Classic Album Review: Kraftwerk - Soest Live (2020)

Craig Stephen’s been on a Kraftwerk trip, discovering a hugely significant but largely unlistenable gem from deep within the German band’s archives. Soest Live was a long celebrated YouTube clip, but in 2020, 50 years after the fact, the rudimentary recording got the full vinyl treatment …

Following Kraftwerk’s stunning gig in Wellington late last month – which you can read about here – it seems apt to delve into a live album recorded more than half a century ago.

It’s only relatively recently that the show has been rediscovered showing the band at a primitive point in their existence.

A Kraftwerk show in 2023 is of four men performing behind synthesizers with computer-generated images and videos being shown on large screens behind them. Other than sole survivor Ralf Hutter the performers have changed often over the decades.

In November 1970, however, it was a vastly different Kraftwerk that performed at a cramped venue in the town of Soest in Germany’s northern industrial heartland as part of the local Winter Festival. The band’s line-up consisted of Hutter, Florian Schneider-Esleban (as he was then known), and Klaus Dinger, who would later form Neu! Hutter played organ and tubon, Dinger the drums and Schneider-Esleban flute, violin and vibraphone. Everything then was radically different from what the band would evolve into within a few years.

 Kraftwerk had only formed that year and had released their eponymous album a few months before this gig. All four tracks from that album were played this evening, and no other tracks made it onto the setlist.

As it was part of a festival, the performance was captured on camera and shown on regional TV station WDR-TV. It is worth investigating on YouTube especially to see the somewhat unusual layout of the venue (clip below). The band was crammed into a corner as the almost entirely student/youth audience sat awkwardly or stood passively facing the stage. A large screen is to the right of the band and in front of that two old-style (ie. massive) standing cameras pan in on the audience. 

The gig begins with ‘Vom Himmel Hoch’ which starts slowly and seems to be an attempt to replicate the sound of VW car trying to start up on a cold winter’s morning while a swarm of bees fight to get out. Eventually, the car starts and after eight minutes faces in the crowd that were showing bemusement and confusion suddenly become interested. Some even clap along to the rhythm of the beat. Someone in the crowd pulls out a whistle and blows it incessantly. English pop and Californian rock this is not.

After 16 minutes of this, they flow into ‘Ruckzuck’ which sees Schneider-Esleban let loose with his flute a la hippie rock band Jethro Tull. Dinger, who was positively restrained for much of the opening track, is now in his element, doing his finest Keith Moon impression.

‘Stratovarius’ is rockier, a little like one of the proto-metal bands that had surfaced a couple of years earlier. It is purely experimental, lacking in any melody at all, basically an amalgam of unsynchronised sounds. A few minutes in, it begins to truly get weird with Florian playing his violin in a manner that would have given a music teacher a cardiac arrest.

The final track, ‘Megahertz’, is most akin to what Kraftwerk would become a few years later with Hutter’s organ-playing and Florian’s violin combining to create that renowned esoteric and magical sound.

This performance is a period piece that provides little insight into the band that would release albums such as Autobahn and Trans Europe Express. But it certainly also parades the immense talents and creative minds of Hutter and Schneider-Esleban. Once they became a quartet with Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur, they became a notable exponent of electro-pop that influenced multitudes of artists such as Bowie, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode.

Neither Kraftwerk nor Kraftwerk II (1972) have been officially re-issued and, if truth be told, if they were they wouldn’t captivate the current audience due to their raw and experimental nature. They would be of curious value only.

Nevertheless, Soest Live merits listening (and viewing) to see the massive developments the band would make in a relatively short time.

Album Review: Vorn - The Late Album (2023)

After reading the Will Not Fade blog’s far more timely review of this album I was quite taken by something the author noted in the review’s final paragraph about “imposter syndrome”. And although I’m not sure those words are the precise words I’d have used, I got the point, and I could relate to the dilemma.

It’s that sense you get when you feel ill-equipped to critique the work of someone you admire. That feeling of inadequacy, and the notion that whatever I wrote, no matter how honest, how insightful, or even how witty I thought I was being, Vorn Colgan - musician, wordsmith, funny-man - could have articulated it so much better himself.

It’s all there in his songs, and if you’ve ever had a chance to read Colgan’s own (far too irregular) written word musings on his Vornography website … well, it’s enough to make you want to permanently retire your own keyboard out of sheer frustration. Vorn Colgan knows how to create a little bit of magic out of words. And he seems to be able to do so without much effort at all.

Writing words is one thing. Turning them into a bunch of decent tunes is quite something else. What are we up to now? Album number eight? Album number nine? And still so little mainstream traction. Colgan probably couldn’t care less. His songs, after all, “are his children”. There to be shaped, nurtured, and loved, and like any parent, his starting point is just as likely to be “who bloody well cares what anyone else thinks? … I love these snotty-nosed little bastards”.

 The Late Album, of course, had long threatened to be a posthumous release, given Colgan’s recent brush with cancer. A fairly advanced stage of cancer too, if I have my facts correct. Yet all through that, I’ve seen him out and about. Conducting pub/music quizzes as the MC, playing music with a number of different “side-projects”, and as a one-man grinning machine - armed with a walking stick, no less - up on the dancefloor at Atomic retro nights at San Fran (venue). Not just surviving, but raging against death in ways I simply couldn’t imagine. There’s a lot more to admire than mere words.

Words are mostly what it is all about though. Words and music. There’s some pretty great words on The Late Album, all underpinned by the unique musical talents of Thomas Liggett (violin) and Nick Brown (drums, percussion) who also support Colgan - who does a lot of everything else - on vocals at various points. As Vorn, the band, this is a tight, well-honed trio, operating at something close to a peak. Although, to be fair, every new Vorn, the band, release across the past two decades has felt like a peak.

Death is, naturally enough, a prominent theme – the album opens with a track called ‘Fanfare For An Album That Beat Terminal Cancer’ and closes with ‘A Dying Man’s Curse Be Upon You’ … the opener being exactly what it says on the tin, a brief “fanfare”, while the closer veers into faux-country-prog-hybrid territory. Several listens in, I still can’t really make out the exact lyrics, but suspect its title rather gives the game away.

Between those two bookends we get various musical forms and a mix of genre, with the most common thread being that wicked sense of humour in the lyrics. I’d be lying profusely if I said that ‘Aging Hipster Blues’ and ‘Drug Friends’ didn’t, for my own sins, touch something of a raw nerve. I laughed and I cried a little, simultaneously.

Then there’s ‘Somebody Wrote A Prog Song About The Internet And It Is (Flame emoji)’ … where to even start with that little 6-minute-plus beastie? Sort of epic, a little bit Beatle-esque, with chunks of pretend Black Sabbath, just for laughs. There’s definitely something quite psychedelic about it, whatever the hell it’s supposed to be.

Suffice to say, without going through all of the individual highlights or trying to dissect each track, the two advance singles - odd timings and breakdowns notwithstanding - ‘No Arms, No Chocolate’ and the covertly catchy ‘A Safe Pair of Hands’ are perhaps the most pop-friendly tracks on the album.

All up, 13 tracks, a lot of hooks, a solid baroque feel - another Vorn staple - thanks largely to the presence of Liggett’s violin and other unusual instrumentation (um, a “banjolin”?), and more than the odd morsel of humour, it’s another worthy addition to Vorn’s ever-expanding musical legacy.

Just a note on that album cover: once you’ve seen it as The Latex Bum, it becomes impossible to unsee it. With thanks to the person who pointed that out … (I think).

You can pick up a copy of Vorn’s The Late Album here (Bandcamp)