Kraftwerk, Academy, Glasgow

Automata for the people

We may have Adolf Hitler to thank for Kraftwerk. There's a theory that runs as follows. For young men in post-war West Germany, nostalgia was not an option. Looking backwards was unconscionable. The horrors of the recent past enforced an aesthetic tabula rasa and, just as the glistening modern edifices which rose from the RAF-incinerated ashes of Dresden and (Kraftwerk's native) Düsseldorf were Germany's physical reconstruction, so the forward-thrusting futurism of Kraftwerk was its artistic reconstruction. Thus, in the early 1970s, while America was wallowing in Lynyrd Skynyrd, and England in The Faces, Germany gave the world Kraftwerk, as a kind of cultural deal-balancer for the Marshall Plan, showing the world a whole new way of being modern.

So modern, in fact, that the world - rather embarrassingly - still hasn't caught up (unless you consider the Xerox machine replication of the Electroclashers to be "catching up"). Kraftwerk - or Patchwerk, as my taxi driver calls them - are arguably the most influential band of all time, and unquestionably directly sowed the seeds for house music and every other form of electronic dance (a connection which is emphasised by a housed-up "Pocket Calculator", and the cascading pills which appear during "Vitamin").

Britain is kept waiting for its first Kraftwerk show in five years, and its first Kraftwerk tour in 10. Tonight's show, it transpires, nearly didn't happen at all. A local "ned" (Glaswegian for ne'erdowell) broke into the Academy in the afternoon and stole a carrier bag containing some money, some knickers, and Kraftwerk's hard drive. The promoter, who thought he knew exactly who the culprit was, kicked down his door and heroically sat on him until the police arrived.

Kraftwerk deprived of their equipment is, after all, the stuff of bad stand-up comedy. And it is difficult to explain precisely why seeing four middle-aged men in suits, who look like benign science teachers (which is, in many ways, what they are), doing little besides standing bolt upright behind computers, is so utterly thrilling. Indeed, why are we here? For one thing, while Kraftwerk themselves may not be much to look at - black suits, red shirts, black ties, grey hair or no hair at all - the back-projected visuals are stunning, a complementary commentary on the music.

The first words on the screen are "MENSCH" and "MACHINE", and this interface between the human and the hi-tech, the state of existing as a "semi-human being", has always fascinated Kraftwerk. This is why "Tour De France" is perhaps their ultimate song: the cycling endurance test being all about a synergy between flesh and steel.

Some of the vintage footage looks distinctly, shall we say, 1940s (possibly even Riefenstahl), and they do fetishise the Volkswagen during "Autobahn". But to accuse Kraftwerk of Nazi sympathies (which occasionally happens) is to miss the point, and overlook the fact that the band's decision to use the English language more frequently than their native tongue was surely a symbolic severance between themselves and their nation's past.

There's a collective "Oh my God!" as Florian Schneider switches off his vocoder and actually sings (yes, they do "The Model"), as though it's almost a surprise to be reminded that there are living, breathing mortals behind these sounds. But for all its apparent precision, inhumanity and coldness, this is music which fires the imagination.

And they're not averse to a bit of showbiz, in their own dry way: the teasing slow chords which introduce "Tour De France", the chug-chug of a stalled engine which heralds "Autobahn", the political statement before "Radio-Activity" ("Sellafield Two will release the same amount of radioactivity into the environment as Chernobyl every four and a half years"), the famous cyborg torsos who deputise for the quartet during the second encore ("The Robots"), and the Tron suits they don for the third. Nor are they without humour, after a fashion: "From station to station/ Back to Dusseldorf City/ Meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie..." In a sense, despite all appearances, Kraftwerk are essentially a rock'n'roll band. And their "unrequited futurism" is all the more poignant because the utopia which they envisaged (and still envisage), the Brave New World for which they were so impatient (albeit politely), has turned out to be a world of mediaevalists bombing the Spanish rush hour, and leaders without the shame or honour to resign when they've lied to the public.

I don't know how we get to where Kraftwerk want us to go, but I want to go with them.

s.price@independent.co.uk