Glasgow has always had a soft spot for a good drum machine. So when Kraftwerk announced they'd be bringing their Multimedia Tour to the Royal Concert Hall on Monday 25 May, the city's electronic music faithful did what they always do: queued up, cleared the diary, and started arguing about which album is best.
The German pioneers — fronted, as ever, by founder Ralf Hütter — touch down in Glasgow as part of their first UK and Ireland tour since 2017. It's a 15-date run that opened in Dublin on 17 May and ends at Edinburgh's Playhouse on 9 June, taking in Belfast, Manchester, London's Royal Albert Hall and a clutch of grand old British theatres along the way.
A city wired for the beat
Kraftwerk's fingerprints are all over Glasgow's musical DNA. The clean, mechanical pulse of Trans Europe Express and Computer World fed directly into the techno that powered the city's club scene through the late eighties and nineties — and arguably never left.
You can hear it in the long, hypnotic sets that made Slam internationally famous, in the genre-bending Sunday nights Optimo (Espacio) ran at the Sub Club from 1997 to 2010, and in the steady stream of producers Glasgow has exported to dancefloors from Berlin to Detroit. The Sub Club itself, now in its 38th year, remains one of the oldest underground electronic clubs in the world — a continuity unimaginable without the path Kraftwerk laid down in Düsseldorf half a century ago.
For a generation of Glaswegian DJs, Kraftwerk weren't a band so much as a starter pack. Numbers, Tour de France, The Robots — these were the records that made you realise a synthesiser could be a rhythm section, a lead singer and an entire worldview at the same time.
What to expect on the night
The Multimedia Tour, which has travelled the world in various forms since it premiered at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2012, is described by the band as "part performance, part digital installation". In practice that means four men in matching suits at consoles, a vast screen behind them, and a pair of 3D glasses on every seat.
The visuals — synchronised, frame-perfect, occasionally laugh-out-loud playful — pull from the band's entire back catalogue: motorways unspooling for Autobahn, abstract cyclists looping through Tour de France, the famous tumbling numerals of Numbers. Earlier this year their Coachella set was widely cited as one of the festival's standout moments — no mean feat when you're up against acts a third of your age.
It is, in short, not a nostalgia gig. The compositions may be 40-plus years old, but the show feels engineered for now.
The practical bit
Kraftwerk – Multimedia Tour 2026
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 2 Killermont Street, G2 3NW
Monday 25 May 2026, doors 7pm
Tickets are on sale now via Live Nation, See Tickets and Eventim, with prices ranging from around £51 to £183 depending on where you sit. Availability is tight — this is the only seated Glasgow date on the tour, and there's no overflow show — so anyone who's been quietly meaning to get round to it would do well to stop quietly meaning to.
Bring the 3D glasses they hand you. Bring earplugs if you value your hearing. And maybe, on the way out, raise a quiet glass to the four men from Düsseldorf who taught half the city how to dance.
