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XXXKRAFTWERK SPECIAL REPORT KRAFTWERK AT THE TOUR DE FRANCE SPECIAL REPORT KRAFTWERK AT THE TOUR DE FRANCE KRAFTWERK Last month, KRAFTWERK played ‘Tour De France’ live at the opening stage of the world’s most famous cycle race – the first time they’ve done so in the 30 years since the track was recorded. As their legion of fans find themselves asking about almost everything the band do, “What took them so flipping long?” Words: JOOLS STONE Pictures: CHRIS P KING As a concept, Kraftwerk performing their ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ album in its entirety at the opening stage of the Tour de France itself sounds so mind-bogglingly obvious you wonder why it’s taken them so long to do it. Ralf Hütter and his associates played Manchester’s Velodrome back in 2009, but amazingly this is the first time that Kraftwerk have made an official live appearance at the world’s premier pro cycling event. Tonight, they will perform one of their 3-D audio-visual extravaganzas as part of the Tour’s Grand Départ celebrations at Utrecht’s Tivoli Vredenburg, the Dutch city’s new, five-storied, angular wedge of a concert hall. The only thing that could make it more conceptually perfect was if they’d managed to get the race to start on their home turf of Düsseldorf instead of here in the Netherlands. Like most things in Kraftwerk lore, the three-decade journey to get here has been as arduous as the climb up Mont Ventoux. The song ‘Tour De France’, which was originally intended for inclusion on the abandoned ‘Techno Pop’ album, has long served as an unofficial jingle to the famous cycle race. It pays a serene tribute to the event’s legendary highs and lows – enduring a flat tyre, regrouping with your peloton mates, finishing on the Champs- Élysées – and marked something of a departure from the group’s previous harder edged work, with its funky slap-bass and dreamy vibraphone scales, augmented by sampling the percussive rasp of Florian Schneider’s bike chain. Some 20 years later, in 2003, in another of the band’s bewilderingly protracted manoeuvres, the ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ album was released to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Tour. Due to their extreme perfectionism, however, it didn’t reach the shelves until weeks after the race itself had wrapped. As a record, ‘Tour De France Soundtracks’ is perhaps best approached as precisely that, a suitably hypnotic soundtrack to an intensive cycling workout rather than a compelling body of original material. When it was released, after a 17-year hiatus in the Kraftwerk catalogue, a measure of disappointment seemed inevitable. In the interim, the acid house revolution had happened and dance music had promptly exploded and splintered into hundreds of different sub-genres, many of which were quickly absorbed XXXKRAFTWERK into the mainstream. As a result, ‘Tour De France For Ralf, cycling and music are perfect bedfellows. Soundtracks’ sometimes sounds more like a diluted by- “Cycling is like music,” he told The Guardian’s John Harris product of the band’s own inspiration than the original in 2009. “It is always forward. It is free, it is outside, it source from which so many burbling electro delights first is the weather, it is the planet, it is energy. Cycling has sprung. parallels with certain aspects of music.” Even a major accident while crossing a dam on the Rhine in 1983 On the one hand, the title track is one of the most did little to dampen his ardour for the sport. Despite perfectly realised pop songs Kraftwerk ever produced fracturing his skull and ending up in a coma, Ralf was (and their biggest UK hit since ‘The Model’, charting keen to play down the impact: “It didn’t affect me,” he twice). On the other, it’s a precursor of things to come – told Harris. “I got a new head and I’m fine… I just forgot Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider’s mounting obsession my helmet and I was in hospital for three or four days.” with the saddle over the studio. According to Wolfgang Flür’s lively memoir, ‘I Was A Robot’, their passion for Ralf’s cycling regime is said to be a little calmer these the sport over-rode their passion for music, slowing the days. He apparently still manages to clock up “a couple creative momentum and causing an irredeemable rift in of thousand kilometres a year”, though. the group’s classic line-up. It’s fair to say that Kraftwerk have coasted some in Ralf and Florian took up serious cycling in 1978, but their the last few decades, gliding downhill with their hands obsession piqued after the ‘Computer World’ tour of 1981. behind their heads. We have grown accustomed to glacial The pair would take the night shift at their Kling Klang intervals between albums, but at least they have stepped studio, abandoning it by day to embark on epic workouts, up their performance profile in recent years, graduating cycling up to 200km a day, and even jumping off