Listening to the Music the Machines Make - Inventing Electronic Pop 1978 to 1983: Inventing Electronic Pop 1978-1983

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So they had come from a very different place, they were a little bit younger, they didn’t have that art school background, they’d met at school and messed around in bands. By Janos Janurik) Temperatures are dropping, days are getting shorter and from now on the umbrella is a permanent accessory when you leave the house. For me, I would say YELLO; they were making really challenging and innovative records, they were visually interesting, they had all the bases covered.

With a foreword by Vince Clarke and a focus on source material such as the music press and the charts, this is a detailed and thorough exploration of how a number of bands, mainly British, developed their sounds from 1978 – 1983. Says Richard, “I didn’t really interview people for the book because wherever possible I wanted to use original materials. I’m too young to have been properly aware of a lot of the original post-punk innovators at the time of their original releases so I did enjoy discovering things like Thomas Leer and Robert Rental. That’s true, I think A-HA are a really important band and yes, they are not in the scope of the book but if they could have been, I would have been delighted to include them because their canon is quite ambitious and wide-ranging.Then I started thinking that it would be great to have one book which told all those stories but which drew from original source materials from the late seventies and early eighties instead of from today’s slightly wobbly memories! I was listening to the album in the car one day and that song came on and I immediately loved the idea of using that lyric as the title for the book.

Evans starts at a place that few others have identified as the touchpoint: “the blue acoustic guitar that filled the screens of millions of television sets as Top of the Pops beamed across the nation on the night of July 6 th, 1972″, when David Bowie, in his Ziggy Stardust persona, performed “Starman”. Evans provides a sweeping study of the genre, filling in many gaps in journalism and popular music scholarship about this particular style of music in a way that cuts across many different genres, artists, bands, albums and sound worlds. Before that happened I did toy with the idea of using The Things That Dreams Are Made Of as a backup title. Usually, I asked those questions as I went rather than going into an interview situation and talking about everything at the same time. Vince Clarke and Andy Bell of course but also people like Martyn Ware, Neil Arthur, Rusty Egan and Daniel Miller.Similarly, some literary works would also be hugely significant in the cold, steely edge given to electronic music produced in the late 70s/early 80s. Now when the electronic bands started coming through, they came with this aesthetic with the keyboards and it looked fantastic.

So from my point of view as a fan of this music, then 1978 would probably be the most interesting year because it provided me new material to listen to that I hadn’t heard before. Events such as the weekly Blitz club nights in London also became the genesis of significant national and international music, fashion, and visual art trends. I went through all these things, page after page after page and every time I saw something that I attained to this story like a news item, review or interview, I took a photo of it on my phone. For me, it was like 1998, DURAN DURAN had the ‘Greatest’ CD out and were touring, OMD had a new singles compilation and CULTURE CLUB had reformed for shows with THE HUMAN LEAGUE and ABC supporting… but I think it took a long time for something to develop. The 528-page book, published late last month by Omnibus Press, features a forward by synth visionary Vince Clarke, the co-founder of Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure.The book concludes with a section entitled REACTION which goes on to complete the synthpop story, where bands have been clearly documented as being influenced by the likes of Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Gary Numan etc. You’re right, it was like a stage of life, you need time to reconnect with the person you used to be.