Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
With the technology the band predicted all around us, their innovation now is in striking visuals and rebooted songs that accentuate humanity
With the obvious exception of the Beatles, it’s hard to think of many acts who have had such influence on popular culture as Kraftwerk. The German electronic pioneers have left their fingerprints on genres from electropop to Detroit techno to hip-hop and EDM. Artists from New Order to Madonna have sampled them; David Bowie named his song V2-Schneider after one of the founder members, and Coldplay had a whopping hit using one of their melodies.
Today, the way most of our pop music sounds and is made owes much to Kraftwerk’s 1970s ideal of a marriage of humanity and machine. Meanwhile, the technological world Kraftwerk envisaged is around us. It’s mind-boggling to think they were singing about Computer Love – the idea of lonely souls finding each other via electronic communications – decades before we even had the world wide web, never mind internet dating. How improbable all this must have seemed in 1975, when they appeared on the TV science programme Tomorrow’s World looking like accountants chuckling at some secret but hilarious in-joke, playing silver foil pads with electronic knitting needles.
Continue reading...by Dave Simpson via Electronic music | The Guardian
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