Responding in 1998 to criticism of The Fall’s promiscuous line up changes, singer Mark E. Smith famously quipped, “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, then it’s a Fall gig.”
The same hubris doesn’t quite apply to Kraftwerk but of the band’s original mid 70’s line up of Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos, Wolfgang Flür and Ralf Hütter only the latter remains, Schneider having passed away in 2020 whilst the others left in 1987 and 1990 respectively.
Whilst together beginning with Autobahn in 1974 the quartet recorded some of the most important and aesthetically beautiful electronic music in history, in the process laying the foundations for the electro, house and techno movements. Listening back to 1978’s The Man Machine – from which what was to become their most famous song The Model was released against their will as a single three years later – it’s almost inconceivable setting it against contemporaries like disco and ABBA, but in abstract ways it mined both of them.
With Hütter functioning as the sole link to the past and no strictly new music since 1986’s Electric Café, the group – now featuring Henning Schmitz, Falk Grieffenhagen and the splendidly named Georg Bongartz – continue to tour regularly, which brings us to an uncharacteristically warm and dry evening in Dublin.
Part of a series of gigs at the city’s Trinity College including Interpol and Róisín Murphy, this show seems to stand oddly apart, but at the advertised time of 8.30 on the dot, the quartet and their occasionally phosphorescent jump suits take to stage with Numbers.
As a visual event it has to be said the appeal of watching four men of bus pass age standing behind their respective plinths whilst tweaking the odd knob has its limitations. Missing also tonight are the phenomenal 3-D effects which always give the idea of the group’s soundscapes elegantly manifesting themselves in the physical world.
What’s left however are the energizing juxtapositions that continue to give these songs a resonance far beyond any imagined half life they had when created.
Invoking this past future there’s also a childlike innocence to some, inherent in the diaphanous Neon Lights, Autobahn’s nursery rhyme melodies and The Robots’ 20th Century pre-AI cyborgia, tokens of some naively paradisal ideas from a century now long abandoned.
There are other moments though when the tempo is increased, long sequences of bass, beats and bleeps which render the still daylit arena into an unlikely dancefloor, to which the audience respond; the message that this is not to the performers just an exhibition is pin drop clear – and in a quality that would have audio nerds in raptures, way loud enough too.
Never songwriters who embraced politics, Radioactivity at least features the incanted names of those places where atomic disaster has struck. But as the two-hour set draws to a close after the pristine ambient groove of Planet of Visions, we enter into the familiar closing tango of Boing Boom Tschak, Techno Pop and Music Non-Stop, each bouncing their notes off the risen moon like playful satellites.
One by one the members depart the stage with a bow, Hütter last, even as the final track is still playing. In what may be a nod to punk there is, as is customary, no encore. Afterwards in a city that rarely needs an excuse to show its enthusiasm it’s evident that the Germans have again succeeded in giving their peculiar world of zeroes and ones a human, utopian vibe. And then the realization strikes, the truth being that it could be one of the showroom dummies and your granny on bongos, but it would still be a Kraftwerk gig.
The Voice Of Unreason 