We arrive at the Tate Modern early, around 8pm, having rushed around the Light Show exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and then up the river in case the Tate’s ineptitude with the ticketing of this event is transposed to the entry system too. We needn’t have bothered, it barely looks like anything is happening, no lines down the block (not that there is a ‘block’ as such), no touts shuffling in the cold muttering, ‘anyone want Kraftwerk tickets?, tickets for Kraftwerk?’. None of this, we just walk in, get our wristbands and follow the smell of chips down to the bar to grab a drink. As more people start to arrive the pre-gig buzz starts, we spot ‘celebrities’ in the crowd, not X-Factor or film star celebs but legends of electronica past (Daniel Miller, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys from OMD), the designer Peter Saville and journalist Paul Morley. One of the first people I recognise is my own accountant, who seems as shocked to see me there as I am him, and who then reveals that he saw them back in ’75 on the original ‘Autobahn’ tour at the Fairfield Halls (!) I knew he was the accountant for me but could never put my finger on why until now.

People are starting to file downstairs into the turbine hall so we follow, being given black cushions if we wish along the way and collecting our special Autobahn emblazoned 3D specs and info sheet on entry. The bottom end of the hall has been draped nearly to the ceiling, speakers run the length of both walls and the stage shows the four pixelated figures as a low electronic murmur emits all around us. People sit down, slightly bemused by the whole cushion thing and hall being a concert venue rather than the exhibition space they’re used to. A family sits behind us, father, mother and two sons, the youngest just ten years old, I ask him if he likes Kraftwerk and he hasn’t even heard any of their music yet but he loves art. The murmuring and the lighting dies, the robotic voice that introduced the gigs I saw in Dusseldorf three weeks back announces the band and we’re off into, errr… ‘The Robots’?

Hang on, we’re at ‘Autobahn’ aren’t we? Did anyone tell them this? Have they loaded the wrong set list? No, they haven’t, it’s fine, it serves as a perfect intro (no actual robots are on stage though) and then we’re into ‘Autobahn’ proper. It’s difficult to tell if they played it in full, time becomes elastic at a Kraftwerk gig, some songs that should be 5, 10 or 20 minutes zip by in what seems like a fraction of that time, others sometimes drag on too long (I’m thinking of the later material here). At the Man Machine show I thought they played ‘Autobahn’ for maybe seven or eight minutes, the next night at Computer World, it seemed to go over the 10 minute mark, the ‘Autobahn’ show definitely must have extended on that although I wasn’t exactly checking my watch to time any of it. The bass was phenomenal at times, vibrating through our bodies but never distorting, each sound crystal clear and all acoustic echo or reverb of the hall completely absent. One of the best 3D moments is during a short ‘interlude’ in the track where it breaks down into a short ‘radio’ section, the melody equalized as if playing through a transistor, and musical notes start to project from the car dashboard on screen. One of the staves floated, seemingly, out over our heads and drew the first gasps from the crowd as the projections did their work of distracting our attention from the four motionless figures concentrating on their ‘werk stations’.

‘Out of the Autobahn…’ and we’re on to side 2, something I never thought I’d ever hear live and was intrigued to know how they’d pull off. ‘Kometenmelodie 1’ was stompy, eerie and oppressive, visually represented by a slow moving comet moving across a star field and over in a matter of a minute or two. ‘Kometenmelodie 2′, the opposite, it’s soaring, mourning melody the nearest other point of reference to the direction the group would take on their next album, ‘Radio-Activity’. ‘Mitternacht’, a similarly slow, brooding accomplice to ‘Kometenmelodie 1′ in a lot of ways, was illustrated by a road with houses either side (?) before an artificial sunrise greeted a short but sweet ‘Morganspaziergang’. This was interesting because the absence of Florian Schneider can most be felt on this track, his flute – initially an integral part of the band sound but dispensed with forever on record after this point – is replaced by a light keyboard replication, presumably played by Ralf who seemed to be in charge of any melody lines being played throughout the gig. The artificial recreation of a morning walk in the country side, complete with electronic chirping birds and insects, mellow flute and light piano is the most out of place piece here but it’s still a joy to hear even if the image of four unsmiling, body-suited men presented in front of you is completely out of whack with the sounds you hear.

