This programme contains some strong language.
SYNTHESISER PLAYS VARYING NOTES
Welcome to a time
when there were no guitars and no drums, just synthesisers.
It was the 1970s.
The place was Britain, and our heroes were a maverick bunch
of young pioneers, obsessed by Kraftwerk and science fiction.
All across the country, these synthetic dreamers would imagine
the very sound of the future - yesterday.
And by the '80s, their dreams would become a reality, as Britain went synth-pop.
Welcome to a time when machines ruled the world.
# I stand still stepping on the shady streets
# And I watch that man to a stranger
# You think you only know me when you turn on the light
# Now the room is lit with danger
# Complicating, circulating new life
# New life
# Operating, generating
# New life, new life. #
FANFARE
By the 1970s, we were living in the future.
Our cities were going space age.
MUSIC: "William Tell Overture" by G Rossini
Victorian slums had been torn down and replaced by ultra-modern concrete high-rises.
Entertainment also looked to the future.
Our cinema and television screens were full of tantalising glimpses
of a future that seemed just around the corner.
Released in 1971, Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange was a futuristic
and violent vision of concrete Britain that captured the zeitgeist.
The film's soundtrack was composed by American synth pioneer Walter, now Wendy, Carlos.
It would have a profound effect on a generation of would-be musicians.
That was probably a lot of people's maybe first time
they'd heard electronic music,
on the score to that film. It made me forever associate
classical music with people getting their heads kicked in,
which is kind of a bit strange.
The soundtrack to Clockwork Orange - fantastic synth sounds in that.
Big Moog synthesiser that Wendy Carlos used.
And they were all orchestrated.
Well, Wendy, who then said she was Walter, I never quite worked out
what was going on there, was an absolute inspiration, you know.
The first time we had ever heard that sort of absorbent synth
bass sound...just raved about it.
Some of the people who would be future post-punk people,
would listen to the three or four
original compositions that Carlos did on that soundtrack
that were much more sinister and foreboding.
There was a kind of linkage made there between those sounds and
the idea of a cold future, a bleak future, and that probably sunk quite deeply into the psyche
of a lot of young musicians at that time.
For a generation of electronic dreamers,
Carlos' soundtrack would offer a glimpse of an alienated synthetic future.
But the true divine spark
would arrive on our television screens in 1975.
Tomorrow's World gave Britain its first glimpse of Kraftwerk,
a German band who played only electronic instruments.
ELECTRONIC DRUM BEAT
They would invade our shores later the same year.
We played one of our first gigs in 1975
of our English tour in Liverpool.
The Wings Over Britain tour was playing the same night in the town.
That was also the reason why our hall was only half crowded.
# Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn
# Fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn. #
All of our posters were stuck right next to the posters of the Wings,
so it made us proud of course, you know.
# Die Fahrbahn ist ein graues Band
# Weisse Streifen, gruener Rand. #
Amazingly they came to Liverpool in October of '75,
and I sat in seat Q36
and witnessed the first day of rest of my life.
'75 was all the era of long hair and flared trousers and guitar solos.
And these guys all came out in suits and ties.
Two of them looked like they were playing electronic tea trays with wired-up knitting needles.
And I was just...blown away. It really - it was incredible.
We had no long hair, we didn't wear blue jeans.
We had suits on, grey suits. Short hair, you know.
And we looked like the...
children of Wernher von Braun or Werner von Siemens.
We saw ourselves as engineer musicians, like that,
instead of dancing, a voice on stage to arouse the girls, you know.
The interesting thing afterwards, there was a knock at our backstage door.
It was a band. They were called Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark.
And the leader, Andy McCluskey, was really astonished and happy
that he was meeting us in person.
And he said, "You know, guys, you have shown us the future!
"This is it! We throw away our guitars tomorrow and buy all synthesisers."
In terms of inspiring people to not just have a synthesiser in their rock band,
but to be completely electronic,
I think you can never underestimate the impact of Kraftwerk.
Trans-Europe Express had the same impact on the synth-pop
as anarchy in the UK had on people who wanted to be punk rockers.
'Next year, Kraftwerk hope to eliminate the keyboards altogether
'and build jackets with electronic lapels which can be played by touch.'
In British music in the mid '70s, the synth was a remote beast.
Although they would become much cheaper later
in the decade, a synthesiser then could cost as much as a small house.
They were associated with rich and technically gifted progressive musicians.
Until punk came along, you had to be Keith Emerson.
If you wanted to be in a band, you had to have learned your instrument for at least eight or nine years
before you would dare come out and play it.
And it was simply the inspiration of The Damned and The Clash...
that said, get up and do it, you know.
Do your best. If it's crap, maybe the simplicity will get you through.
