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.
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.
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