10 Years Ago I Had The Greatest Gig Experience of My Life

Friday is fun because it’s about music. So playlists. And of course the chat about the music too. Today it’s reminiscing about one of the best gigs I’ll ever see by one of my favourite bands.

It’s ten years, almost to the day - okay, last week - since I saw Kraftwerk live in concert not once but TWICE on the same night. I didn’t pay for either gig. (They played Autobahn in its entirety at the early show - followed by a selection of hits, then they played Radio-Activity in the second, completely seperate gig, and then many of those same hits again after).

I didn’t pay for the tickets. It also didn’t happen anywhere near where I live. It happened in Sydney. At the Vivid Festival. And so I was flown to Sydney, taxi-chits, the hotel paid for, a gift basket, freebies to all sorts of things (including an orchestra from the UK performing the soundtrack to Blade Runner, and a fairly ropey performance by Bobby Womack too…)

Good lord I was spoiled that one time I tell ya!

Oh yeah, to add to the surreal vibes, my date for the night when I saw Kraftwerk play Autobahn live was Sylvie Simmons. Only my favourite music writer.

I think about this a lot. Because I love Kraftwerk, and regularly binge their entire catalogue (I’m in the middle of doing that right now in fact - another run through the records). I think about this a lot, because as far as freebies go, as far as perks, as far as the “junket”, this was as good as it ever got. (And I realise this is pretty far from just ‘good’ - this was pretty fucking great actually!)

I’d met Sylvie, a year or so before, in America. And then her wonderful book about Leonard Cohen was released, and she made it all the way down to New Zealand as part of her book tour. I drove to Carterton to interview her live on stage as part of an event. The next day I got a call asking me to collect her from the train station in Wellington; there’d been a mistake and she’d need to stay the night in Wellington. Could she stay with me? Sure thing! Cue a night of stories about Suzanne Vega and Neil Young and LC, Aerosmith, Metallica, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, the bloody works…

And then I dropped Sylvie at the airport as she was off to do some book-promo in Sydney. We made tentative plans to catch up for a drink, because I was on my way over a day or two later for the Vivid Festival. Then I casually mentioned that I was seeing Kraftwerk and Sylvie asked if I could hook her up with a ticket.

I panicked. But my email to the promoters worked! Next thing me and Sylvie are heading in to see Düsseldorf’s finest.

The lights go down and we put on our 3D glasses. The audience is reading and waiting. Sylvie Simmons turns to me and says – “I might just write some notes on this, if that’s alright. It’s the sort of nerdy thing I like to do”. And even now if you tried to tell me there was ever a better way to watch a Kraftwerk show than sitting next to a Mojo scribe and Leonard Cohen biographer, a new friend and writing hero then I’m sorry but I just couldn’t believe you.

That almost made the show for me. That alone.

Oh, but then very quickly after, there was the actual show!

So here’s how that went:

For the opening show of Kraftwerk’s The Catalogue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 series of concerts at Sydney’s Vivid Festival it’s 1974’s Autobahn, but Kraftwerk (now Ralf Hutter and three new, anonymous showroom dummies) begin the show with The Man Machine’s scene-setter, The Robots. And try as they might to disappear into the music, to seem more machine than man, there’s just so much heart in this performance; it is so very human – audience and band on the same side as soon as lyrics from the song start pouring out from the backdrop and there are hushed gasps and excited murmurs from within the sea of 3-D glasses.

And then from red to blue the screen signals time for the ride to start properly: “Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn”. Weightless, the song is a glide, somewhere – still odd to think it – a hit single sits inside this 23-minute blueprint for ambient electronica. The album cover comes to life on the screen behind the band – a car’s wheels turning in time with the music’s perpetual roll/role.

Autobahn is a short album – but always a beautiful ride. The opening title track, aka side one, is the dominant half but as we’re guided through the glide of Kometenmelodie 1 and 2 (“Comet Melody 1 and 2”), Mitternacht (“Midnight”) and Morgenspaziergang (“Morning Walk”) it all feels like it’s over too soon, 42 minutes that almost seemed like only half that – but will go on to live forever too; there was some dream-like drift and dream-logic lapse to it.

