(article to accompany Synth Britannia BBC 4 documentary)
director's cut, The Guardian, October 9th 2009
by Simon Reynolds
The synthpop era really kicked off in June 1979 when Tubeway Army's "Are
Friends Electric" hit Number One.
Soon the charts were teeming with thin white dudes caked in Max Factor
28 panstick and playing one-finger melodies on Korg keyboards. The sound and visuals owed a substantial debt
to David Bowie's Berlin trilogy and his stranded alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth.
Chuck in some Europe Between the Wars atmospherics and you had the
recipe for Visage's "Fade To Grey" and "The Damned Don't
Cry", Japan's "Nightporter" and "Ghosts," Ultravox's
"Vienna", and the rest of the scene known (confusingly) as
both Futurists and New Romantics. Bowie himself resurfaced with the synth sadness of "Ashes To Ashes".
And bringing up the rear were the pioneers , the chaps who'd coined the whole
Mittel Europa/ Mensch Maschine shtick in the first place:
Kraftwerk, #1 in February 1982 with their 1978 tune "The Model".
Synthesizers in popular music actually go back much further than
the mandroid melancholy of Gary Numan. All
the way back to the psychedelic Sixties, when American groups like Silver
Apples and The United States of America ditched guitars for oscillators. In
1969 George Harrison put out a whole album of Moog doodles called Electronic Sound. German cosmic rockers Tangerine Dream gradually
streamlined their Pink Floyd-wannabe grandeur into a minimal, darkly pulsing, all-electronic
sound. Floyd themselves forayed into
full-blown synth-rock with Dark Side of the Moon's "On The
Run", whose brain-searing wibbles anticipating acid house, while other
proggers like ELP's Keith Emerson and Yes's Rick Wakeman performed behind
massive banks of electronic keyboards but tended to use their synths as glorified
organs, hamming it up with Bach-style variations and arpeggiated folderol.
Far more unearthly electro-tones could be
heard on the telly via s.f. series like Doctor Who and The Tomorrow People or at the cinema courtesy of dystopian movies
like A Clockwork Orange, The Andromeda Strain, and Logan's Run. Black music too had its complement of visionaries besotted with the synth's cornucopia
of otherworldly tone-colours, from fusioneers Weather Report and Herbie Hancock to
funkateers Stevie Wonder and Funkadelic.
Black or white, these precocious knob-twiddlers all had a
freakadelic, proggy mindset: they dug synths for the "far out, man"
noises they generated, so they let rip long
noodling solos or oozed out abstract dronescapes. None stood a chance of troubling the hit parade.
In some ways the crucial word in synthpop isn't "synth" but
"pop". The British groups who took over the charts at the dawn of the
Eighties were catchy and concise. Here they followed the lead of Kraftwerk, who
were not only the first group to make a whole conceptual package/weltanschauung out of the Electronic Age,
but were sublime tunesmiths. It's righteous that Kraftwerk's long-awaited
remastered catalogue is getting reissued at almost the exact same time as the
long-awaited remastered catalogue of the Beatles, because Hutter & Co rival
the Fab Four for both their transformative impact on pop and their melodic
genius.
Equally inspiring to the synthpop artists was Kraftwerk's
formality: their grey suits and short
hair stood out at a time of jeans and beards
and straggly locks, heralding an European future for pop, a decisive break with
America and rock'n'roll.
Perhaps even
more of a portent here was Giorgio Moroder's Eurodisco, whose clockwork-precise sequencers and icily
erotic electronics forged the connection between synthesisers and the
dancefloor, as opposed to the early
association of Tangerine Dream/Klaus Schulze type music with getting stoned and
supine on your sofa. Released in 1977, Donna
Summer's Moroder-produced "I Feel
Love" and Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express" divided pop time in
two as profoundly as "Anarchy in the UK". The Eighties begin there.
Conveniently, these singles arrived at a time when synths got
vastly more affordable, portable, and user-friendly. As Synth Britannia reveals, what once cost as much as a small house
(and therefore stayed the preserve of prog superstars) became something you
could buy for a few hundred quid, or
cheaper still if you mail-ordered a build-your-own-synth kit and were prepared to
spend weeks assembling the bugger. Groups who'd been inspired by punk's
confrontational rhetoric and sartorial provocations but who found the actual
sonic substance of punk rock to be too ye olde rock'n'roll seized on the cheapo synth as the real coming
of do-it-yourself.
Synthpop went through two distinct phases. The first
was all about dehumanisation chic. That didn't mean the music was emotionless
(the standard accusation of the synthphobic rocker) but that the emotions were bleak:
isolation, urban anomie, feeling cold and hollow inside, paranoia.
