Electronic music

Opening a bottle with: the French co-founders of Lisbon’s MOGA Festival

Quizzed on how best to assimilate a new culture, travel writer and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once uttered the famous line: “Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.” I never met the man, but still I miss him and his deft writing. The Opening a Bottle series is about getting pickled with people far cooler than I am, in whatever city I’ve washed up in.  An incredulously cloudy spring day in Lisbon. I’m sitting on a low sofa at Go A Lisboa, one of the city’s glitziest new rooftop spaces, with panoramic views of the majestic Pont de 25 Abril bridge. It joins the legion of high spec bars and dinner spots popping up weekly in this ever-changing city — which is pulling crowds like never before.

MOGA

Uniform beats

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Right from the beginning, everything about Kraftwerk was odd. They had no frontman, they seemed to play no instruments and their strange, electronic music owed nothing to blues, soul or any of the other forms of music that underpinned 20th-century pop. Instead, a Kraftwerk gig consisted of four gauche-looking fellows from Düsseldorf standing in a row, each poking at a synthesizer while strange, apparently unconnected images appeared on screens behind them. A Kraftwerk album could be just as confounding. The cover of 1977’s TransEurope Express featured the band in suits and ties, looking more like the partners at an accounting firm than a pioneering electronica band.

kraftwerk