There is applause to mark the end of each piece and a huge swell of pride and a surge in the clapping as the band puts this live version of the album to rest. You can see a slight jiggle in the legs of the Kraftwerk Klan, maybe a puffing out of chests too – but it’s straight on to a run of hits, “hits” and shoulda-been-hits from the rest of the catalogue.

Each tune matched to the iconic artwork of the associated album, Trans-Europe Express’ title track receives a whoop of applause as the black’n’white of the TEE logo morphs into train tracks and this forward-motion theme of travel continues.

The Model has vintage footage hanging in a cloud above the band and is greeted by the audience as if the evening’s only true pop song.

Computer World’s offerings (particularly Numbers) are among the highlights, but then so too is Tour de France and Electric Cafe/Techno Pop’s Boing Boom Tschak and the closing Musique Non-Stop.

Throughout the nearly two-hour show that doesn’t so much trace around 00s cafe-culture soundtracking, 90s trance and techno and 80s hip-hop as it does float along in its own parallel universe, married up with footage that offers its own waft and drift, its own actual parallel universe, Ralf Hutter provides all of the vocals, his voice almost bloodless at times it is so calm.

These almost-too-faithful recreations are a proud testament of the sound-world carved out by Kraftwerk’s dogma, the stringent focus on everything that is not the 12-bar blues scale; that is not ever close to that magic combination of chords derrived from Pachelbel’s Canon in D has resulted in 40 years of work that is its own canon; that is tied to whatever part of our past – as audience members, from when we discovered it – but is still given enough rope to slide out and off toward a future sound; a series of found future sounds.

One by one the members of Kraftwerk have at their consoles, hovering down over the laptop and iPad and synth that hides inside each desk-tray, these cubicle-workers of the stage. One by one they walk to the side, take a bow, as if to receive a medal from the princess in honour of the work they have offered to further the cause of dance music’s Rebel Alliance.

Ralf Hutter is last to leave the stage. “Good night!” he says, as if an instruction, a command. “Auf Wiedersehen!”

And that is all that he said all night. And all that he needed to say. The dream is over. Euphoric, charming, innovative, still loaded with both naivety and – because of that – a mystique that’s been cultivated, slaved over, the music sounds as fresh – so boundless – as it ever did; ever could. Linear, sometimes dark, always beautiful, there was pop music inside of sci-fi soundtrack; there was dance music with heart, with soul, with smarts.

Kraftwerk, the members, leave the stage. Kraftwerk, the music: its members – both audience and band – have disappeared inside the tunes. A form of transcendence.

So on it goes, on it lives. Choruses hidden inside gently unfolding melodies. Melodies shaping, dictating rhythms.

I’m sure I wrote a little bit more after…

*

I said goodnight to Sylvie, got her in a cab to where she was staying, killed about an hour, and then got to head back in to watch them do it all again, this time with the Radio-Activity album.

The trip was the result of a deal with Destination NSW and the Dominion Post. They obviously couldn’t find a journo who was able to go, so they offered me. The paper didn’t print anything about it - so I blogged the whole trip. I wrote reviews of every show I attended (mostly rave, save for the dud that was a clearly dying Bobby Womack). I wrote about the photos and light shows, the artist-talks, the installations. I attended an amazing chat about war reporting, I saw a couple of DJ sets, it really was an unreal weekend.

I shared the links to everything with Destination NSW and promptly heard nothing. I was never invited to anything like this ever again.

But hey, lightning doesn’t strike twice.

Ten years on, I still can’t believe my luck. I think I probably think about those Kraftwerk shows more than any other gig I’ve ever been to.

So that’s my memory to share with you today. And of course the music of Kraftwerk, which I hope you know and love already…

But there’s also a volume of the “Sounds Good!” weekly playlist. This edition of A Little Something For The Weekend is Volume 119. As always, I hope you find something here to enjoy anew, or for the first time.

And hey, if you’re in New Zealand, happy long weekend!