Whilst the music didn't concern itself with synthesisers, the attitude of the punk movement
would inspire those with an interest in electronic music to do it themselves.
# Oh
# White riot - I wanna riot
# White riot - a riot of my own
# White riot - I wanna riot
# White riot - a riot... #
All the infrastructure around punk we absolutely loved.
It's just that the actual music we saw as being quite old-fashioned.
And I think they had been a bit of a one-trick pony.
So what we did was, we took the attitudes of punk and give it
a different context, ie, let's make music that nobody's heard before.
Across the country, small pockets of experimentation surfaced, inspired primarily by punk and Kraftwerk.
We were in my studio at home in south-east London.
One day I opened my e-mail inbox, there were 10 e-mails
from a very disparate bunch of people saying,
you've got to go to eBay now and buy this.
What was Kraftwerk's original vocoder,
which was being sold on eBay. And it was the one that was used on Autobahn.
I thought, well, this is the equivalent for a guitarist of getting
Jimi Hendrix's guitar that was used on Purple Haze or something.
MUSIC STARTS
# TVOD... #
I first got a synthesiser in...1977.
And I bought a second-hand Korg 700S from Macari's Music Shop
in Charing Cross Road.
The thing that pissed me off about punk was you had to learn three chords to be in a punk band.
If you had a synthesiser, all you had to do was press one key with a finger.
# I don't need a TV screen
# I just stick the aerial
# Into my skin. #
Advances in technology in the late '70s heralded the invention
of the affordable synth, costing no more than an electric guitar.
Daniel Miller used his to form The Normal, an experimental act that supported punk groups.
Miller drew on the work of English author JG Ballard
whose Crash was another futuristic vision of Britain.
# Warm
# Leatherette
# Warm
# Leatherette... #
I'd just broken up with a girlfriend who I was very much in love with.
And a friend of mine said, read this book. And I read it,
and it really had a huge...
I'm using all these puns, like impact.
But it did have a huge impact.
# See the breaking glass in the underpass... #
It wasn't like science fiction in the sense it was outer space and stuff like that.
It felt like it was five minutes into the future, and I loved that aspect of it,
the fact it was so outrageous, but so possible at the same time.
# Leatherette... #
Warm Leatherette by The Normal. The Normal was the alias of Daniel Miller.
# Hear the crashing steel... #
The lyrics are just a precis of some of the concepts in Crash,
Ballard's novel, which was about people who have car accidents and find that
thereafter their sexuality has been diverted and they are obsessed with being turned on by car crashes.
So you had the lyric like, "The hand brake penetrates your thigh - quick, let's make love before you die."
# Warm
# Leatherette... #
The music was supposed to be visual.
You know, like driving along a highway with big buildings either side and going into a tunnel.
There's quite a lot of humour in it really.
It wasn't meant be apocalyptic or dystopian.
Miller was one of Britain's first synth poets. And he wasn't alone.
In the north of England, a bunch of computer programmers dreamt of a similar feature.
We loved JG Ballard.
In fact, Roxy had a song, To HB, about Humphrey Bogart.
And we had a song, 4JG, which was about JG Ballard.
The Future were a bunch of sci-fi nerds from Sheffield.
They formed in '77 and played only synthesisers.
When I bought my Korg 700S in...1976,
it was the first time there was a monophonic synthesiser
which you could do stuff with, which was kind of domestic level, entry level, in terms of price.
It was £350, I think.
And I remember distinctly thinking at the time -
I with a computer operator - there was a decision day
where it was either buy a second-hand car and learn to drive,
or go and buy this monophonic synthesiser.
And that proved to be quite a fateful day, because I still can't drive.
But I've still got that synthesiser.
This is a Mini-Korg 700S, and was the first affordable synth.
Fantastic machine. Completely eccentric.
# Listen to voice of Buddha... #
They give you a book of patches with it.
Because it was Japanese, there would be things like Synthy Cat or Funny Frog.
And you can't follow why it's doing what it does, but it sounds great.
Usually with a synthesiser, you can get it to do something for you.
You don't have to be manually good at all.
That was why we turned to them in the first place,
cos no-one could learn how do the guitars either.
We'd all tried. My brother's a great guitarist and he tried to teach me.
It just hurts your hand. So we use these things.
You can press a switch on, and they'll do things for about ten minutes. It's quite interesting.
If you've got a tape recorder, you can put it down, put something next to it and it will sound all right.
# ..Doesn't mean that she's your better... #
The day that I joined the band, Martyn came round my house and he had two records under his arm.
One was Trans-Europe Express, and one was I Feel Love. And he said, "Look, WE can do this."
I think that was his actual phrase.
MUSIC: "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer
We loved all that stuff. The concept albums that Giorgio Moroder did with Donna Summer.