The album we’ve chosen to hear out of the way,  it’s time to get to the meat of the event, the rest of the catalogue. Having seen this twice before there are no surprises although the selection is different and some visuals seem to have been improved or changed here and there. We go from ‘Radio-Activity’ to a crushing, rolling, metallic ‘Trans Europe Express’ (complete with the ‘meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie‘ line) but no ‘Showroom Dummies’ unfortunately. ‘The Man Machine’ gets a work out with only ‘Metropolis’ missing, ‘The Model’ predictably receiving the biggest cheer and the 3D in ‘Spacelab’ garnering more cheers. ‘Computer World’ is heavily plundered (but no ‘Pocket Calculator’ alas) with a great version of ‘Home Computer’ that really hasn’t aged at all in over 30 years. They ended the track quite suddenly and I was amazed to see Ralf and Henning Schmitz turn to one another, laughing, sharing a moment as if to say, ‘well you cocked that one up didn’t you?’

On to ‘Tour De France’ then, the original version sequenced into the newer one from ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ and ‘Vitamin’ providing more amazing 3D visuals as bubbles and pills cascade out of the screen. After this things take a slight dip with ‘Expo 2000/ Planet of Visions’ a low point, a track derivative of much of the less-loved ‘Electric Café’ album and the first sign that the band were falling back to old ideas, even referencing how Techno had played its part in the past with its, ‘Detroit we’re so Electro’ line. Visually as well we’re into vector graphics and 8-bit computer type here and it looks dated in a way that the other album graphics don’t, not retro enough to have come back round a second time yet for a generation largely still pining for the degraded, warm feel of an Instagram image.

The designer in me can’t let go of some of the visual anomalies on screen too, jagged anti-aliasing around pictures, lined video footage that needs de-interlacing and low resolution jpeg artifacts in certain parts. Some of these are the bare basics of video and print work and make it look like they’ve used a work experience bod to execute some of the footage. It’s a minor, personal gripe but with the sound so pristine it’s a shame some of the vision is lacking. Back to ‘Boing, Boom, Tschak’ though and things start to pick up, the vector graphics are still there but we get the animated heads, created by Rebecca Allen which, at least, have a fuzzy VHS quality to them that’s just the right side of retro to feel appealing. I’m wondering if younger generations who discovered Kraftwerk in the 90’s will find their post-80’s graphics more appealing years down the line?

They finish with ‘Musique Non Stop’ and the beats are just incredible, the groove in that track is testament to the fact that a machine can funk. Play it to any narrow-minded jerk who gives you the tired, ‘it’s not as good as a real drummer is it?’, line and see them eat their words. This last track was one of the highlights for me because, as in the previous gigs, the players, one by one, take ‘a solo’ before they leave the stage. Each has 16 bars to play with the sound and get a little bit of the spotlight briefly before striding to the side, taking a bow and disappearing behind the curtain. Ralf is, of course, the last to leave and after his keyboard solo he gives a brief, ‘goodnight, auf wiedersehen, see you tomorrow’, and is gone, leaving the words ‘music non-stop’ reverberating around the room as the lights come up.

There is no encore, nor is there any call for one, there is little else to play and people know that, we were sated in our thirst to hear the Man Machine and this is really what the band has become now. Did we see ‘Kraftwerk’? Kind of but not really, we saw four men playing the music of the band, one of whom happened to have been an original member when most of these songs were written. But we didn’t really see ‘Kraftwerk’ as in you’re not seeing ‘The Beatles’ when you go and see McCartney doing ‘Hey Jude’. We saw what Kraftwerk wanted us to see, the sleek, airbrushed, we’re-ignoring-the-first-three-albums-because-they-don’t-fit-with-the-concept-Kraftwerk and that’s the difference between this mutated form of the group or seeing a tribute band perform these songs. Talking to Andy McCluskey from OMD before the gig brought up an interesting concept, he thought that even after Ralf retires or dies, the band will continue to tour, either with other human players or as their Robot counterparts. It may be that they invest in the same technology that brought ‘hologram Tupac‘ to Coachella last year but the band and their legacy will live on, why shouldn’t they tour? I think he may be right and if any band is going to do it it’ll be Kraftwerk, the men have laid the foundations, the machines can do all the werk from now on.

