Kraftwerk review – after more than half a century of techno supremacy, they still sound like the future | Kraftwerk

Ffifty-five years ago this month, Kraftwerk released Computer World, an album to a world that had yet to be built. Tonight in Belfast, Ralf Hütter and his friends open with three songs from it: Numbers, the title track, Computer World 2 – electro-popping electro that the next few decades of music tried to contain.

The first few seconds of Numbara are surprisingly catchy: a very long familiar pause, then a steady, then non-relenting all-nighter. 55 years after the band’s inception, the machine still needs its man. Hütter, 79 years old and the last member since Florian Schneider left in 2008, is more interesting than the legend says – a hopping left leg that shows what a face can’t do – feeding music into a system he created before most people knew what a synthesizer was. Light from below, Henning Schmitz, Falk Grieffenhagen and Georg Bongartz surround him on the lectern-like metal, like pre-internet polygons with running figures behind them.

The best times are without a program. The breakdown of the Autobahn has Hütter warping arpeggios in real time, the synths disappearing like water. Neon Lights dissolves into an excellent coda; Hütter’s vocals are brilliant, his fresh riffs only adding to the song’s power.

Then comes the only words that speak throughout the night, beyond a different “Auf wiedersehen”: a kind tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died three years ago: “Since 1981 with our first concert in Tokyo we have been friends forever,” he says. He offers a low-key version of Mr Lawrence’s Merry Christmas in which the soft notes begin Sakamoto’s piano, which he folds into Radioactivity.

The seated crowd is polite but waiting for something else until the Tour de France medley ends: Étape 3 in particular, a repetition of the limited technicality that cannot be seen of the cycling champions. Trans-Europe Express is where the room creates the future. The Robots return for an encore, reformed and skipping hats that owe more to Chicago than Düsseldorf. These incredibly fast-paced songs beg for space to move. Don’t imitate. Tonight, the Rosetta Stone for new wave, techno, electro, industrial, house and everything after that was read aloud, as emphatically as ever, by Kraftwerk themselves.