Kraftwerk by Uwe Schütte

Author:Uwe Schütte [Uwe Schütte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241320556
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

Around the Globe: The Computer World World Tour of 1981

The release of Computer World brought with it the difficult issue of how to tour and perform the landmark album live. The most recent Kraftwerk concerts had been to publicize Radio-Activity in the autumn of 1976, a short European tour that closed with three dates in the UK (Sheffield, Coventry and the London Roundhouse). During their five-year absence from the stage Kraftwerk released no fewer than three milestone albums – Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine and Computer World; it was the most densely productive period of their career.

The world was eager to hear Kraftwerk’s genre-defining music live, at long last. To meet this demand, the band transformed the Kling Klang studio set-up by reconfiguring their equipment into modular form. The various music machines and pieces of electronic equipment, originally designed to function as independent units, were now connected with each other, allowing the band a much greater level of control and to streamline their operations. This was an arduous task and took three years to complete. The declared aim was to enable Kraftwerk to take the entire set-up on tour.

And so they did, as this was the only way to replicate the increasingly complex musical production of these three albums in a live setting. Hütter explained: ‘It took a lot of work to make the Kling Klang studio transportable, to really stage it, to install it in situation. All the parts are connected, it’s a new conception of Kraftwerk: before it was studio plus live, now it’s live studio, we play the studio on stage.’48

This feat located Kraftwerk not just aesthetically but also technically at the forefront of developments in the live performance of electronic music. They were not only pre-empting later stage practices in electronic music, they also put the Kling Klang studio on display, making the spectacle of the music machines a part of their show. The line between their everyday workplace and the stage as a temporary, special space created and inhabited only for public appearances was dissolved.

Embodying the man-machine concept included being mostly motionless on stage, to mark them apart from standard rock acts: ‘Our rather static performance is necessary for emphasizing the robotic aspect of our music.’49 However, as part of Kraftwerk’s calculated efforts to subvert established boundaries, even their own, during the playful encore section the band members would leave their positions and come to the front of the stage holding everyday-gadgets-turned-Kraftwerk-gear, such as a Bee Gees-themed keyboard from Mattel, a drum trigger pad or a Stylophone. They would often use this opportunity to make direct contact with the audience, allowing people in the front row to initiate the sounds themselves.

‘Kraftwerk made a performance out of their working environment, and they did so at a time when the working world was itself beginning to change.’50 Kraftwerk not only proclaimed themselves ‘music workers’, they also brought their mobile workplace with them, as it were, allowing the audience to watch them operate their machines, in pretty much the same way as people today bring their laptops to work in cafés and other public spaces.

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