(MACHINE-DISTORTED VOICE) # One, two, three, four, five. #
We used to play those continuously.
This wasn't some kind of post-gay ironic thing.
It's because they sounded great and interesting.
You were never really sure what the next set of sounds coming up was going to be.
I Feel Love just didn't sound like any record that had been before.
It came on the radio, and you couldn't quite believe what you were hearing.
It was hypnotic, but it was driving.
# It's so good... #
Moroder's mood music was the disco single of '77.
Its success would set the template for the future of the future.
# I'm in love I'm in love, I'm in love... #
We were in fact much more influenced by Moroder than we were by Kraftwerk.
Everyone...ever since anyone that knows we used synths, "Oh, you sound like Kraftwerk, don't you?"
We use the same instruments, so some of the sounds are a bit the same.
But we never really wanted to be Kraftwerk, we wanted to be a pop band.
We wanted to...
embody a sense of futurism
without being so literal.
It just so happened a friend of ours, he had bought for him this
science-fiction board game called Star Force.
And it was prodigiously tedious.
It was real geek stuff.
It was impenetrable. You couldn't play it.
There was The Rise Of The Human League, or something.
And I thought, The Human League, that is such a cool name.
# No future, they say... #
The Human League set out to make electronic pop for the modern city.
# The city is human
# Blind youth take hope You're no Joe Soap
# Your time is due Big fun come soon
# We've had it easy We should be glad
# High-rise living's not so bad... #
The Human League have a totally different spin on synthesisers
where it was much more like this bright technocratic
optimism thing. In fact, in one of their early songs,
Blind Youth, they make fun of people who go on about dehumanisation.
# Dehumanisation
# Is such a big word
# It's been around
# Since
# Richard the Third
# Dehumanisation
# Is easy to say
# But if you're not a hermit
# You know the city's OK. #
I'd say most of the brightness came from Martyn.
Martyn's very optimistic, and if anyone's moaning about
anything, Martyn will go and write a song in the opposite direction.
I think I felt a bit gloomy about the concrete jungle and everything,
which is ridiculous, cos I'm a townie.
I gravitate towards concrete...
If you put me in the country, I would find the nearest town and I'll be sitting in a bar quite quickly.
# Blind youth take hope You're no Joe Soap
# Your time is due Big fun come soon... #
Unfortunately, British pop music wasn't quite ready
for a synth-led group of futurists...just yet.
But in 1978, The Human League weren't the only group experimenting with electronics in Sheffield.
This is the old Psalter Lane art college,
which used to be part of Sheffield Polytechnic in the 1970s.
I believe The Human League also played this very place
for their first-ever live show in Sheffield.
Cabaret Voltaire did perform in this very room.
Yeah, we just thought there was nothing for us.
It was all kind of bloated supergroups
and progressive bands
who weren't even from the same kind of social backgrounds.
They were probably public school educated,
whereas most of the scene in Sheffield was pretty solid working class.
You'd find little bits of interest interesting music within perhaps
some of the prog rock stuff where there'd be a weird little synth break.
But then once you kind of started to discover all the German bands,
you realised that there were entire albums that were made of electronics.
Whilst The Human League dreamt of pop, Cabaret Voltaire
were anything but, using electronics to explore Sheffield, a city torn between the past and the future.
I remember watching loads of science fiction things
in the '60s, like Doctor Who and things like Quatermass.
And all these kinds of strange things seemed to happen
in old gasworks or industrial environments.
There was an other-worldliness about it.
You might see an alien or a giant blob creeping across the floor,
glowing bright green from radioactivity.
# Nag nag nag
# Nag nag nag. #
A very arty group. Obviously their name echoes Dada.
They were really into William Burroughs and ideas like control and surveillance.
They actually used quite a lot of guitar,
but it was so heavily processed, it didn't sound like rock 'n' roll guitar.
It sounded more like a synthesiser.
They also put synthesising-type effects
on the voice, which is probably one of the most disturbing things they did.
You have a guy singing, but it sounds more like a dalek than a human being.
At night-time, you'd hear distant booming noises with which would
probably be something like a drop forge or steam hammer or something.
You certainly knew that you were on the edge of heavy industry.
Everything in their music is alienated.
The music that comes from people who are divorced from natural life, any natural rhythms.
The music for a hostile environment.
If I've ever been asked to explain that movement, I always call it the "alienated synthesists".
Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division who were up a little bit less obviously synthy...
Everyone...everyone was sort of like that.
We were all going around in long coats from second-hand shops
and saying how terrible things were, with a synth.
Across the Pennines, another pocket of alienated synthesists dreamt
of an electronic future in the spiritual home of British pop music.
