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

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It’s the way that Evans weaves and knits these familiar names into such a rich and enormous tapestry that makes the book stand out … Highly recommended.' Louder Than War Your book captures a period, I don’t know if you listen to much modern day pop, but do you think there is an electronic pop legacy today, whether direct or indirect from this 1978-1983 era? The act I’m going to highlight is THE WEEKND… You’ve mentioned ‘Being Boiled’, ‘TVOD’ and ‘Warm Leatherette’, but which was your epiphanal moment were you realised you were an electronic pop fan? For me although I had bought ‘The Pleasure Principle’ by Gary Numan as my first album, it wasn’t until I heard OMD ‘Messages’ that I considered electronic music to be my thing… On this channel we feature some of the pioneers of the industry, interview musicians and talk about retro and current gear. Overcoming any musical shortcomings through their use of new technology, in January 1978 The Human League demoed their first electronic experimentations. The band that entered their Devonshire Lane rehearsal space in Sheffield to commit those first recordings to tape was a trio of rather earnest young men – Martyn Ware (synthesisers), Ian Craig Marsh (synthesisers) and Philip Oakey (vocals, and owner of a saxophone he had conspicuously failed to learn how to play) – who had come together to realise a musical vision that was entirely their own, and which was in part dictated by a musical proclamation displayed on the wall of their workspace. With the exception of the human voice, only electronic instruments were to be used in the band’s compositions, and ‘bland’ words – and in particular the word ‘love’ – were to be avoided at all costs.

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. It also discusses the techno genre of Detroit, USA, which was directly borne out of the electronic music produced by bands in the era covered here and its importance on contemporary popular culture. I first started doing research for the book about six years ago, but not in any serious or particularly organised way. I just kind of messed around for a couple of years and didn’t really get anywhere, but I did build up quite a collection of research materials.In the book, Evans spotlights the impact of early innovators such as The Normal, Cabaret Voltaire, Gary Numan, OMD, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode and more, and includes input from Clarke, Mute Records founder Daniel Miller, and Martyn Ware of The Human League, B.E.F. and Heaven 17. Martin’s interests include: music cities and future cities; hidden histories of late twentieth-century alternative music - specifically punk, post-punk and electronic music; and also music journalism in the UK and US printed and online music presses. His current research projects explore the cultural economy of key cities, the role of music in future cultural growth, and the place of music archive in the creation of a cultural city identity. Using the subtitle ‘Inventing Electronic Pop 1978 – 1983’, while the book primarily sources period archive material, additional input comes from Neil Arthur, Dave Ball, Andy Bell, Rusty Egan, John Foxx, Gareth Jones, Daniel Miller and Martyn Ware. Meanwhile, Vince Clarke contributes the foreword while a third verse lyric from the ULTRAVOX song ‘Just For A Moment’ provides the book’s fitting appellation. By the start of 1978, the first domestic British releases for Devo were still some months off. January would instead see Bowie himself become one of the first artists to place a musical mark on the new year with the January 6th single release of ‘Beauty And The Beast’, the final single to be taken from the Heroesalbum, which had been released just a few months previously, but which had already left an indelible impression on an entire generation of musicians and music fans. I grew up in Essex and was starting my journey as a music fan at the same time that they were starting out. The fact that they were broadly local made them extra exciting, and their trajectory from out and out pop towards exploring more challenging sounds happened at the same time that I was doing something similar, so it felt like we were in step musically.

More importantly, the process had allowed Tubeway Army, and Valeriun in particular, to open up to the idea of embracing a wider palate of opportunities, and ‘Bombers’ nevertheless represents an important step along the band’s journey. Tubeway Army were growing up in public and, while they didn’t yet know where they wanted that growth to take them, there was one thing they were sure of: they had no interest in being another of the one-dimensional punk act that were starting to crowd 1978’s release schedules. The SPANDAU BALLET versus DURAN DURAN thing has been well documented, but what about SOFT CELL versus DEPECHE MODE? They were both on the ‘Some Bizzare Album’ but in 1981, SOFT CELL were rated higher than DEPECHE MODE, any thoughts? One of the best things about this era was how these weird avant pop songs could enter the charts, they were classic songs but presented in a strange way with these sounds and boundaries were pushed… as much as I embrace this period of music, I always felt when it all crossed over into the mainstream in 1981, I don’t think it was on the cards and kind of a fluke… Such lukewarm reactions from the music press would become the norm for Ultravox!, whose long-running battle with the way the media portrayed them was then still in its infancy. Nevertheless, when it came to Ha! Ha! Ha!, the band themselves could understand some of the negativity that was thrown their way. The album had been made during a difficult time for Ultravox!, whose debut had failed to live up to their own expectations and who, as a result, had channelled the anger and frustration they were experiencing into the new songs. While the speedy writing and recording process added an urgency and a spontaneity to the finished record, by the time it hit the record shops Ultravox! were already impatient to be developing their sound further.After 1984 and then into the new decade, a lot of people were trying to kill off electronic pop, especially around Britpop but was there a point later, and this might tie in with Remember The Eighties, when you thought “this stuff has value and people are liking it again”, that there might actually be a legacy? It was during the final sessions with Ultravox! that Eno received the call from David Bowie to become a prime collaborator and co-conspirator in the creation of Low, as John Foxx told Sheppard later: ‘It was quite funny really, because Brian went all coy; wasn’t sure if he should really do it and so on. We all howled ‘Go on Brian, you have to.’ Of course he was just showing off by playing hard to get. It was endearing really.’ Presumably it was a more buoyant and confident Eno who then rendezvoused with Bowie in France, having successfully tested some of his creative strategies and techniques on Ultravox!.

