Glasgow’s love affair with the septuagenarian renaissance continues tonight as Kraftwerk visit the Royal Concert Hall after a decade’s hiatus. Following on from Martin O’Neill’s recent double-winning heroics, 79-year-old Ralf Hütter plugs Düsseldorf’s famed techno four-piece into the city’s matrix, wrestling control away from AI slop and putting LLM music back in its box.

Billed as the Multimedia Tour, those iconic lecterns sit in front of a giant video wall as caustic yellow Tetris glyphs tease the band’s entrance, a nod to the 50th anniversary reissue of album Radio-Activity. What follows is two hours of relentless exposure to the fundamental charged particles of electronic music, with the audience begging for a full dose. Taking their cue from Jeff Bridges’ light-up suit in Tron, the band blur the boundaries of immersive performance. Opening with a long stem from Computer World, that album’s futuristic synth figures seem to envelop the band within the staging, yellow and green neon pulsing in, around and through the performance space. It’s a hypnotic starting point, yet Kraftwerk are merely warming their batteries.

‘Home Computer’ boots the room up fully, dropping the kind of motorik beats that set pulses racing from Heidelberg to The Haçienda, pushing the Concert Hall’s top-notch sound system to the edge of its operational limits. ‘Tango’, the obscure 90s techno workout, cranks the BPM further, posing the question: should Hi-NRG music be absorbed in a sedentary position? Judging by the patrons nearby, the answer is resoundingly no, with people undulating in their seats as though they’ve been hooked up to the national grid.

Kraftwerk’s current line-up employs two live video technicians (Falk Grieffenhagen and Georg Bongartz) who subtly tap and prod at their consoles, creating startling visual effects that match the music with cine-film newsreels or blinding stabs of electric waveforms. Industrial typeface and a De Stijl-inspired palette of red, black and white accompany the digital bleeps and Hütter’s vocoder vocals on ‘The Man Machine’, while angular Bauhaus geometries invade grainy archive footage in a pulsing Tour De France section.

Classics such as ‘The Model’ feel as fresh and essential today as they ever have and it’s startling how utterly contemporary Kraftwerk’s sound still feels. Not content with inspiring everyone from The Chemical Brothers to DJ Shadow and Aphex Twin, it’s obvious Hütter is locked into every trend in the current electronic landscape. The closing section of ‘Boing Boom Tschak’/’Musique Non Stop’ could be dropped into a peak-time set at Berghain tomorrow and the sweat would be dripping from the ceiling. Encoring with a head-wobbling version of ‘The Robots’ reinforces the cast-iron truth: music is a human endeavour. Machines are a tool to enhance our creativity into genius. And Kraftwerk do that better than anyone.

Kraftwerk reviewed at Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow.

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