One of our readers, who will remain nameless, claims that this is a camera-phone shot of the March 17th Kraftwerk show. You be the judge.

Kraftwerk's last live appearance on UK soil was at the 1997 Tribal Gathering festival, a massive open-air rave (and staple of the UK dance music calendar) staged in an airfield just a few miles from my house. Though I didn't manage to get a ticket, a few people I knew were lucky enough to score part-time jobs as backstage helpers, litter pickers, parking assistants and bar staff -- anything that might help them gain entry to the event and its dance-manic prestige. The following weekend, I bumped into a few of them at our local pub and immediately quizzed them for festival highlights, goofy anecdotes or general goings-on. There was little to tell -- the backstage area had been completely sealed off at Kraftwerk's request, with only the group and its tiny entourage permitted VIP entry. The only telling anecdote I heard involved a goofy chat with Detroit techno guru Derrick May, who, like my bar-staff comrades, was refused backstage access and made to wait out front, due in no small part to Kraftwerk's savage guarding of their human selves.

It's also strange how the group have embraced post-modernism simply by re-appearing. Last year's Tour De France Soundtracks was nothing if not a retread of the mystical electro-modernism they've been peddling since 1978, complete with re-hashed title track and remedial 21st-century polish. The announcement of the group's 2004 world tour seemed to have come almost out of nowhere, but for the Kraftwerk-loving denizens of Manchester and beyond, March 17th 2004 would be a red letter day. And for all of the reasons outlined above, it was not without a heightened, feverish sense of anticipation.

Evidence of the venue's strict adherence to Kraftwerk's protective wishes was immediately obvious: Manchester's prestigious Apollo Theatre was lined with bold-text notices that screamed "STRICTLY NO PHOTOGRAPHY". Entrants with bulging pockets were searched for photographic devices or photo-capable mobile phones, and the security guards looked more like anti-terror airport agents, or Pete Postlethwaite's humorless turn in The Usual Suspects. Once inside, the venue buzzed with feverish chatter as we staked our place at the front. Everyone from kids to hipsters, middle-aged couples to local celebrities, jaundiced ravers to whey-faced indie kids were in attendance, seemingly thrilled to be so. Eventually, the lights dimmed, to a swell of cheers. A moment of tense pre-programmed silence followed, before that infamous robot voice bled from the speakers:

"Ladies and gentlemen... Damen und herren... Kraaaaft... Weeeeerk"

"Man Machine" issued its immediately-recognisable pulse as the cheers reached a ferocious crescendo. A giant red back-light shone against the closed curtain, bringing with it a silhouette of four thin, motionless figures. As the song's infectious blips and staccato synth began to take hold, the curtains slowly parted to reveal the four middle-aged, blank-faced members of Kraftwerk, standing behind purpose-built laptop podiums on a clinically bare stage. Decked in trademark black blazers and red shirts, the four members appeared as motionless and emotionless as every expectation had prepared us for. Save for the odd jolt of a limb or between-song pause to sip from a carefully-concealed water bottle, Ralf Hutter, Fritz Hilpert, Henning Schmit, and a humorously coot-bald Floran Schneider remained in a state of suspended animation for the next 90 minutes, never issuing so much as a single audience glance or rhythmic acknowledgement, despite the bassy Teutonic rumblings coming from the speakers. True to form, this was not so much an arena gig from dance music's foremost inventors and commentators as a static piece of anti-performance art akin to a Powerpoint presentation.

As "Man Machine" kicked in, a gargantuan video wall sprang to life behind the group, flashing up line-drawings of shapes, colors, geometric oddities and carefully-aligned text in perfect synchronisation with the song's clipped, blippy rhythms and wheezing machine harmonies. Sound-wise, the song was subject to the same kind of re-jigging as heard on the updated treatments on last year's Tour De France or 1991's The Mix: beats were beefed up, '80s textures modernized and clarified, and some tunes were even segued seamlessly into their The Mix counterparts for extra arena-club friendliness.

However, while the video wall provided the show's only kinetic activity, it was the four motionless figures on stage that commanded the most attention. Every tiny glance seemed utterly significant, every mouth movement appeared as some kind of dialogue between technology and humanity. In short, everything about them rewarded staring, and the fact that music's most famous robot-people were standing before us in ultra-rare flesh form meant that taking our eyes off of them, even for a second, simply wasn't an option. Defending Kraftwerk's mystique as though their lives depended on it, the venue's security seemed obsessed with shining torches into the lenses of anyone who'd somehow gotten a camera past security, while the unfeasibly polite crowd were under constant invasion from the orange-shirted, camera-pilfering image police.

Kraftwerk raced through their set with characteristic precision, and the visuals amply followed suit. On the screen behind the four moody, besuited, damn-near-mythological motherfuckers were, amongst other visual treats, a rainbow shower of multicolored CGI pills and white-on-black line drawings of soluble tablets dissolving in water ("Vitamin"), Lumiére-like shots of train-tracks, railways and continent-straddling supertrains ("Trans Europe Express"), shots of high-speed traffic ("Autobahn"), wiping fades of Vegas-meets-Dusseldorf architecture ("Neon Lights"), and slow-motion monochrome shots of melancholy-looking catwalk girls ("The Model"). Oh, and as was to be expected, a hell of a lot of bicycling footage ("Aerodynamik", "Tour De France").

