A fond farewell to Kraftwerk and all that?

Kraftwerk live, Roni Size, garage vibes

Kraftwerk were almost one of the first bands I saw live, by which I mean they played Norwich UEA in June 1992, when I was just 14, and I almost went to see them, before deciding the £12 - or whatever it was - was just too much for my adolescent wallet and stayed at home instead. As the years passed and the cult of Kraftwerk grew, both inside and out of my head, my decision annoyed me more and more.

So when the band announced they were playing London in 2004, I bought tickets to both the Royal Festival Hall and Brixton Academy gigs, with the latter, in particular, one of the best concerts I have ever seen, a wonder of clean, pounding sound and audience rapture. I saw them again that year at the Benícassim festival, down by Valencia, and considered myself sated, the UEA disaster more than made up for.

I didn’t see Kraftwerk the next few times I could have done. They played Sónar and I was elsewhere; they played the Liceu opera house in Barcelona and tickets were north of €100. But when the festival Terramar announced Kraftwerk would be playing Sitges - Sitges! - in July 2023 I had to go. To give some context, Sitges is where my wife and her family are from, a holiday town 40km down the coast from Barcelona that is known for being very LGBTQIA+ friendly and the perfect place for  a family getaway but not so much at all for electronic music pioneers. Playing the Terramar festival alongside Kraftwerk this year are Tom Jones, Malú and Zucchero Sugar Fornaciari, a most unlikely bunch, which got me wondering who on earth would go and see Kraftwerk in Sitges?

I was, to be honest, slightly reticent. The criticism frequently voiced of Kraftwerk in 2023 is that under the direction of Ralf Hütter - the only original member still in the band - they have become a parody of their former, progressive selves, a touring dinosaur content to pump out the old hits for anyone who’s paying them. And there is the smallest touch of truth to this. Their set at Sitges contains all of the old hits - The Model, Computer Love, Tour De France, The Man Machine et al - with the newest songs taken from 2003’s Tour De France Soundtracks. The one “new”song they play - Tango - has never been officially released but they have been playing it since the 1990s. (And, I’m sorry to say, it is appalling, a three-note bass line trudge through 90s techno that is, by some distance, the worst thing they play tonight.)

And yet…. there is still a sense of adventure and - dare I say it - love of music to Kraftwerk’s live set. The set list includes lesser known songs like Airwaves - its pumped up and muscular sound a real highlight  - Planet of Visions and Electric Café and the versions of the well-known songs they play aren’t quite the same as on their 2017 live album 3D: Der Katalog, perhaps because Kraftwerk are notably playing live, with the odd mistake in evidence - a keyboard line slightly fluffed, for example. (Kraftwerk have recently changed their live line up, with Georg Bongartz coming in and Falk Grieffenhagen shifting to a more musical role. And this may have something to do with it.)

At the same time, (Tango aside) Kraftwerk still sound perfectly contemporary, in a way you just can’t say for most older touring bands. You could happily play a good 95% of their current live set in a techno club and people would dance to it, without considering its historical origins. (Which, perhaps, also says something about the state of techno.) The same can’t be said for, says 1980s Chicago house, as much as I love it. 

That’s hugely impressive - and it takes work, sonically, to make sure things stay up to date. Sure, I would probably prefer it if Hütter et al were working away on new music in the Kling Klang studio. But the sheer 2023 shine of their current live set does at least suggest that their constant studio tinkering is paying dividend. They look and sound absolutely spectacular, crushingly loud but utterly free of distortion, the vast screen behind them resplendent as a fluctuating wall of modernistic art. And, yes, I’d love a Kraftwerk set that was bathed in new material. But I’d also be pissed off if they didn’t play The Model. And I suspect most people feel the same.

But what really wins me over in Sitges is the passion you see in Ralf Hütter’s face when he sings these songs from another millennium. The Sitges gig is a small one, and relatively empty for that, and so I manage to get very close to the stage, from where I can spy on Hütter. And, honestly, if that isn’t a kind of historically-infused passion on his face while he sings Neon Lights for the n hundredeth time, then he is an even better actor than musician. It helps, perhaps, that Kraftwerk have some distinctly humanising technical difficulties with Hütter’s light suit, which forces a brief pause in between songs, in which Hütter addresses the audience, responding to someone shout of “Music” with a shy-sounding “non stop”, to general delight. It would be easy for someone in his position to cruise on autopilot. But for tonight, at least, the passion seems very much to be there.

None of which is to suggest that Kraftwerk are beyond criticism in 2023. I would dearly love Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos - who were very important parts of the Kling Klang machine - to have some kind of role in 21st Century Kraftwerk. And, as my wife pointed out, it was a particularly masculine concert, all Men and their machines, with the Model models the only women to appear on the screen. (Madame Curie also appears in name.) But, for me, this concert proved that Kraftwerk remain a vital life force in their seventh decade of existence.

Will I ever see them again? I’d like to. I’ve never seen the Kraftwerk 3D show, for example, or heard The Telephone Call live. But Hütter is almost 77 years old and, much as he might like the idea of Kraftwerk continuing as a music machine, with none of its original members, the collective idea driving the group ever forward, I’m not sure it will continue after his death. But if this was a goodbye to Kraftwerk, a group I have loved for almost 30 years and almost went to see at 14, then it was an emotional one.

Roni Size and the role of MCs

The question of when a new musical genre emerges has long fascinated me and none more so than in the case of hardcore / jungle / drum & bass, where the offshoot - D&B - seems to have progressively eaten the mother genre.