On the postpunk underground that meant Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing
Gristle, both of whom ironically used a fair bit of guitar but heavily treated
it with electronic effects. On the pop
overground it meant John Foxx and Gary Numan.
Gaz also used guitar prominently on his early hits under the name
Tubeway Army. The secret of his success was that his music, for all its
majestic canopies of glacial synth,
rocked. Even when he dropped the guitar along with the name Tubeway Army
and went fully electronic on "Cars", he kept his flesh-and-blood
drummer.
The second phase of synthpop reacted against the
first. Electronic sounds now suggested jaunty optimism and the gregariousness of
the dancefloor, they evoked a bright, clean
future just round the corner rather than J.G. Ballard's desolate Seventies
cityscapes. And the subject matter for
songs mostly reverted to traditional pop territory: love and romance, escapism
and aspiration. The prime movers behind synthpop's
rehumanisation were appropriately enough The Human League (just check their
song titles: "Open Your Heart", "Love Action", "These
Are The Things That Dreams Are Made Of").
Soft Cell were also crucial with their songs of torrid passion and seedy
glamour. Their line-up--male-diva Mark Almond, keyboard wiz David Ball--set the
template for the first half of the Eighties. The new compact synths resembled
an orchestra in a box; you didn't need to have a whole band of
instrumentalists. Suddenly pop was packed with duos who divided labor neatly between the
composer/technology-operator and the singer/lyricist: Eurythmics, Yazoo, Tears
For Fears, Blancmange, Pet Shop Boys.
The shape of a synthpop outfit was subversive, or at least enough to make
rockists uneasy: the rock band's gang-like structure replaced by same-sex
"couples" plus the occasional female diva/male boffin partnership.
Yazoo were a classic example of this fire-and-ice
combo: Alison Moyet's proto-Josh Stone soulfulness matched with Vince Clarke's pristine
perkiness. Clarke had been the brains behind Depeche Mode, or so everybody
thought. Yet while he went on to commit a spree of cultural crimes under
aliases like The Assembly and Erasure, it was Depeche who unexpectedly grew
into Major Artists, leaving behind dinky ditties like "Just Can't Get
Enough" for the musically sophisticated,
politically engaged/enraged Construction
Time Again and Some Great Reward. The anti-monetarist
smash " Everything Counts" caught the melancholy of that moment after
the re-election of Thatcher, while "Master and Servant" combined an S/M-inspired
personal-is-political allegory about power (“it’s a lot like life,” so “forget
all about equality”) with a pop translation of Einsturzende Neubauten/Test
Dept-style metal-bashing. Best of all
was the haunting “Blasphemous Rumours,” a jibe at the Almighty which suggested “God’s got a sick sense of humor.”
One running theme in Synth
Britannia, voiced repeatedly by Daniel Miller, the founder of Depeche's
record label Mute, is the notion of
electronic music being essentially un-British. But that would seem to beg the
question of why the UK became the world's leading nation for synthpop, and
later the major force in electronic
dance music all through the Nineties.
The truth is that the real kingdom of synthphobia was the United
States. But this also meant that
American misfits could express their deviance by spurning standard high school
fare like Motley Crue for "faggy" English electropop. Depeche's cult following in the States expanded
as they turned out to be surprisingly kick-ass
live performers on the arena circuit,
peaking with a 1988 show at the Pasadena Rose Bowl that drew seventy
thousand. They were bigger still in Europe, almost Beatles-level in Germany
where to this day there are Depeche raves that play Mode music all night long.
A curious thing that comes through watching Synth Britannia is how the futuristic-ness of this music is largely
irrecoverable to us, precisely because we live in the future that the synthpop
era helped to bring about. Electronic tonalties are omnipresent to the point of
banality, thanks to Nineties techno-rave and Noughties R&B, videogames and ring-tones. "Electro" in the early Eighties
meant cutting-edge, the future-now; nowadays "electro" refers to the
kind of sounds that lit up hipster bars in Hoxton all through this past decade
and then unexpectedly went mainstream this year with La Roux and Lady GaGa,
which is to say synthetic pop that isn't
state-of-art, doesn't use the full
capacity of the latest digital technology,
and is therefore almost as quaint as if it were made using a
harpsichord.
With the future-shock
aspect depleted, what comes through now is the pop in synthpop: OMD's pretty tunes, the aching plaintiveness
of Numan and Human League. Oddly, what's
made this music last are the same things that made The Beatles and Motown immortal: melody and emotion.
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