Forty-five years ago this month, Kraftwerk released Computer World, an album addressed to a world that hadn’t been built yet. Tonight in Belfast, Ralf Hütter and his bandmates open with three songs from it: Numbers, the title track, Computer World 2 – body-popping electro that the next few decades of music tried to live up to.
The opening seconds of Numbers catch oddly: a familiar pause stretching too long, then steadied, then not another slip all night. Fifty-five years since the band formed, the machines still need their man. Hütter, 79 and the last original member since Florian Schneider’s departure in 2008, is more animated than legend has it – a bobbing left leg betraying what the face won’t – feeding melodies into a system he built before most of pop knew what a synthesiser was. Lit from below, Henning Schmitz, Falk Grieffenhagen and Georg Bongartz flank him at lectern-like consoles, as pre-internet polygons and cascading numerals tower behind them.
The best moments are off-program. Autobahn’s breakdown has Hütter warping arpeggios in real time, synths spilling like water. Neon Lights dissolves into an exquisite improvised coda; Hütter’s voice is in remarkable shape, its new fractures only adding to the song’s gravity.
Then come the only words he speaks all night, beyond a parting “Auf wiedersehen”: a tender tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died three years ago: “Since 1981 and our very first concert in Tokyo we have been friends for ever,” he says. They offer a low-lit rendering of his Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence in which soft synth pads cradle Sakamoto’s immortal piano motif, which they fold into Radioactivity.
The seated crowd is reverent but holding something back until the Tour de France medley undoes it: Étape 3 in particular, iterative minimal-techno supremacy locked to footage of cycling’s greats. Trans-Europe Express is where the room tips forward. The Robots returns for the encore, retrofitted with skipping hi-hats that owe more to Chicago than Düsseldorf. Music this immaculately propulsive asks for room to move. No matter. Tonight, the Rosetta Stone for new wave, techno, electro, industrial, house and everything after was read aloud, as emphatic as ever, by Kraftwerk themselves.