Kraftwerk 1_extract

XXX
KRAFTWERK
SPECIAL
KRAF T
AT T
TOUR DE
REPORT
T WERK
THE
FRANCE
KRAFTWERK
Last month, KRAFTWERK played ‘Tour De France’ live at the opening
stage of the world’s most famous cycle race – the first time they’ve done
so in the 30 years since the track was recorded. As their legion of fans find
themselves asking about almost everything the band do, “What took them
so flipping long?”
Words: JOOLS STONE
Pictures: CHRIS P KING
As a concept, Kraftwerk performing their ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ album
in its entirety at the opening stage of the Tour de France itself sounds so
mind-bogglingly obvious you wonder why it’s taken them so long to do it.
Ralf Hütter and his associates played Manchester’s Velodrome back in 2009,
but amazingly this is the first time that Kraftwerk have made an official
live appearance at the world’s premier pro cycling event. Tonight, they will
perform one of their 3-D audio-visual extravaganzas as part of the Tour’s
Grand Départ celebrations at Utrecht’s Tivoli Vredenburg, the Dutch city’s
new, five-storied, angular wedge of a concert hall. The only thing that could
make it more conceptually perfect was if they’d managed to get the race to
start on their home turf of Düsseldorf instead of here in the Netherlands.
Like most things in Kraftwerk lore, the three-decade journey to get here has
been as arduous as the climb up Mont Ventoux. The song ‘Tour De France’,
which was originally intended for inclusion on the abandoned ‘Techno Pop’
album, has long served as an unofficial jingle to the famous cycle race. It
pays a serene tribute to the event’s legendary highs and lows – enduring
a flat tyre, regrouping with your peloton mates, finishing on the ChampsÉlysées – and marked something of a departure from the group’s previous
harder edged work, with its funky slap-bass and dreamy vibraphone scales,
augmented by sampling the percussive rasp of Florian Schneider’s bike chain.
Some 20 years later, in 2003, in another of the band’s bewilderingly
protracted manoeuvres, the ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ album was
released to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Tour. Due to their extreme
perfectionism, however, it didn’t reach the shelves until weeks after the race
itself had wrapped.
As a record, ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ is perhaps best approached
as precisely that, a suitably hypnotic soundtrack to an intensive cycling
workout rather than a compelling body of original material. When it was
released, after a 17-year hiatus in the Kraftwerk catalogue, a measure of
disappointment seemed inevitable. In the interim, the acid house revolution
had happened and dance music had promptly exploded and splintered into
hundreds of different sub-genres, many of which were quickly absorbed
XXX
KRAFTWERK
into the mainstream. As a result, ‘Tour De France
Soundtracks’ sometimes sounds more like a diluted byproduct of the band’s own inspiration than the original
source from which so many burbling electro delights first
sprung.
On the one hand, the title track is one of the most
perfectly realised pop songs Kraftwerk ever produced
(and their biggest UK hit since ‘The Model’, charting
twice). On the other, it’s a precursor of things to come –
Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider’s mounting obsession
with the saddle over the studio. According to Wolfgang
Flür’s lively memoir, ‘I Was A Robot’, their passion for
the sport over-rode their passion for music, slowing the
creative momentum and causing an irredeemable rift in
the group’s classic line-up.
Ralf and Florian took up serious cycling in 1978, but their
obsession piqued after the ‘Computer World’ tour of 1981.
The pair would take the night shift at their Kling Klang
studio, abandoning it by day to embark on epic workouts,
cycling up to 200km a day, and even jumping off the
tour bus early so they could complete the journey to a
venue by bike. Wolfgang Flür recalls them drooling over
cycling equipment catalogues in the studio and recounts
how they would commission specially tailored cycling
suits. He says they treated bicycle tyres with the sort of
reverence normally reserved for vintage wines, fussing
over their precise storage conditions.
For Ralf, cycling and music are perfect bedfellows.
“Cycling is like music,” he told The Guardian’s John Harris
in 2009. “It is always forward. It is free, it is outside, it
is the weather, it is the planet, it is energy. Cycling has
parallels with certain aspects of music.” Even a major
accident while crossing a dam on the Rhine in 1983
did little to dampen his ardour for the sport. Despite
fracturing his skull and ending up in a coma, Ralf was
keen to play down the impact: “It didn’t affect me,” he
told Harris. “I got a new head and I’m fine… I just forgot
my helmet and I was in hospital for three or four days.”
Ralf’s cycling regime is said to be a little calmer these
days. He apparently still manages to clock up “a couple
of thousand kilometres a year”, though.
It’s fair to say that Kraftwerk have coasted some in
the last few decades, gliding downhill with their hands
behind their heads. We have grown accustomed to glacial
intervals between albums, but at least they have stepped
up their performance profile in recent years, graduating
from occasional festival appearances to full tours. For UK
fans, this culminated in the frenzy that was their 2013
Tate Gallery residency playing Der Katalog, each of their
eight classic studio albums presented in full, which sold
out faster than a pumped up Lance Armstrong taking the
downhill stretch of La Mongie.