the from occasional festival appearances to full tours. For UK tour bus early so they could complete the journey to a fans, this culminated in the frenzy that was their 2013 venue by bike. Wolfgang Flür recalls them drooling over Tate Gallery residency playing Der Katalog, each of their cycling equipment catalogues in the studio and recounts eight classic studio albums presented in full, which sold how they would commission specially tailored cycling out faster than a pumped up Lance Armstrong taking the suits. He says they treated bicycle tyres with the sort of downhill stretch of La Mongie. reverence normally reserved for vintage wines, fussing over their precise storage conditions. On the broiling streets of Utrecht, however, there’s not synergy of man and machine moving forward in constant much evidence of Kraftwerk mania, mainly because motion,” he replies. today the city is as obsessed with competitive cycling as Team Hütter is. Utrecht has been transformed for There is no support act and the red curtain rises at 8pm le Grand Départ – from a smaller, more serene version sharp, revealing our robot rulers already in place behind of nearby Amsterdam to something akin to Rio on the their neon-trimmed consoles. There’s no time for even a Canal. cursory wave to the crowd as the speakers begin to belch out a repeated pattern of distorted, excitably escalated There are thousands of cycling fans lining the race route, words – “eins, zwei, drei” – before that colossal beat some getting stuck into boozy makeshift picnics, others bounces into play. scaling lamp posts, fences and poster towers for prime views. A caravan of vehicles bizarrely shaped like giant Choosing ‘Numbers’ to open tonight’s set demonstrates McCain oven chips and Vittel water bottles zip past at Ralf Hütter’s confidence in the Kraftwerk legacy. breakneck speeds, flinging out promotional merchandise The screen visuals stick with a flickering stream of and water cannoning the grateful crowd. Every shop in huge, calculator green, dot matrix numerals, but you the city sports some sort of two-wheeled window display can practically see the light bulb pinging over Afrika and even the dog statue in the Lepelenburg Park is Bambaataa’s head at a South Bronx block party far, wrapped in a yellow jersey. far away in both place and time. ‘Numbers’ segues effortlessly into a beefed up, dark and sinister incarnation Inside the Tivoli Vredenburg, of course, it’s a very of ‘Computer World’, with its prophesy of shadowy different story. Hilde and Jan have travelled from governmental and uber-corporations who “control the Brussels, driving here straight after work. “I really hope data memory”. they play ‘Autobahn’ tonight – all 26 minutes of it,” says Hilde. “I expect we’ll hear ‘Tour De France’ too,” adds While it is hard to see exactly what the band are doing Jan. “Well, there may be a small riot if we don’t!” Greg behind their identical consoles, their tunnel vision from Canada has been a fan since ‘The Man-Machine’, expressions speak volumes and there are a few moments but he didn’t realise the Tour de France charabanc was when their improvisational roots – don’t forget that Ralf in town until he arrived. I ask him why Kraftwerk and and Florian first met on an improvised music course at cycling seem so entwined. “I think it’s the ultimate Düsseldorf ’s Conservatory – become evident in subtle XXXKRAFTWERK ways. Ralf looks impressively trim, if not quite perfectly seems to foreshadow the quirky ‘Elektro Kardiogramm’, at ease in his black lycra ‘Tron’ bodysuit. At times, he which comes a little later, with a cruel irony. Surely a seems to resemble an older version of Future Islands’ man of Ralf’s age is all too familiar with this particular Samuel T Herring, furrowing his brow at the young medical process, intense fitness regime notwithstanding. whippersnapper’s more animated stage smarts. The rest of the group are decked out identically, of course. You ‘Vitamin’, one of the more distinctive tracks from ‘Tour don’t notice them much, but I think that’s the point. De France Soundtracks’, sounds like a worried Pacman ghost rattling about an abandoned washing machine Something that rarely gets explored in discussions factory and we’re treated to a vivid stream of images, as of Kraftwerk’s music is the pervasive sense of hundreds of multi-coloured tablets slowly cascade from melancholy many of their best tracks are steeped in. the rafters. A sly nod to our straight-laced übermensch’s Where ‘Computer Love’ has always sounded sweet role in fostering house music and its attendant and optimistic on record, tonight it comes across as associations with pharmaceuticals, perhaps? ‘Chrono’ heartbreakingly lonely, especially since a seemingly rather meanwhile chugs by with all the excitement of a wet vulnerable Ralf effectively serenades a young, handsome weekend circling the Redditch ring road and ‘La Forme’ vision of himself on the video screen.

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