Wistful Joy

Of all the current music I subject my kids to in the car, the group that the three of them are most enthusiastic about is Teleman. When I asked them why, they struggled to articulate their appeal at first; but then my daughter said it was the lead singer's voice and my oldest said he found their songs uplifting. The middle one grunted something unintelligible from behind a curtain of hair and we moved on.

It was an unfair question because it was one I had no concrete answer to myself; since I had first seen Teleman at the Green Man festival a few years ago, I had played their music a lot but, because some friends expressed ambivalence, I sometimes asked myself what it was I liked about them without ever coming to a conclusion. However, seeing them live again in Brighton this week provided me with some answers: the simplicity of the music - Pete Cattermoul and Hiro Amamiya's bouncing rhythms, Jonny Sanders' vintage synths, his brother's selective guitar - combined with clear but obscure lyrics delivered with Tom Sanders' yearning vocal, creates a naïve sound somewhere between the Velvet Underground's more playful moments and Kraftwerk's poppiest songs.

Perhaps it is this naivety that explains the youthful appeal. I took my eldest with me to Concorde 2 for his first proper indoor gig and when we bumped into a friend he commented that the venue seemed to be half-full of youngsters with a parent. He was exaggerating but, when I looked around, I realised he had a point. Teleman have got that teenagers-not-too-embarrassed-to-go-to-a-gig-with-their-parents market sown up.

With their third album - Family of Aliens - just released, the pick of the new songs were showcased. Cactus, Twisted Heart and Song For a Seagull, the latter obviously going down well in Brighton, all seemed immediately familiar but there was also room for favourites from the previous album, Brilliant Sanity. Tangerine and Fall In Time featured early on in the set and it was closed with the much called-for, Dusseldorf - "Düsseldorf looms in the cold grey light/I love everyone that I meet tonight."

The two encore tracks were both from the debut album, Breakfast. The delightful Christina ("Christina so good/She makes me go across town") perfectly demonstrated Teleman's gift for wistful joy and Not In Control, a hidden track on the album, shows off their ability to move effortlessly into the territory of motorik.

So I left the gig having realised that there is a lot more to Teleman than a sense of innocence and whimsy. Their songs make me think of the city: they are artful - the covers of all three albums are beautiful examples of geometric graphic design - and European and metropolitan and, to the ears of someone whose escape to the country has been soured by the Great British Brexit, that is balm to salve a wound right now. My son had a good time, too.

Into the Blue

Stephen Black, otherwise known as Sweet Baboo, tells a very complicated tale of the opening number of his set at the Prince Albert pub: it was originally called Wild Imagination and was the title track of the new album; but Moshi Moshi hated it so much they wanted it left off. So Sweet Baboo retitled another song Wild Imagination, but he is playing the original on tour just to spite the record company. I can’t remember the new title of the original song but it was about trying to persuade Black’s three-year-old son to leave the house more and embrace the outdoors. Are you following this?

This deadpan comic explanation is typical of Black’s between-songs ramblings as he tells us about the space bongo - “people have been going wild for the space bongo” - played by multi-instrumentalist Rob Jones and how the band have slimmed down from a six-piece to three since their last tour. To compensate, he says, they have crammed the stage with equipment; as well as the keyboards and guitars Black and Jones have, there is another Jones - Paul - surrounded by more keyboards than Kraftwerk had between them at the Brighton Centre last week. When things go wrong - as they do a few times - it is all dealt with with good-natured forebearence and a lightning quick catchphrase, "ten years in the biz".

There are some excellent tracks played from Wild Imagination that show the sophistication of the arrangements, the simplicity of the sentiments expressed and the emotion of Stephen Black’s voice. The beautiful Swallows, with its plaintive refrain of “Oh, won’t you come back to me?”, is contrasted with the funk of Pink Rainbow; and songs such as Wild Imagination (the newly titled one) and Badminton capture the bittersweet essence of the Sweet Baboo sound from the previous two albums.

There is a trio of songs from those albums: the glorious Swimming Wild and If I Died from 2013's Ships and the sublime Walking in the Rain from The Boombox Ballads, the track that first caught my ear when I saw Sweet Baboo at the Green Man festival in 2015. However, the stand-out song last night was Clear Blue Skies from the new album. Formless and abstract, it rolls along, swelling and falling, with shimmering and mournful guitars underpinning a lyric of hope and sorrow: "let's rise/ into clear blue skies/ far from home/ clear clear blue/ let's not worry about tomorrow".

Only Human

Gigs in big venues with prices to match are not where I usually find myself but, thanks to a spare ticket and the largesse of a good friend, yesterday evening I was in a very long queue to see Kraftwerk at the Brighton Centre. The anti-tout requirement for ID to verify named tickets, coupled with increased security searches in the current climate, meant the line snaked all the way to the rear of the venue; but it was a good-humoured queue and we ended up sharing bottles of Becks with a man from Hamburg and his grown-up kids. Very fitting.

A Kraftwerk performance is not an ordinary gig: seated in orderly rows, all wearing our 3D specs with faces raised towards the giant backdrop screen that dwarfs the band, when I glanced back we looked like a congregation come to worship. Calling Kraftwerk a ‘band’ hardly seems appropriate: arranged in a line across the front of the stage, the German quartet resemble operatives on a production line. And on the far left is the foreman, the septuagenarian Ralf Hutter, the only remaining original member since Florian Schneider stood down in 2008.

Having never seen Kraftwerk perform before, it was thrilling to experience those unique sounds in a live setting: the sub-bass was like a punch in the solar plexus and those familiar and much-sampled motifs from Trans Europe Express, Numbers and others were a joy to hear. I was delighted that all bar one of the tracks from 1978’s The Man-Machine LP were played: the title track, Spacelab, The Model, the beautifully evocative Neon Lights and The Robots make this, in my view, Kraftwerk’s outstanding album. Others will disagree, I am sure: there was a lot of warmth in the room for the quintet of tracks from 1981’s Computer World, if that doesn’t sound too oxymoronic, and Autobahn and Tour De France were greeted with cheers.

The 3D graphics were superb and when the curtain reopened for the first encore, The Robots, the band had been replaced by animatronic doppelgangers. Ralf’s, obstinately not programmed in the same way as the other three, stood motionless for the most part and only came to life sporadically to throw some limited shapes. When the curtain failed to close at the end of the track, we were treated to the sight of the showroom dummies being manually removed from the stage. It was a timely reminder that, for all Kraftwerk's automative imagery, they are only human and there are people behind this peerless music.