Kraftwerk - essentially four retirement-age men and a clutch of robots - might seem an odd choice for the Global Gathering festival's headline act to younger revellers, but not, one imagines, to any of the electro acts sharing the bill.
The legendary German outfit invented electronic music and is considered one of the most influential acts in musical history. Their career spans almost 40 years and its pioneering experiments with electro have influenced post-punk music, techno and new wave.
Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk's founders, began playing together in 1970 as Organisation, experimenting with synthesisers, flutes and organs, before evolving into a quartet working with futuristic technology, simple melodies and a unique aesthetic.
They were also notoriously private, rarely granting interviews.
As their sound took off around the world in the late 1970s and early '80s, Kraftwerk disappeared from public life, working in their almost-mythical studio, Kling Klang, where it is said there are no phones, faxes, no address listed, and from where all mail returns unopened.
In 2003, they released their first album in 17 years,
Tour de France Soundtracks, to celebrate the centenary of the world's most famous cycle race (Hutter is a fanatical cyclist) and began touring again.
Speaking to us ahead of the Global Gathering festival, Ralf Hutter is characteristically oblique about the Dusseldorf band's time away from the spotlight (saying it spent 17 years "transforming Kraftwerk from analogue to digital") but genuinely excited about their visit.
"We are looking forward to Australia because last time (in 2003), unfortunately, we couldn't bring the robots," Hutter says of the replica mannequins of the band members, which have long been an integral part of the group's complex live performances, which also feature highly choreographed audio-visuals.
"They wanted to travel with us but we couldn't bring them as they were in an exhibition in Paris. They want to see some summer weather. They like hot weather," Hutter says.
Kraftwerk similarly considers what they do to be a lifestyle, a philosophy, even. Their references to robots and technology are an integral part of the band's man-machine aesthetic.
Hutter concedes that it allows no outside contact when it is in its studio and the rumours surrounding Kling Klang are all true.
"We only communicate when we have to communicate," he says. "We have to be isolated when we go into the studio, because when you are trying to find new music and doing research and development, any disturbance is not good.
"We've been going for such a long time, but that's the life. Our compositions are like minimal, conceptual work, but we can constantly change and develop from the original compositions. We can play 'Drive' at different speeds or 'Pocket Calculator'. We constantly change and now we have the equipment, we can do it when we travel as well. We now have access from our studio archives to nearly 40 years of music, all on our laptop."
As visionaries and early adopters of technology, Hutter says the technological advances the group members have seen throughout their career are more than they could have hoped for.
"We were lucky technology developed in our direction," he says. "When we recorded and composed music and the lyrics for the album
Computerworld we didn't even have computers ourselves.
"Personal computers didn't even exist, so it was like a visionary album. Now we are mobile and that's what Kraftwerk is about - live electronic music."
How do the group members feel about being referenced as the inventors of the genre?
"It's very encouraging feedback for us," Hutter says with trademark understatement. "And we like playing live again - performing is a continuous upgrade of what Kraftwerk has always been doing."
And what Kraftwerk has been doing, is, says Hutter, a "lifestyle".
"Kraftwerk is what we do and what we talk about," he says.
Kylie Northover