I’ll be posting a week of entries dedicated to Kraftwerk from today (Kraftweek? – sorry) highlighting ephemera, esoterica and oddities to do with the band. Friday the 8th will see Solid Steel premiere the Kraftwerk Kover Kollection vol. 8 – this time heavily focusing on jazz, piano and acoustic cover versions.

Tonight the group kick off eight nights at the Tate Modern in London with ‘Autobahn’, their biggest chart hit after ‘The Model’. I’ll be going alongside fellow fan Osymyso who graciously got me a ticket after the Great Tate Ticket Meltdown of last year. I, like many others, spent half a day fruitlessly trying and failing to get any joy from their phone lines.

The original album was released in 1974 but back in 1985 – after ’82’s No.1 success of ‘The Model’ and ’83’s ‘Tour De France’ single but the non-appearance of the aborted ‘Techno Pop’ album – ‘Autobahn’ was reissued and ‘digitally re-mixed’ with amended artwork. The back cover photo of the old line up in the back seat of their car (itself visually altered at the time to reflect the changing line up) was replaced entirely with a black and white live shot of the band from the mid seventies.

Aside from a new catalogue no. (Auto 1) there was virtually no other info on the sleeve, even the track titles were relegated to the labels on the disc despite a colour inner sleeve bearing the blue Autobahn logo inside on both sides. To my ears there is no difference in the audio at all, ‘digitally remixed’ probably being used for ‘remastered’ in this instance. The advert to the right was taken from a copy of Record Mirror from June 15th ’85.

Here’s the fantastic appearance they made on ‘Tomorrow’s World’ around the time of the original release, check Florian at the end.

* First off, a disclaimer: despite loving Kraftwerk for the past 30 years I’ve never seen them live.

There are several reasons for this. First off there was ‘The Mix’, which seemed a rather pointless exercise in ‘digitising’ all that had gone before and took a certain something from the originals for me. Then there was Tribal Gathering, I wasn’t there but I’m reliably informed that it was awesome for both the crowd and the group by people who were. I did however catch the radio broadcast of it and was dismayed to hear a 4/4 kick under everything which put me off in much the same way ‘The Mix’ had. They played Brixton Academy in 2004 with my interest at an all time low after the disappointing ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ LP and I skipped it, thinking it would be a law of diminishing returns, not wanting to be disappointed by former heroes. Again, reports filtered back from friends that it was amazing and I began to kick myself as similar reviews appeared alongside various festival appearances. Next time, I vowed, I would not hesitate.

It’s Wednesday so this must be Dusseldorf. I left London on the Eurostar as most were getting to work, travelled through France to Brussels before changing trains and ending up in Disseldorf, Germany – the home of Kraftwerk. At the hotel I met old friend and Leaf label manager Tony Morley who’d made his own way from Leeds. We’d come this far to see the legend (even if there’s only one of the buggers left) that is Kraftwerk perform our two favourite LPs, ‘The Man Machine‘ and ‘Computer World’ during their eight night residency at the Kunstsammlung NWR/ K20.

After the excitement surrounding a similar happening at MOMA in NYC last year, something few got to see, we both jumped at the chance when it was announced the same would be happening in their hometown. What could be more apt than seeing them in the city where it all started, making an adventure out of it and spending far more money than necessary in the process? Call it a mid-life crisis if you want but something about this made me throw common sense to the wind and do it anyway, it would be cheaper than a Porsche or a mistress I told my wife. The joke was on us though when, a few weeks after spending all morning online securing tickets to the German gigs, the bastards went and announced the same thing was going to happen at the Tate Modern!

No matter, the tickets were bought, we were there, in the freezing snow that would sweep across the channel and cover the UK a few days later, let’s have it Dusseldorf! Except it’s not really that kind of town, and us being nice middle class, middle-aged Brits, weren’t about to go on the rampage – more like a meal, a bit of record shopping and a failed poster theft attempt. Reich ‘n’ Roll! Jumping forward in time we found Aras Schallplatten, a shop we’d seen a film of on the web, except it was in the process of redecorating and all the stock was in the garage. We spent a freezing half hour rooting through the boxes we could get to before the cold (and his exorbitant prices) put us off. Further on we found Slowboy Records which has to have the best kept stock ever, it was like a vinyl museum in there, originals of many classic Krautrock, Punk and Avant Garde records in the kind of condition you can only dream of.