On the broiling streets of Utrecht, however, there’s not
much evidence of Kraftwerk mania, mainly because
today the city is as obsessed with competitive cycling
as Team Hütter is. Utrecht has been transformed for
le Grand Départ – from a smaller, more serene version
of nearby Amsterdam to something akin to Rio on the
Canal.
There are thousands of cycling fans lining the race route,
some getting stuck into boozy makeshift picnics, others
scaling lamp posts, fences and poster towers for prime
views. A caravan of vehicles bizarrely shaped like giant
McCain oven chips and Vittel water bottles zip past at
breakneck speeds, flinging out promotional merchandise
and water cannoning the grateful crowd. Every shop in
the city sports some sort of two-wheeled window display
and even the dog statue in the Lepelenburg Park is
wrapped in a yellow jersey.
Inside the Tivoli Vredenburg, of course, it’s a very
different story. Hilde and Jan have travelled from
Brussels, driving here straight after work. “I really hope
they play ‘Autobahn’ tonight – all 26 minutes of it,” says
Hilde. “I expect we’ll hear ‘Tour De France’ too,” adds
Jan. “Well, there may be a small riot if we don’t!” Greg
from Canada has been a fan since ‘The Man-Machine’,
but he didn’t realise the Tour de France charabanc was
in town until he arrived. I ask him why Kraftwerk and
cycling seem so entwined. “I think it’s the ultimate
synergy of man and machine moving forward in constant
motion,” he replies.
There is no support act and the red curtain rises at 8pm
sharp, revealing our robot rulers already in place behind
their neon-trimmed consoles. There’s no time for even a
cursory wave to the crowd as the speakers begin to belch
out a repeated pattern of distorted, excitably escalated
words – “eins, zwei, drei” – before that colossal beat
bounces into play.
Choosing ‘Numbers’ to open tonight’s set demonstrates
Ralf Hütter’s confidence in the Kraftwerk legacy.
The screen visuals stick with a flickering stream of
huge, calculator green, dot matrix numerals, but you
can practically see the light bulb pinging over Afrika
Bambaataa’s head at a South Bronx block party far,
far away in both place and time. ‘Numbers’ segues
effortlessly into a beefed up, dark and sinister incarnation
of ‘Computer World’, with its prophesy of shadowy
governmental and uber-corporations who “control the
data memory”.
While it is hard to see exactly what the band are doing
behind their identical consoles, their tunnel vision
expressions speak volumes and there are a few moments
when their improvisational roots – don’t forget that Ralf
and Florian first met on an improvised music course at
Düsseldorf ’s Conservatory – become evident in subtle
XXX
KRAFTWERK
ways. Ralf looks impressively trim, if not quite perfectly
at ease in his black lycra ‘Tron’ bodysuit. At times, he
seems to resemble an older version of Future Islands’
Samuel T Herring, furrowing his brow at the young
whippersnapper’s more animated stage smarts. The rest
of the group are decked out identically, of course. You
don’t notice them much, but I think that’s the point.
Something that rarely gets explored in discussions
of Kraftwerk’s music is the pervasive sense of
melancholy many of their best tracks are steeped in.
Where ‘Computer Love’ has always sounded sweet
and optimistic on record, tonight it comes across as
heartbreakingly lonely, especially since a seemingly rather
vulnerable Ralf effectively serenades a young, handsome
vision of himself on the video screen. This genuinely
causes me to well up for a moment, not a reaction I ever
envisaged having at a Kraftwerk gig.
I occasionally forget that this is a 3-D concert and
abandon my glasses, keen to remove an unnecessary
barrier between myself and the band. They feel
surprisingly accessible in this well-designed venue. But
there’s no doubt the 3-D elements enhance certain
tracks, particularly ‘Autobahn’, which is animated
by a charming stop-motion cardboard cut-out style
visualisation, putting you behind the wheel of a cartoon
vintage VW.
After ‘Autobahn’ comes the first big surprise of the
evening. The 1990 reboot of ‘Radioactivity’ for ‘The Mix’
album saw the track undergo a drastic modernisation.
Once a naïve bit of wordplay, it’s now inconceivable
to hear it without the bellowing round of “Chernobyl,
Harrisburg and Hiroshima” that prefaces it, tipping the
song’s meaning into unambiguous environmentally
conscious territory. By 2015, “Hiroshima” has been
replaced by “Fukushima” and several verses tonight are
dispatched in Japanese, complete with projections of the
lyrics in Kanji.
