Kraftwerk on stage, then and now

Just came across the above pictures of late ’70s live Kraftwerk. As with their music, they’ve honed, but not radically rejigged their visual presentation.

Black and white stills have been replaced by a mixture of film and computer graphics; gone are the names rendered in neon light that stood at the feet of each performer; laptops replace the various tapes and small instruments of yore. But the four men are still ranged in a shallow semi-circle before a large screen. Those neon lights are surely housed in the Kling Klang studio somewhere, though perhaps Karl Bartos’s was consigned to recycling long ago.