor imperfections. On the far left of the stage, Ralf Hütter, now 70 years old and, since 2009, the only original member of the classic line-up, spoke and sang the lyrics to a parade of greatest hits – Autobahn, Radioactivity, The Man-machine, The Model, Trans-europe Express, Computer Love. Even when computer-modified, Hütter’s voice always had a gentle tone that gives a human quality to the music’s harder surfaces, and the power of the synth bass to vibrate the floor, seats and internal organs of an audience in shorts and T-shirts who had earlier been sweltering in the heat outside only adds to that impression. This is music for human beings.
A brief appearance before the encore of the redshirted robots that sometimes take the place of the group onstage for We Are the Robots from 1978’s The Man-machine was loved by all, but the encore, which drew heavily from 1986’s Electric Café, the band’s last proper album, relied too much on slightly weaker material. As they left the stage, one by one, with each performing in turn an improvised rhythmic slot, there was a sense that Kraftwerk could keep doing this, and probably will, until Hütter, as he has said, falls off the stage.