The Man Machine in the West Country: When Yeovil folk opened for Kraftwerk
The little Somerset town of Yeovil probably isn’t the first locale one thinks Kraftwerk’s seminal electronic act would have ever reached.
To be fair, the Johnson Hall venue had attracted some fairly big names by the time Düsseldorf’s finest graced the stage in September 1975. Better known as the Octagon Theatre today, the old civic hall-come-rock and pop promenade on Hendford Hill had hosted the likes of Dr Feelgood, Judas Priest, Hawkwind, Thin Lizzy, and Motörhead barely a year after the performance spot had opened. But a dedicated all-synthesiser and electronic drums line-up hadn’t struck Yeovil yet.
Indeed, neither much of the world. Since their founding in 1970, co-founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider were a prolific experimental live band in true Krautrock fashion, playing a rawer and slapdash conjuring of noisey flute jams and boasting future Neu! members Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother. Across three albums that still haven’t seen an official reissue, Kraftwerk began to realise their electronic avant-pop in earnest with the acquisition of the Minimoog, releasing to the world 1974’s landmark Autobahn album and the first significant chapter of their evolving gesamtkunstwerk art project.
However, they remained a tough sell to much of the music press still enamoured with the day’s double-denimed classic rock. Along with the cropped hair and tailored insurance clerk suits, a total aversion to anything resembling America’s bluesy foundations and the alien set-up of synths and electronic gear too cold for Melody Maker, opining at the time to “keep the robots out of music” and lambasting their “spineless, emotionless sound”.
Yet, with the financial help of the Phonogram Inc label, Kraftwerk soldiered on with their innovative new sound, undertaking a prominent tour across North America, then on to the UK for the first time. The Autobahn Tour wasn’t without problems, however. While the classic line-up was now settled with Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos’ recruitment, the quartet were playing to a lot of half-empty concert halls, with some dates even cancelling due to poor ticket sales. Then there was the temperament of the hardware. As well as encountering problems with the regional mains voltages, the Minimoog and ARP Odyssey required daily tuning, with the stage lights enough to send the synths out of whack.
Through hostile press and lightly attended sets, Kraftwerk managed 17 dates across the UK, plus a secret show at London’s Festival Hall on September 1st, 1975, to kick things off. Joining them as support for the majority of the tour was the unlikely solo acoustic of South West folk singer, AJ Webber.
Webber was no country small fry. Born in Bristol, she’d already played with Paul Simon and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young over in the States, then decamped to London as a Marquee Club regular and ended up opening for both Frank Zappa and the Eagles. Still, hailing from the West Country, Webber offered the curious Yeovil music fans a folk introduction as the anticipation for Germany’s strange new avant-pop band in a seemingly confounding pairing.
“They weren’t the easiest [people] to talk to, probably due to the language barrier,” she told The Quietus in 2013. “But they were polite and reasonably welcoming. They drew a certain ‘following’! We warmed to each other as the tour went on.”
It made practical sense, Webber only needing her one guitar-making set-up between sets, easy enough. But fundamentally, in a manner likely not picked up consciously by the Yeovil fans, Hütter described Kraftwerk’s Germanic soundtracks as “industrielle volksmusik”, industrial folk music reflecting the country’s beckoning romantic Mitteleuropa and the enthusiastic new sonic language the band were embracing to forge their national identity in the pop world.
Electronic music was still in its genesis back in 1975, yet to fully realise its trajectory, conventions, and ultimate blueprint toward the teeming constellations of genres and movements it would spark. As far as the audience at Johnson Hall was concerned, Kraftwerk could have been folk as much as anything else, but even to the room’s naysayers, no one could have doubted they were witnessing the future.
