Kraftwerk - London Brixton Academy - 20/3/04
4/5
By: Samantha Hall
What a sight. The crowd are an uneasy alliance of asymmetric-haired trendies and what may be their polar opposite: nervous, bespectacled thirty-something men who look like they regularly won the 'best at maths' prize whilst at school. Regrettably, some of the latter are wearing Gary Numan T-shirts.
So, the attendees' appearance may be odd, but it's nothing compared to their conversation. A' la queue to the bar, we overhear two men enthusiastically discussing computerised hi-hat patterns. 'It's sort of a tsk-ch-ch-tsk,' suggests one. 'No,' counters his friend, 'it's more ch-ch-ch-tsk.' Ask people why they are here, and they have a tendency to fix you with a gaze somewhere between pity and total incomprehension: 'It's Kraftwerk, innit?'
Indeed 'it is'. Even still, most people had given up on Kraftwerk ever releasing any new music years ago, but ever since their surprise, recent 'Tour De France' LP and an outstanding and lavishly hyped Brit Awards performance (via which they recreate the neon body suits and micra-wave backdrop for tonight), optimism is being re-kindled... even though Schneider and Hütter have spent the last two decades gradually cutting themselves off from the outside world.
Lest we forget: they rarely give interviews, and when they do, they come with ridiculous strings attached; their legendary Düsseldorf studio, Kling Klang, has no telephone, no fax, no email, no reception and returns all post unopened; and they have not attended a photo-shoot since the days when the BeeGees ruled the Earth (their record-label has had to make do with blurry shots from their highly infrequent live appearances and pictures of the band's painstakingly constructed robot doubles - which we're also braved with tonight, and unnerving they indeed are). No band has shunned publicity with such admirable dedication.
But indeed 'it is' Kraftwerk: one of the few bands in history who genuinely bear comparison to The Beatles. Hell, not because of their sound or their image, but because, like The Beatles, it is impossible to overstate their influence on modern music. There's five albums that really are the 'marble slab commandments of popular music': 'Autobahn', 'Radioactivity', 'Trans Europe Express', 'The Man Machine' and 'Computerworld'. And those pinnacles, those structures are just as marvelling live as in their recorded discography: in their clipped, weirdly funky rhythms, simple melodies and futuristic technology, you can hear whole new areas of popular music being mapped out; all spectres of their past days are replicated with rigid precision this eve, with little in the way of 'human' about it.
It's fitting, however; Kraftwerk were so far ahead of their time that the rest of the world has spent twenty-five years inventing new musical genres in an attempt to catch up. House, techno, hip-hop, trip-hop, synth-pop, trance, electroclash: Kraftwerk's influence looms over all of them. It's difficult to imagine what rock and pop music would sound like today if the curry-wurst lovin' quartet had never existed.
The conceptualisation for their sound almost seems too large, too grand and vast to fit into even the generally perceived-as-cavernous Brixton Academy. Something as phenomenal and overpowering lusts for air and space and seemingly never-ending corners or constraints. An open-air, Glasto-esque set up would surely be more suiting... which, of course, would also give us space to escape the body odours of the Gary Numan stalkers. But with a near-predictable reliance on all the hits (we mean, all of them) and a large series of visuals, the honour still remains solely ours.
Artists in this article: Kraftwerk
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