Kraftwerk, The Man-Machine, Tate Modern, review Conforming to the average, audience demographic of middle-aged men in black T-shirts, a Kraftwerk fan to my left raised his arms like a Thunderbirds puppet. It was as though the mournful, electronic pulse of the music was pulling his strings, albeit in a rather wobbly, retro fashion. Then, suddenly, he appeared to experience an irresistible surge of power, pitching his bowling ball stomach and bushy black beard in opposite directions as his hips twitched into manic motion. Filing into Tate Modern's blacked-out Turbine Hall, clutching our album note handouts, 3-D glasses and black floor cushions, I'd wondered if we'd all remain seated, nodding like earnest students at a late night seminar while the pioneering, German electropoppers guided us through their place in the culture, accompanied by a 3-D slideshow: here's what we learned from the Beach Boys, here's where we invented modern pop music, here's the one Coldplay sampled etc. But, for the fourth night of their retrospective residency, they were playing their 1978 album, The Man-Machine: their most clubbable record and the one featuring their biggest UK hit, The Model. I suspect most people danced at some point. The weird thing was how random the individual bursts of activity were. Perhaps the peripheral vision-blocking 3-D specs and focus on the spectacular effects were responsible. But looking around the hall, I felt as if I were waiting for the cast of a vintage sci-fi movie to be struck by a sudden space virus. The visuals are, as everybody has now said, amazing, if you want to feel as if you've fallen into an old school computer game, that is. It's hypnotic and dryly, Teutonically witty, watching those Volkswagon and Mercedes hubcaps spin to the vocodered trance of Autobahn. There's a delight in the pop art simplicity of the quavers floating out of the sketched car stereo and into the crowd. But the self-consciously retro graphics anchored them unnecessarily in time, and in geekery. It also made me feel nauseous and cluttered the melancholic minimalism. I kept having to close my eyes to feel the music and parachute out of the prescribed flight plan. And for all this is the must-see musical event of the moment, my favourite part of the night was the soundcheck. While waiting for the front doors to open, I leaned against a side door in the dark. Everybody else was queuing at the front of the old power station, so I had the space to myself to watch illuminated lifts glide up and down London's tower blocks, past the stationary cranes as a cool drizzle settled on my face. Those synths sang of mechanised beauty and urban alienation, of a future some had feared and others embraced. It's how we'll always feel about "the future," so it'll always resonate with the present. The bass throb soaked through the concrete and into the soles of my feet, comforting as a computerised cat's purr. And then a man from inside the building came to jam black-out cloth beneath the door. The sound was suddenly dulled. "That should do it," he said. Well, it did it for me.