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Review: Kraftwerk, Bristol Beacon – ‘Like a mythical experience’
Packed to the rafters, the Beacon audience waited in anticipation for the legendary four-piece Kraftwerk, currently made up of founder Ralf Hütter, Henning Schmitz, Falk Grieffenhagen and Fritz Hilpert.
They emerged on-stage wearing black suits with neon threads that changed colour to mirror the graphics behind them.
This felt very reminiscent of the famous ABBA voyage set-up and the image of four stoic German men wearing tight-fitting neon suits was initially quite amusing.
Group frontman and founder Ralf Hütter sported a diva mic to complement his neon armour and overlay the tracks with his signature rhyming couplets.
Largescale visuals veered between archive footage and kitsch animations
Aside from a leg jig here and there, their static positions behind four separate lecterns changed the way we think of ‘live performance as’ they looked like they were studiously hacking into the mainframe or steering their megaship across space to land here in Bristol.
Hearing classic tracks of the Kraftwerk back-catalogue live felt like a mythical experience – you can’t quite believe it happened.
The two hour performance spanned the Computer Love, Tour de France and Man-Machine eras, treating the audience to tracks like Das Model and Musique Non Stop.
The Beacon’s immaculate sound meant the percussive and bass elements were really pronounced and felt by an awestruck audience.
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Hütter made a touching tribute to longstanding collaborator, Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, with whom he has been friends since 1981.
He performed Radioactive using Sakamoto’s dedicated Japanese lyrics to unsettling, flashing written images of nuclear explosion sites like Hiroshima and Fukushima.
The visuals alternated between deliberately kitsch 3D animations of spaceships and the autobahn and archival footage of the tour de France or fashion models.
The two-hour multimedia show spanned a large part of the seminal band’s back catalogue
The archival footage served as a reminder of the period Kraftwerk pioneered their enduring futuristic sound – as early as 1970 when synthesisers were in their infancy.
The group acknowledged and paid tribute to the origins of techno music by projecting DETROIT and TECHNO on-screen throughout their Techno-Pop segment.
There was a sense that everyone felt privileged to be in the presence of this group and the partial standing ovation was reflective of our gratitude for their stand-alone contribution to electronic and techno music globally all the way from the Kling-Klang studio in Dusseldorf, Germany.
All images: Holly Greenwood
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