The screen opened into a fast-moving motorway and the crowd became the passengers inside the car, staring past the rear-view mirror into the urban landscape ahead. Then the screen melted into a planetary landscape as they progressed into the Autobahn album with psychedelic skies, lunar landscapes and musical scores rising out of the skies before melting into the crowd.
The Düsseldorf band bust the parameters of "krautrock" in the 1970s and have long since been recognised as the godfathers of pop music, who have been seminal influences on hip-hop, house and drum & bass, as well as the electro genre.
As they made their way through Autobahn, from its theme of night moving into day, house, techno and rave beats were clearly discernible, alongside a slightly dated, tinny "fairground" sound at times.
The crowd-pleasing numbers came later in the evening, after the serious business of Autobahn was over. "The Model" – their catchy, most successful UK single – was followed by "The Man-Machine" and its Bauhaus-style graphics, "Neon Lights", and then "Tour de France", with black-and-white retro images of competitive cyclists.
The band formed out of post-war urbanisation and all the digitisation that came subsequently.
Now, their vision appeared both nostalgic and contemporary. Their animations of a mechanised world was like seeing a futuristic vision rising out of the past. It worked somehow, and represented a seminal moment in musical and cultural history that still resonates. Kraftwerk won widespread praise for their eight-day "catalogue" retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. From this first performance it seems as if their success will be repeated at Tate Modern, where they will run through the same eight studio albums.
A second performance, Radio-Activity, follows tonight.
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