This book is a thorough, well-executed delight for fans of the electronic music genre and puts together all the pieces of information which you possibly already knew in the correct sequence, with myths dissolved and facts confirmed… a highly researched report of the music that machines make.”– We Are Cult In the event, the relationship between Devo and Brian Eno turned out to be less than satisfactory on both sides, as Devo struggled to see beyond the scope of their own original demo concepts and stubbornly refused to adopt Eno’s trademark studio spontaneity in favour of following more regimented processes of their own, an impasse that left Eno perplexed. ‘They were a terrifying group of people to work with because they were so unable to experiment,’ Eno confessed to Mojo in 1995. By starting at 1978, you are specifically highlighting the start of that British wave because before that, it’s international with bands like KRAFTWERK and SPACE as well as Giorgio Moroder and Jean-Michel Jarre… I definitely do think there is a legacy. I’m not great on contemporary electronic music, the things I hear about, I tend to hear about from ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK and that’s fantastic. I use Spotify a lot and the suggestions function is quite powerful as well. From a sonic musical point of view, I can totally see these bands are referencing things that happened during the period I have written about in the book.That’s absolutely right. There is a brief section at the beginning within the context of the whole book that joins together some of the dots, things that people were taking in their early electronic experiments. Things that Vince Clarke was listening to like SPARKS, things that OMD were listening to like Brian Eno, things that THE HUMAN LEAGUE were listening to like Giorgio Moroder. Arguably, punk’s decline would have been even more rapid if it hadn’t been for the frantic mechanisations of the music business itself, an industry now hungry to harness some of the commercial possibility those legions of little sisters represented. With few exceptions the mainstream music industry had arrived late to punk’s joyous, irreverent party, and had then over-invested in the signing, recording and promotion of a miscellany of acts, sporting safety pins and clad in uniform leather and studs, most of whom had cynically jumped on punk’s bandwagon, and whose very existence underlined the end of a glorious golden age. But if you are looking for a deeper more analytical approach that seeks to place the music into its relevant political and cultural landscape, as Jon Savage did for Punk and Simon Reynolds did for Post-punk and Glam, then this work will leave you unsatisfied. And the author provides almost no conclusion, with the narrative simply coming to a fairly abrupt end.

The decision to then bring in Brian Eno to co-produce Ultravox!’s debut album only served to compound those media assumptions, even though the choice of producer had come from the band and not from the label. Foxx had actually approached Eno at Island Records’ creative hub of offices, studios and rehearsal rooms in West London during the negotiations with the label that led to Ultravox!’s signing and, on behalf of his band, had asked Eno to produce their album on the very straightforward grounds that ‘We liked the things he did, because they were unorthodox, and we were very enamoured of things that were unorthodox at the time,’ to which Foxx added, ‘Eno seemed the only salvation – plus the fact that no one else could make head or tail of what we were doing.’ The match was subsequently approved by Island who were keen to have their new signings work with a ‘name’ producer in addition to the then-unknown Steve Lillywhite, who had previously befriended the band and who – using downtime at Phonogram Studios in Marble Arch where he was working as a tape operator – had produced the demos that had contributed to Ultravox! securing their Island deal. Yes, this situation impacted on the bands that we are talking about, there were pressures on people to be more commercial when one of the reasons that they were attracted to Virgin in the first place was so that they could be less commercial should they choose to be. I think that electronic pop in this period is so crucial in the development of music, and it was just time for someone to tell the story. I’d been working on the book for a few years and the whole time I thought “someone is going to do this, someone is going to do this before me!” *laughs* I don’t have any guilty pleasures. I love music equally across the genres and, although my tastes are definitely weighted towards electronic artists, at any one time I’m just as likely to be listening to Buddy Holly as I am to Orbital!Good question! I don’t specifically, it hadn’t occurred to me until you asked, but I think from a writing point of view, the earlier years were the most interesting to me because in 1978, I was 10 so I wasn’t really aware of these things. Lots of these records, I didn’t really hear until later and some much later… one or two of them, and I’m not confessing which ones, I didn’t even listen to until I started writing the book. Keen to explore more of the possibilities suggested by the moments of electronic experimentation that had led to the creation of ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, ‘My Sex’, ‘The Man Who Dies Every Day’ and ‘I Want To Be A Machine’, Ultravox wanted to follow in the footsteps of the original electronic innovators, and decided to approach the influential German producer Conny Plank – who had already worked on records for Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Neu! and Cluster, among others – to produce their next record.