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

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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. Other artists inspired by these authors would include The Normal, Throbbing Gristle, John Foxx, Cabaret Voltaire and Joy Division and therefore their influence on these pioneering artists cannot be ignored. Of course there were exceptions, and Paul Morley and Jon Savage in particular come across now, as I found then, as both eager and erudite, and usually generous in their praise or constructive in their criticism.

But the important ones for me were THE NORMAL ‘TVOD’ / ‘Warm Leatherette’ and THE HUMAN LEAGUE ‘Being Boiled’. You’re right, it was like a stage of life, you need time to reconnect with the person you used to be. This brave new world of music-making smashed through anything that had ever gone before, producing an innovative and creative genre of music. That’s an impossible question to answer, particularly after having recently revisited so much of the music as I wrote about it.

There aren't many books about this genre of music available, but even if there was loads then it would be difficult to better this book. In 1982 I think, she changed papers and went to the short-lived Noise magazine and then Record Mirror… hopefully, that was in recognition of her being a leading light in this particular movement. There are two reasons for it; one is this period started 45 years ago, you’re not going to remember these details. But the process of going through all the edits, the photos, getting the artwork and style right, it’s been quite intense.

I don’t think it was until DURAN DURAN reformed the classic line-up with the three Taylors in 2004 and then the OMD classic line-up reunion in 2007 that things got properly kick started… I think it took a while because of the age of the audience, people had mortgages and kids in primary school! In 1998 he set up marketing consultancy "The Fan Base" and has been connecting musical artists with their audiences ever since.

I think that it’s fascinating that so many of the pioneers of this story are still making new music, and also that the music they are making is every bit as innovative and interesting as it ever was, and sometimes more so. But the timing just happened to be right and all of a sudden, there were PR companies coming to me saying “Thank goodness you’re there!

It might seem that there is nothing new to say about the UK electronic pop music scene in the late ’70s and early ’80s. In a way, that was really important because any music that I found was mine, it wasn’t handed down to me or curated for me. 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.There are so many great records and my favourite one day might not be favourite the next day depending on what I’m listening to, how I’m feeling and what sort of a mood I’m in. Looking back however and I can see that the music that I was drawn to often had a very noticeable electronic element even when it wasn’t electronic music as such, so although I would enjoy, for example, rock music, the actual songs I was listening to would be things like ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’ by Yes, or tracks from ZZ Top’s ‘Eliminator’ album. It feels there’s been a period where everything and the kitchen sink has gone into electronic music and its gradually being pared away to a point where the instruments and sounds are getting a bit of space to breathe. The study concentrates on the big names in electronic music at the time which sadly allows more shadowy figures like Robert Rental, Thomas Leer, and Fad Gadget to slip out of the picture prematurely, though all are at least mentioned however. Then the writing bit came in stringing these things all together and turning them into this story from all those different perspectives layered on top of each other.

I originally wanted to use Electric Dreams but David Buckley beat me to it for his book about The Human League which comes out next year. A scroll of chronological, interwoven but often disparate stories featuring every purveyor of synthpop you can possibly think of. These were transformational times and what made it exciting was that a lot of artists, like myself, were just making it all up as we went along. Onwards the book progresses year by year from 1978 through to 1983, into TRANSITION where those fledgling bands formed out of the punk era, metamorphosed into their peacock-feathered, Top of the Pops-appearing, face-of-mainstream-music full beings.I’d invested so much of my myself and spent so much of my money in my teens in their music, that it wasn’t such a big jump to continuing that support of them 10-15-20 years later.