Kraftwerk Olympia, Dublin: Once upon a time, this is what the future must have looked like. Four somewhat austere gentlemen in smart dark-grey suits, red shirts and black ties are standing behind laptops, peering at the screens and pressing buttons.
Behind them, there's a screen featuring simple, timeless, striking text and graphics, or black-and-white footage of cyclists huffing up mountains and trains running into tunnels.
To the audience, used to the semiotics of live house, techno and electronica shows, there's nothing remotely new about what they're seeing. What's far more interesting, however, are the sounds which are coming from those laptops. Made by man, performed by machines.
Kraftwerk's return to werk with a huge world tour (including this, their first Irish show) to plug their latest album Tour de France Soundtracks is a break from a very old routine. Away from the security of their Kling-Klang studio, the "elusive" and "enigmatic" descriptions which normally apply to Kraftwerk look a little threadbare, especially when they're standing right in front of you. By the end of the show, however, it's such adjectives as "graceful", "elegant" and "beautiful" which seem far more fitting to the occasion.
There are many times in the evening when you think to yourself, "this sounds like early Orbital" or "that sounds very 1990", until you realise that what you're hearing significantly predates both. Hidden in tracks such as the opening Man Machine, the mesmerising crackle of Numbers or the two versions (one fast, one slow) of Tour de France are the codes which others have taken away and used to energise everything from techno to hip-hop.
The innovators rarely blink, instead showing that they can still tease and coax electro-pop gems such as Autobahn and The Model into highly attractive shapes. Radioactivity and Trans Europe Express, tracks which should be showing signs of wear and tear given the leaps and bounds in electronic music since they first appeared, are poised and charming, losing nothing to time. Even adding a little vroom to the tracks doesn't take away from their potency.
As the encores begin, there's a visible relaxation onstage, Ralf Hütter even appears to attempt a slightly bizarre shuffle during Pocket Calculator.
The loudest cheers of the night are heard when the curtains fall back for another encore to reveal four robots performing, what else, The Robots, the ultimate visual statement on technological development.
They end with Musique Non Stop, each Kraftwerker performing what amounts to a laptop solo before, one by one, walking offstage. It would be nice to think that they then went to the stage-door, mounted racing bikes and cycled into the night, but such details are the stuff of myths. Let's just be happy with what we saw and heard here, a state of the nation address from electronic music's elder statesmen. The machines are still working and everything is OK.
