The summer afternoon I shared a dining table with Kraftwerk

Back in the summer of 2009, Goldie Lookin Chain was smack bang in the middle of the festival circuit, but Bestival on the Isle of Wight will stay with me until my final days.

We knew Kraftwerk would be playing and there was serious excitement. Not only had we grown up listening to them, we had been so influenced by The Model that we had sampled it on a track on our Return of the Red Eye album. We were excited kids, asking: “What time are they on?” and “Are they actual robots? I’ve heard they are actual robots!”

In a band you board a tour bus, wake up in different festival locations and are penned into a backstage area. You quickly learn they are never particularly glamorous, but it can be fun to see a Portaloo-bound pop star or watch a “too cool for school” indie rocker negotiate the mud in his brand new winklepickers.

It’s different for the big rock megastar headliners. They usually have the whole site locked down, arrive in a helicopter half an hour before the show, get carried onstage by a swollen entourage and get out with military precision. Which is why the events of 2009 are etched on my memory. This time a rumour started that Kraftwerk liked to be dropped off several miles from their shows and cycle in.

I started to give up on the idea of even seeing the show, so after we delivered a storming set in the Roller Disco Tent and after meeting TV’s Mr Motivator (that’s another story), I headed off to grab some food in the catering tent. I found a quiet table and as I began to soak up some of the afternoon’s beer with something stodgy, a small group of men joined me at the table. They seemed quite unassuming and proceeded to eat with precision, perhaps quasi-mechanical efficiency, and good manners.

The penny dropped. There were no bikes and I couldn’t see any robots, but the German accents and the braces that they all wore suddenly hit home: “My God! I’m sitting at the same table as Kraftwerk!” No glamour, no massive entourage and hardly a word said. In fact, if my memory serves me correctly, the highlight was when one of them had extra pudding. Kraftwerk have a sweet tooth. You heard it here first.

It was maybe the most exciting yet pedestrian thing to happen to me all that year. They were completely normal. Perfect. There was no need to scream and ask for a selfie, to fawn over these electro gods. I sat there and drank in an experience that would have sent their many disciples into convulsions. If Kraftwerk left me with one profound understanding beyond the music, it is that everything that’s gold doesn’t glitter… and sometimes that’s exactly the way it should be.

Goldie Lookin Chain release Fear of a Welsh Planet on 4 November and play Cardiff and London 8 and 9 December (youknowsit.co.uk)