Die Mensch-Maschine

Back in the early eighties, I would buy any publication that featured Kraftwerk. In the absence of any useful, accessible Internet and, indeed, world wide web, the occasional article or cherished interview was all I had to go on apart from my much studied album sleeves. And around that time, the chaps from Kraftwerk - and probably Ralf Hütter specifically - were very interested in their mannequins, the precursors to their robot selves. 

There's no denying Kraftwerk's sense of humour but sometimes it was hard to distinguish between jokes, whimsy, and actual intention: Hütter would talk about the robots performing their gigs for them and, indeed, for the last twenty or so years, the actual track 'The Robots' has always played without any humans on stage, just four somewhat basic robots. I've heard stories that at one gig, the band sat in the audience while it played.

Over the years Hütter has done a very good and thorough job in refining Kraftwerk's back catalogue and, these days, their tours - which only feature him from the original line up - don't feature any new material, just songs from the canonical 'Catalogue'. A few years ago I saw them at Tate Modern where they played an album in its entirety each night followed by a greatest hits set and recently they released of boxed set of the eight Catalogue albums played live. Tonight I saw them again, in Liverpool, playing a greatest hits show to promoted the boxed set.

The show itself was great, including a couple of glitches that belied the assertion that they band are simply standing on stage while sequencers do all the work. And Hütter's whimsical sense of humour was in evidence as he blamed the first glitch on "a failure of electricity".

In fact, it was fun to watch him. I swear that at the end of 'Autobahn' it was him making car noises (processed by a vocoder) and generally he struck me as someone very proud of his legacy and who enjoyed taking it out to play to people. 

And the final treat for me was that they finished with full suite of 'Boing Boom Tschak'/'Techno Pop'/'Music Non Stop' :-)

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-6.9kgs
No words (but the intention is still there!)