But I digress – arriving at the gig we were given our 3D glasses, in paper slipcases adorned with the date and graphics of the album we were about to attend, I bet eBay is awash with them even now as collectors try to get a full set. Once inside it was all very formal, this being an art gallery, and the merch table was stuffed with variations of Der Katalog in the form of vinyl, CDs, T-shirts and mouse mats! As you can expect the audience was largely 40-something males in various states of bespectacled receding-ness. The joke running around when the Great Tate Ticket Meltdown took place was that it was ‘a group of old men tapping away on their keyboards to buy tickets to watch a group of old men tapping away…’, yeah you get it.

The hall was long and high, the stage at one end and we immediately noticed speakers positioned around all walls, facing into the centre. 3D sounds as well as 3D vision, nice. There couldn’t have been more than 800 people by our estimation either, we’d expected far more – something I think we’ll see a repeat of at the Tate Modern in London. An electronic rumbling had everyone facing the curtain with the four bitmapped figures from the Katalog cover projected on it. After a few minutes a synthetic robot voice slowly intoned, “Meine Damen und Herren, Heute Abend, Die Mensch Maschine… Kraftwerk” and there they were, the quartet who now represent the band. Looking as if they were about to deliver speeches behind their own podiums they launched straight into ‘Man Machine’ with El Lissitzky-styled 3D projections that really popped. It should be noted that, for most, Kraftwerk will always be Ralf, Karl, Wolfgang and Florian but members Henning Schmitz and Fritz Hilpert have actually now both been in the group longer than the departed drummers. Each was characteristically non-smiling except for new guy, Falk Grieffenhagen, on the right controlling visuals or sound (or both?), who was smirking like a loon most of the time.

Seeing ‘the band’ these days is an odd one, you’re listening to versions of the songs ‘tidied up’ in a similar way that the sleeve graphics have been slowly shorn of all human personality. Equally the sounds have been replaced and replayed to bring them up to modern production standards but the trained ear can still detect samples of their own originals in the mix, presumably where they couldn’t replicate the sound satisfyingly enough. The very idea that Kraftwerk have to be ‘up to date’ runs counter to all their initial moves and motives, they were well ahead of the pack, one of the most forward thinking groups of the 70’s and early 80’s. But time marches on and the group stalled in the mid 80’s and have virtually stood still ever since. As men trying to emulate machines they gave soul to the sound, but now, sadly, those machines can make the songs as precisely as they always wanted and they’ve sucked that soul right back out again. The resurgence in popularity of the ‘Radio-Activity’ LP in recent years, an album always in the shadow of its predecessor, ‘Autobahn’, and the classic trilogy that followed it, shows that people are keen to embrace the ‘analogue warmth’ that the band once had. Having said that, that’s a personal thing and the sound at the gig was one of the cleanest, clearest I’d ever heard by any band live.

Aside from some of ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ they’ve been mining the same songs and sounds since 1986 in either remixed, live or remastered releases. And that’s fine, we don’t expect them to catch up, the music is timeless now anyway. To hear it loud, live and played by even one of the original members – Ralf Hutter being the key member in the group’s history no less – is enough. On the second night I had a position near the front, roughly four meters away from him on stage. To see him sing, “Fahren, fahren, fahren, on the Autobahn”, was something that deeply moved me, taking me back to the six year old who heard those words on my dad’s home recorded tape back in the 70’s. That alone was worth the whole trip and that’s what we’re here for – nostalgia. A nostalgia for a band from the past who sing about the future but are now, essentially, playing the retro circuit – albeit one that they have tight control over.

They finish ‘The Man Machine’ album in record time, a truncated ‘Neon Lights’ with some lackluster floating neon lights graphics leaving me disappointed, ‘Spacelab’ a joy to hear but with visuals that were hilariously retro but included one of the best 3D moments of the gig. Immediately the sound of an engine turning over signaled the start of ‘Autobahn’ and the rest of the two hour gig is a near-chronological journey through their back catalogue. I won’t spoil the rest of it apart from to say that some of the visuals worked brilliantly and some were so laughably archaic it shows how far they have stalled visually as well. Of course they’ve had to make imagery for all their songs over the eight nights so some are going suffer more than others but you’d think by now that they’d have a visual live show that befits their legendary status.