I’ve written before about genre, concluding that the key to understanding them lies in the drums and the BPM. To briefly quote myself: “Musical genres - and I’m largely talking about dance music here, surely the most genre conscious of any type of music - largely come down to the drums and a combination of speed and style. Of course, it’s not just that - most music genres have their own particular palette of sounds too. 

“But consider: what differentiates the bass-line-obsessed dubstep from the similarly bass-line-obsessed drum & bass but the drums? Similarly what fundamental difference is there between 174 BPM hard house and 174 BPM drum & bass, other than the former’s straight up four to the floor beats and the latter’s shuffling step?”

Of course, repetition is also really important. Make one 240 BPM reggae tune and it will sound insane; make 100 240 BPM reggae tunes and you’ve invented a new genre.

I asked Roni Size about this when I interviewed him this week for Line Noise and his answer brought up something I hadn’t really thought about in all this: the role of the MC.

Roni’s first record to be released was Wicked Ways, as 3 Way Split, in 1992; I called it hardcore; he called it jungle tekno, the brief jungle precursor that emerged about 1992 then swiftly faded from view. But, I asked Roni, how did he known when hardcore became jungle?

His immediate response was the kick drum: hardcore had a four four kick drum and jungle didn’t. But, of course, it wasn’t quite so simple: “For me, it was more to do with a time and era,” he added. “I believe that music -  this my personal opinion - that is all to do with the dates rather than the actual sounds. I believe that there was a time when it was called hardcore. And then it turned into jungle tekno, turned into something that counts as jungle. Did you remember the phrases that the MCs used to use?”

I did. And I thought his response was fascinating. He didn’t elaborate but I knew what Roni meant: if an MC was talking about hardcore on the mic, then the music he was chatting over was hardcore; when MCs started talking about jungle, that meant the music the DJ was playing was jungle. And when MCs then started talking about drum & bass, it was no surprise that that became the default name for the genre.

It made perfect sense. The MC’s role (at least in raves) is to hype the crowd but, I’d argue, also to define the experience - to let people know what, exactly, they are doing in this darkened room at 3 in the morning. In 1992, when jungle was just starting to emerge, raving was still pretty young and the music was evolving at a breakneck speed. So people needed a little guidance.

Producers themselves rarely like to define their music and DJs don’t have mics. But MCs do and they have air to fill - so what would be more natural than to define the music the crowd was listening to? Arguably, this is unique in cultural history: the evolution of new musical genres as mapped out in real time, in actual words, and by the people actually involved in changing the music, rather than by journalists and outsiders. 

This means, too, that you could trace the evolution of hardcore to jungle to drum & bass by going back and listening to the numerous live recordings from raves at the time, both for the records played and the MCs’ chat.

You can listen to the interview here. 

PS Krust - one of Roni Size’s closest musical allies and an absolute giant of jungle production - this week released Irrational Numbers (Volume 1), part one of a five-part series in which he is remastering and re-releasing classic tunes from his extensive discography. It is TOWERING, monumental stuff and cries out to be listened to. Also, you can listen to my 2020 interview with Krust here. He is a fascinating character.

Some music to enjoy

Priya Ragu  - Easy (MJ Cole remix)

I was wondering the other day what the people behind the new wave of UKG-inspired summer anthems could do to recognise the pioneers of the genre - and the best I could come up with was getting MJ Cole in to do a remix, which explains why I was VERY happy when Priya Ragu did just that. The original Easy is great but MJ Cole is an absolute garage master, not to mention one of the best remixers in the game, and he tightens everything up here, making it more funky and immediate. Excellent work.

Kwengface x Joy Orbison x Overmono - Freedom 2

I’m far from an expert on UK Drill but the combination of one hot MC and two of the UK’s biggest electronic producers / production teams is a wonderful thing, particularly when it produces something as 2-steppingly anthemic as Freedom 2, a rolling, rumbling, joyous bundle of funk.

Todd Terry - I’ll Do Anything 

I’ve been slowly making my way through Todd Terry’s Unreleased Project EPs this month as I try to work out who, exactly, invented filter house. I’d heard it was Todd Terry and the key track was on one of the Unreleased Project EPs but, although there are certainly lots of disco samples and bumping house beats in Projects one to seven, I don’t think there are any typically filter house-style uses of filters there, so the question remains unresolved. 

Also unresolved: if these EPs were released between 1992 and 1995, then when exactly were the songs unreleased from? How long has to pass from creation to release for a track to be officially unreleased? And not just, you know, a song that hasn’t been released yet. I’ll Do Anything, which was released in 1992 on the first Unreleased Project EP, samples LFO’s LFO, so it can’t have been sitting in the vault that long. What’s more, isn’t Todd Terry’s catalogue pretty ill served in the streaming era? I was looking for a suitable greatest hits style playlist for some casual TT listening and nothing really fit the bill, possibly because Todd has released under such a bewildering variety of names. All the same, for a producer as absolutely vital to house music history as Todd Terry, this seems a shame. 

Entirely 100% resolved, though: isn’t Todd Terry a fabulous producer? His beats are so wonderfully crafted, his use of samples absolutely perfect, his mixture of hip hop and house production styles unbelievably fresh and lively.

The playlist

Of all the newest and the bestest - have a listen here. Includes new music from Mitski, Tinashe, Aphex and more. I’ve even worked out how to make it run from newest song added to oldest, in a thrilling development in playlisting.