Category: Music

In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for anything like “career,” I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old’s interest in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were being heard from New York and London. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society’s flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign. And I began, then, to write.

— William Gibson, 2002, http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/source.asp

 

Making playlists on Youtube is as foolish as making sandcastles. It’s an impermanent medium and eventually videos will vanish as the inevitable cold tide of copyright washes in. But  all of human life is impermanent, and so far, we have this moment. And so, before the tides rise over all the world…

About five years ago I started idly searching Youtube and stumbled over a treasure: offbeat 1980s New Wave and synthpop songs. Some from bands you’ve heard of. Some that you may never have seen. Some which stirred faint memories. Some which were completely new to me. So I started collecting them, and then I started blogging a few. Meanwhile, I started putting them into playlists.

Continue reading “The Tomorrow Trilogy”

We crossed the oceans of megabyte
When the diskettes start to burn like candles

I usually think of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) as the prototypical Cyberpunk work, but of course it wasn’t even Gibson’s first story set in the Sprawl  (1981’s Johnny Mnemonic) or the first one featuring his videogame-like Cyberspace (1982’s Burning Chrome).

Meanwhile, Vernor Vinge’s 1981 cyberpunk novella True Names featured a slightly different take on the ultimate computer user interface; one that ‘evoked’ images in a person’s mind rather than a visual field of pixels, and was conceptualised in terms of magic. Of the two writers, Vinge was the only one working as an actual computer scientist at the time, and would have experienced first-hand the pseudo-anonymity of computer chat forums that we now take for granted as ‘the Internet’.

Finally, in 1982, Disney released the movie Tron, taking place inside a computer from the viewpoint of programs, and giving a third popular fictional impression of ‘cyberspace’ based on mythology and analogies to videogames. Wikipedia suggests that development of Tron began as early as 1976, as a response to the popularity of Atari’s 1972 hit videogame Pong.

(It’s fascinating to think how long it takes for technology to migrate to popular culture: in the case of Pong to Tron, about 10 years. So the seeds of cyberpunk, even in its earliest fictional form, would likewise go back to the early 70s. What’s being sown now, in the years after Snowden, I wonder?)

Continue reading “Boytronic: Red Chips (1983, Germany)”

Look at them fall
Flicker and fade

There’s a line in the genetics of popular music that goes: 1970s disco -> 1980s synthpop -> 1990s club electronica -> whatever it is came next in the 00s and the synthpop revival of the 2010s.

(Of course, that’s an exaggeration; there are many other strands of DNA in the 80s synthpop primordial soup: the musique concrete of the 1950s avant garde, electronic experimentation from the 1960s,  Kraftwerk in the mid-70s with their ‘German electro’ sound which then detonated like an atom bomb around the British scene in the early 80s. And if we want to get truly nerdy (and of course we do) then most of the 1990s in computer gaming  was dominated by synthy sounds otherwise forgotten a decade earlier by the analog ‘MTV unplugged’ mainstream.)

But that line weaving from disco, into synthpop and back into club dance music still intrigues me, mostly because – generally – I’m not hugely into 70s disco, and the 1990s drug-culture club music mostly left me cold. Why? I’m not sure. I think because although I love the pure tones of synthesisers, I also love the poetry of words, and a song doesn’t really register with me unless it combines both. Dance music is music that has its eyes squarely elsewhere: it’s music not intended to be primarily listened to, and it just doesn’t work if you’re not there, live.

A band that seems to exemplify this trend is Freur, who fall neatly into three separate phases. From 1982 to 1986, a Welsh New Wavey synthpop group; reformed as Underworld from 1987 to 1990 as  more mainstream pop-dance-rock; then from 1991 on, a techno/acid house electronic dance band becoming hugely famous with the soundtrack to Trainspotting. Today, Underworld continue to be beyond huge in the British scene; they ran the music for the 2012 London Olympics. That’s pretty much the definition of ‘made it’.

Continue reading “Freur: Doot-Doot (1983, Wales)”

Slowly senses leaving me
Once the two are in 3D we play the game

I have a strange relationship with a lot of music. There are bands who are huge names, critically acclaimed cult favourites in the music literature; in many cases, these leave me cold. Or, I’ll find one or two of their songs – sometimes a single, sometimes an obscure track – which resonate with me, while the others fly completely over my head without leaving a mark. On the other hand, sometimes the only song I’ll like from a band will be the one which, in fact, was their chart hit, proving my tastes are solidly mainstream.

New Wave and Synthpop as genres are particularly fraught for me. There are giant names – Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Gary Numan, Siouxsie and the Banshees – to whom I have an almost physical allergy. Their sound is somehow too harsh for me, too bleak.  There are plenty which are just too experimental: Art of Noise. Then there are ones which are too empty, too poppy: Duran Duran maybe. Then there are ones which are on the edge, but mostly too famous: Eurythmics, Rush, Thomas Dolby, Ultravox. (They may come up later).

The Buggles, sadly, fall for me mostly into a mix of ‘too experimental’ and yet ‘too famous’. There’s that one song which if you’re of a certain age you know by heart –

— you remember, of course you remember, you have to remember, it opened MTV in 1981–

Continue reading “Dollar: Videotheque (1982, England)”

But we cast aside the reck’ning
for stars they were a-beck’ning

Music is a strange odyssey sometimes. In searching ’80s synthpop I came across this little gem: Hiroshima by the German singer Sandra. It fit the early-80s anti-nuclear mood perfectly, but it was recorded in 1990 – too late for the period I’m capturing. Or so I thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiB8rjGcCE4

And the world remembers his name
Remembers the flame was
Hiroshima, Hiroshima, Hiroshima

But of course there’s more to it.

Continue reading “Tandy Morgan Band: Princeton (1984, England)”