In general, seemed like they had fun playing Pocket Calculator, especially with how Florian and Ralf let the up-close audience have a quick turn at playing their instruments. Plus Karl is smiling quite a bit too, but I think it could be because he's seen the camera on stage and either can't keep in character knowing he's going to have his dancing seen by people on TV or because he was just having so much fun.
I read in Karl's book that Florian came up with the idea for Pocket Calculator when he brought a bag of toy instruments to the studio one day. It's the one song where he was clearly having fun in concerts. Seems he had a nice sense of humour. I can think of a couple of videos where Florian was goofing around. His mad scientist smile on BBC's Tomorrow's World in 1975. He gave bunny ears to the moderator at Discoring in 1981. He did silly air guitar poses during Pocket Calculator in New York in 1998. The audience loved it. He slowed down the robovox during Autobahn in Paris 2002 until Fritz next to him started laughing... Florian's Silverstar Club 1988 interview is also entertaining. He demonstrated the TI Language Translator he used in 1981 to do the computer voices on Numbers etc. He was cool and unique. It's inspiring. RIP Florian
Saw these guys in Sydney 1981, next 2003 at Big Day Out Concert in Sydney, again 2013 Sydney Opera House 3D concert, looking forward to seeing these guys in Brisbane this year, looooooove their music
Such a shame they abandoned this fantastic setup for laptops and hiding behind consoles that show nothing. When the curtains opened the audience gasped. And rightly so.
While I agree with you, it's understandable really; one of the synths they used back in the day (the EMS Synthi-A) runs around $21,000 at a minimum today and most of the stuff they used on this tour isn't cheap either, whereas digital is slightly less of a pain in the ass to deal with in some cases, so it's either pack up a bunch of synths that cost insane amounts of money and hope they don't get broken, stolen, or die onstage, or upgrade with the times out of pragmatism.
@@RampinUp46 not that they actually fiddled with the equipment in old Kling Klang while on stage. Only very few times, and in the dark, with little torches. Much of the equipment seemed to be there just for show, like the EMS vocoder 5000. And the big sequencer on the left behind Hütter was only functioning during The Robots.
I feel there were certain rhythmic irregularities in Kraftwerk's concerts that made the music so exciting to me. A big part of this was manually played percussion. In the 70s, in 1981 and from 1990 to 1992 they had live percussion on many tracks and it created an exciting, slightly irregular rhyhtm to the music that was missing in later concerts. The 2nd big change came in 2002. The feel of the music changed drastically when they abandoned hardware synths. Now every note is set in stone with perfect computerised precision, and let's be honest, it is boring. I understand why they do it, it made playing concerts much easier to no longer have to carry their huge Kling Klang Studio around with them. But musically it's a downgrade in many ways. Listening to earlier concerts I find myself hooked to the rhythms in a way that is no longer possible with the laptops.
@@_ifstcuvifugig Since Kraftwerk influenced Africa Bambatta with the haunting, futuristic apocalyptic rhythms and break dancers in the US danced to Kraftwerk at the time, Kraftwerk was considered to be part of the instrumental hip hop genre like this song - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oXPpng1dQag.html.
i have to disagree mate, rap payed homage to kraftwerk in its early days, and it evolved and morphed as every genre does. admittedly i’m a bigger fan of kraftwerk than i am of rap but things change and that’s cool! kraftwerk were and always will be the godfathers of modern music.