*Tony disagrees here: “you know I disagree with you on this. The retro-futurist look they go for – and have always gone for – is a fine line to walk, and I think for the most part they pull it off. They don’t need super-modern graphics for music that’s 30 or 40 years old, and I think updating things like the Neon Lights video for this context is a nice gift for fans. Like everything they do, it seems to me to be very carefully thought through – too carefully perhaps. That’s why we love them, the same reason we love The KLF, for that attention to apparently trivial detail. Kraftwerk always yearned for something that was already in the past (postwar optimism, the beauty of rail travel, manned space flight), even when they were looking into the future, and that’s what gives the music that melancholy edge that others consistently fail to capture. Whether or not you like the stripped down vector graphics of the ‘new’ Mix artwork/video, it works in that context, and I think it’s quite deliberate. Incidentally, I’ve listened to all the albums since I got back, and it’s those melancholy songs that have really hit the spot since the gig – Neon Lights, Hall Of Mirrors, Ohm Sweet Ohm (most of Radioactivity in fact). I think Trans Europe Express is my new favourite album!”

They end with a rocking, pulsating version of ‘Musique Non Stop’ in which each member takes a turn to demonstrate some of their playing skills before taking a bow and leaving the stage. Ralf is the last to leave and, predictably, gets the biggest cheer, the vocal refrain of the song rolling around the walls before the lights go up. This was one of the highlights, each member effectively ‘taking a solo’ and, even though you couldn’t see what they were doing, it was evident they weren’t just miming to a backing track. More of this improv would have elevated the gig even further.

The next night – ‘Computer World’, or ‘Welt’ as we’re getting the German language versions of most tracks at these gigs – is notable in that there seem to be a lot more women, sporting a variety of tattoos, than the day before. The show follows a similar pattern to the previous night, ‘Numbers’ kicked things off and a combined version of ‘Home Computer/It’s More Fun To Compute’ shortened the album down to less than half an hour. During the non-album set they played the WHOLE of ‘The Man Machine’ album with an improved (to my ear) version of ‘Neon Lights’ which managed to take off this time, even though it was still trimmed down from the original length. Seemingly more on form the second night, things were smoother, little touches that they added worked better and ‘Musique Non Stop’ rocked even harder this time. They switched a few tracks around, added ‘Vitamin’ with it’s excellent 3D pill visuals and ended up playing ten minutes longer. One thing was conspicuous by it’s absence on both nights though, well, four things actually, where were the robots? I’d been expecting them at some stage in the concert but no, they didn’t make an appearance ‘in the flesh’, only on the screen, possibly because the stage wasn’t deep enough to accommodate them?

Out of the two nights, the second was definitely the most satisfying and Tony and I decided to wander the streets afterwards to try and find the band’s famous Kling Klang studio on the Mintropstrasse near the train station. Although the band no longer work there the departed Florian Schneider supposedly retained the studio for his own use and a quick look on Google Maps earlier in the afternoon had revealed the building, although all but the ground floor had been blurred out! After zig-zagging through the streets and stopping for a chinese meal nearby we finally found it – a nondescript five story building with a metal shutter taking up most of the ground floor. From the look of the buzzer there were several other businesses occupying the floors, one name plate had been removed, presumably taken as a souvenir by a fan. Someone had also wheat-pasted an image of the four robots circa ‘The Mix’ onto the wall which had been partially torn off.

I’ve never done anything like that before, it was late and dark, a solitary light was on and it looked like nobody was home, not that we would have been let in even if there was. But it was something to stand outside the building where all that great music was created. As we turned to go Tony spotted a familiar sign further down the street, a simple ‘Club’ with an arrow in blue and red neon light. We recognised it immediately as one of the graphics in the ‘Neon Lights’ part of the show, they’d obviously taken inspiration for the song from their slightly seedy surroundings and used it in the visuals. As we walked towards the building we saw that it was a strip club and the lyrics, “we go into a club, and then we start to dance”, from ‘Showroom Dummies’ took on a whole new meaning.