Perhaps the evening's most striking and frankly terrifying visual moment was nothing more than a piece of scrolling text, read aloud by robot-voice as the lights dimmed into darkness. Here, we were informed that the Sellafield 2 installation in Britain will produce 7.5kg of plutonium each year, that only 1.5kg of the stuff is required to make a nuclear bomb, that the plant will release the same amount of radiation into the environment as Chernobyl every 4.5 years, and that one of these radioactive substances, Krypton 85, causes skin cancer and death. Given that the Madrid bombings had taken place only days earlier, an eerie silence descended upon the auditorium, albeit one quickly quoshed by the thumping, solenoidal blip-work of the proceeding "Radioactivity" (performed as a mash-up of both the original, and remixed version).

Searching for traces of humanity became the most fun and rewarding aspect of the gig, not least when Schneider and Hutter were called upon to sing. On "Trans Europe Express", for example, Hutter employed the same emotionless, machinic psycho-stare as did David Byrne in Stop Making Sense -- a piercing glare that suggested looking through the audience rather than at them. His finger held to his earpiece in the manner of a newscaster or a hard-of-hearing drive-thru attendant, Hutter's vocal delivery on "The Model" was so deadpan and indifferent that it was, conversely, strangely moving. Likewise, when Hutter fumbled a few of the spiralling "Trans Europe Express" chords, he was rewarded with such a fierce and severe glance from Hutter that it made Kraftwerk's fascistic connotations all the more believable. Clearly, errors of any kind were not to be tolerated.

As the curtains closed on a shit-kickingly climactic "Trans Europe Express", expectation again began to heighten. Would Kraftwerk do something as "human" as an encore? The venue lights remained dimmed, and a mumbling chatter (overheard comments included "GOD-LIKE!" and "COME BACK AND GIVE US A SMILE!") began to swell. As the 5000-strong crowd began stamping their feet and jeering, the familiar Kraftwerk rumble resumed. The curtains pulled open once again to reveal the four laptop podiums. Kraftwerk, however, were nowhere in sight. As "Tour De France" began, the four members entered from stage-right, although this time with a line of sequenced flashing lights clipped to their ties. The man-machine transformation had begun... An absolutely thrilling "Pocket Calculator" followed, in which (complete with video accompaniment), Hutter issued a clumsily human grin through his lines: "I'm the operator of my pocket calculator...By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody". As if to quell this (comparative) outburst of emotion, he continued to sing the song in French and German, perhaps under the impression that it sounded less funny. It did, though this earned another piercing evil glare from Floran Schneider.

Another half an hour or so, and the curtains closed to rapturous applause. The lights remained dimmed once more, and the encore-baiting volley of cheers resumed. Before long, the infamous spoken intro to "The Robots" was heard, as another silhouette of four men was projected onto the curtain. As the song's ominous techno rumble burst into life, the curtains slowly pulled apart to reveal....surely not?

THE ROBOTS! THE FUCKING ROBOTS!
FOUR LIFE-SIZED KRAFTWERK REPLICA ROBOTS!

In word form, it's a truly Herculean task to transcribe the sheer surreal excitement of watching four mechanical life-sized robot replicas extending their arms up and down at the pace of a crippled slug, but the presence of these iconic shamble-bots forced us all into a state of something appropriating frenzy... "We are functioning automatik... And we are dancing mechanik... We are the robots..." Being in a crowd of several thousand people, watching four robots dancing in front of a video wall flashing line-diagrams of their movements was as exciting, daft and absorbing a live-show spectacle as I've ever witnessed. The song rumbled and pumped its way to an ending, and the curtains closed once more to an orgiastic and deafening rumble of cheers. The lights remained dimmed again...another encore? Where the fuck could we go from here?

The motorik synth-grind of "It's More Fun To Compute" kicked in, and the curtains pulled back for what would be the final time, revealing Kraftwerk back at their re-installed laptop podiums, this time decked out in dazzling and frankly blinding luminous neon-green, UV-lit grid suits. As a result, the stage resembled the set of the 1984 film Tron, only with a more sustainable watchability. Remaining utterly motionless at their podiums, even as the song collapsed into a strobe-light breakdown, the four members eventually became unified in a motion of sorts, by way of a synchronized pedal-stomping during "Boing Boom Tschak". A show such as this couldn't have demanded a more fitting closer than "Musique Non Stop", after which the four members of Kraftwerk slowly exited one by one, from right to left. When it came to Hutter's turn to leave, he once again put his finger to his earpiece and spoke: "Thank you, England, for coming out tonight -- Danke". Cheers followed. He exited the stage, and the curtain closed, leaving the closing robo-voiced chant of "Music Non Stop" to fade into silence.

As the house lights rose, the sense of being transported from one world to another was palpable, and as we exited the venue into a world of merchandise salesmen, traffic, taxi queues and the lack of a nearby cash machine, the magnitude of what we'd witnessed was still hard to fathom. We decided to walk home, and as we did so, we passed a horde of excited showgoers peering at Kraftwerk's tour bus from across the street. We toyed with the idea of waiting with them, if only to witness the potentially hilarious sight of Kraftwerk's replica-robots being loaded onto the bus by a team of roadies -- but what could have shattered the evening's mystical, ethereal, transcendent magnificence more than that?

Article by Allan Harrison.