Finally, a mere eight tracks in, we get to the ‘Tour De
France Soundtracks’ set, starting with a sampling of the
re-engineered ‘Tour De France’ suite. The vast majority
of the robo-vocals emanate from the electronics tonight,
but when Ralf takes to the mic himself to deliver the
laboured rhythmic exhalations that punctuate ‘Tour De
France’ itself, it’s a genuinely startling moment. This
seems to foreshadow the quirky ‘Elektro Kardiogramm’,
which comes a little later, with a cruel irony. Surely a
man of Ralf’s age is all too familiar with this particular
medical process, intense fitness regime notwithstanding.
‘Vitamin’, one of the more distinctive tracks from ‘Tour
De France Soundtracks’, sounds like a worried Pacman
ghost rattling about an abandoned washing machine
factory and we’re treated to a vivid stream of images, as
hundreds of multi-coloured tablets slowly cascade from
the rafters. A sly nod to our straight-laced übermensch’s
role in fostering house music and its attendant
associations with pharmaceuticals, perhaps? ‘Chrono’
meanwhile chugs by with all the excitement of a wet
weekend circling the Redditch ring road and ‘La Forme’
is a similarly punishing uphill slog, what with its sluggish
iteration of cycling-related words ending in “-tion”. It’s
certainly more expiration than inspiration.
It does serve to lay the track for one of the highlights
of the evening, though. The arrival of ‘Space Lab’ from
‘The Man-Machine’ truly is one of those pure stardust
moments of pristine, precision tooled magic. And as if
hearing the delicate, simmering modulations and plaintive
whistled melody were not enough, the screens show
pictures of the Tivoli Vredenburg’s Connect Four-like
circle clad exterior being eclipsed by a giant UFO.
Somehow I was expecting to hear the ‘Tour De France
Soundtracks’ album in sequence, with maybe a
smattering of crowd pleasers towards the end, but instead
Ralf wisely elects to bookend this central part of the set
with a bounty of perfect bound classics. By the time the
irresistibly jaunty chords of ‘The Model’ spring to life, the
previously circumspect audience spontaneously breaks
into a rhythmic clap and sing-along. The band pedal
through the fearsome beast that is ‘The Man-Machine’
before tunnelling into an urgent ‘Trans Europe Express’
and ‘Metal On Metal’, the brakes screeching to such a
deafening halt that you half expect the nose cone of an
ICE engine to rip through the backcloth and plough across
the stage.
With no waiting for that tiresome audience ego stroke,
the legendary Kraftwerk robots rise up for the encore.
An opening sequence of alarms, doops and mechanical
sproingles stutter to life to reveal the four Dusseldroids
in position. They do their disarming balletic thing, arms
aloft, imploring the audience to, well, do what
exactly? Join their ranks and take them for a waltz
around the auditorium? In fact, they move more than
their human counterparts. I swear I see Ralf Robot
nodding his head in time to the metronome march at
one point.
Soon after, their masters regroup behind their
terminals for a second encore, this time in greenlit bodysuits. Lady Gaga eat your meat-clad heart
out! They revisit ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ with
‘Aerodynamik’ snaking its way in. Despite its chic
Francophonic chevrons, it still comes across like the
functional strain of trade fair stand muzak that you
might hear at Munich’s BMW Welt.
The night’s only new discovery for me is the
interstellar exploration vehicle that is ‘Planet Of
Visions’ from the ‘Minimum-Maximum’ live album.
Part of me takes a mischievous thrill in mishearing
the lyrics as “Detroit, Germany, we’re still the best”
like some playful boast reminding their progeny
who the Euro electro-daddies are, but the words are
actually the more inclusive “Detroit, Germany, we’re
so electric”. But let’s be honest here, the “newer”
tracks are mere practice laps for the unstoppable
juggernaut of closing behemoths – the triple whammy
of ‘Boing Boom Tschak’, ‘Techno Pop’ and ‘Musique
Non Stop’.
As the seismic girder blasts of the latter pummel
their way to a conclusion, the band members exit
the stage individually, each giving a modest bow,
leaving Ralf Hütter to issue a simple “Goodnight,
guten abend, geodenacht”. Save for that, there is
no glimmer of audience interaction whatsoever,
but somehow this makes sense. Anything more
exuberant would feel as creepy as their robots turning
sentient and chatting to fans in the post-gig crush.
While the closing triptych gets into its flow, the
visuals turn to intricate wire-frame CGIs of the music
workers communing with their consoles, faithfully
mirroring the stage reality and that of the audience’s
lives too no doubt, and Kraftwerk seem more
prescient than ever. It may have taken over 30 years
of time trials and endurance training, but tonight was
a barnstorming breakaway to brag about.
Kraftwerk will be taking their 3-D
show to Canada and the US in
September and October, returning
to Europe to play concerts in France
and Germany in November. A new
Kraftwerk album is expected... oh,
never mind
KRAFTWERK
XXX