MUSIC DROWNS SPEECH
We are in Mathew Street in Liverpool, and I am actually standing outside of the door to what used
to be Eric's Club, which is where we played our first gig, where we invented OMD to play at this place.
And it was the club where we all used to come.
The Bunnymen and the Teardrops played within a month of us playing here as well.
This was the place I saw Devo play their first English concert.
And all of the influential bands that we could get to come to town
played here, apart from Kraftwerk who played the big theatre down the road.
And then literally ten yards away is the Cavern Club.
We've got Eric's and the Cavern right across the road from each other.
When Paul and I started being interested in electronic music,
we were very young.
We had no money.
And it was totally unrealistic to think about getting the big kind of keyboards you saw
on TV or on stage with some of the keyboard players in the '70s.
My mother had a Kays mail order catalogue, and they had some synthesisers.
Our first Korg Micro-Preset was bought from my mother's catalogue
for 36 weeks at £7.76 a week, I seem to recall.
This was the first synth, and we'd made the first two albums with this.
It's like, it's quite a basic synth.
INTRO TO "ENOLA GAY"
HE LAUGHS Can you believe that's the record?!
# Enola Gay
# You should have stayed at home yesterday
# Oh-oh, words can't describe
# The feeling and the way... #
The major record labels largely ignored synth music,
forcing bands like OMD to look to newly reformed indies instead.
In 1978, OMD would sign to Factory. A movement of sorts was beginning to coalesce.
I think the first wave of bands
that sort of came out of the closet in a late '70s...
..we were all working independently of each other.
There was no unified movement.
It didn't all start in one club or one town.
There was no gang of people who all had a manifesto
that we were going to do the new British electronic music.
It was small pockets of people in different parts of the country
who were independently obviously listening to the same things.
I did make an electronic drum machine, because I'd seen Kraftwerk with their sticks.
So I thought, I can make one of those. And so I did.
Some of the early synth drums was this very Heath Robinson-looking box
with all these plates on there with these sticks with wires
that we did the drums to Electricity.
# Our one source of energy
# The ultimate discovery
# Electric blue for me
# Never more to be free... #
We were horrified when Tony Wilson said, "What you do is the future of pop."
Pop? We were experimental German influenced. We are not pop at all!
How do you call us pop? We were absolutely mortified.
We couldn't see it at all.
Totally by accident, Paul and I
and I guess others at the time had distilled the electronic
experimentation and the glam pop of Britain from just a few years and earlier, into what was going to
become, which didn't seem at the time, but what was going to become the future of pop music.
By the start of 1979, the future of pop music seemed a long way off,
as the combined efforts of The Normal, OMD and The Human League had failed to trouble the charts.
But dabbling in synthesisers was becoming increasingly de rigueur.
Even for dyed in the wool punks.
At the other end of the East Lancs Road, another Factory band,
who would become one of the greatest electronic acts, were taking their first synthetic steps.
The first synthesiser we had in Joy Division was a little thing called a Transcendent 2000.
I actually built it from a load of components.
At the time I had insomnia, I couldn't sleep very well.
So I used to get this magazine called Electronics Today,
something like that, and in it was this synthesiser.
And if you were to buy one in those days it was incredibly expensive.
And we didn't have any money. So I thought, this is really cheap, it's only 200 quid,
how difficult can it be to build it?
And it was like... Soldering components by hand.
It took about two months of doing that.
And then it didn't work incredibly well.
RUDIMENTARY SYNTHESISER NOTES PLAY
I remember we went to write a track in the studio called Cargo, in Rochdale.
And when we went it, we found a little Woolworths organ
that you switched the battery power, switched it on and it blew a fan.
You could play chord buttons on it. So I was messing about with these chord buttons.
And then Martin Hannah I think had brought in a Solina string synth.
What? You can play more than one note at a time on it!
So I got the organ and the synthesiser
and hit these chord buttons, and wrote Atmosphere, a Joy Division track.
I seemed to write it there in the studio.
# Walk in silence... #
I think we wrote the music
and then Ian wrote the words that night.
Then we recorded the vocals the next day. Which is amazing when I think about it.
# See the danger
# Always danger
# Endless talking
# Life rebuilding
# Don't walk away... #
Whilst it seemed the north had the lead in post-punk synth pioneers,
things were also stirring down south.
John Foxx was the former lead singer of Ultravox.
He worked in Shoreditch in London's then unfashionable East End.
SYNTHESISER CHORDS PLAY
SYNTHESISER MELODY PLAYS
These modular synths were the first generation really
of working synthesisers.
And then the companies decided to make a cheap version of it because no-one could afford these,
or very few people could afford them.
And they condensed all that down into this.
London seemed almost empty in the '70s.
I used to walk around the streets, newspapers blowing around and great concrete walls.
And everything seemed grittier
and lost somehow, like we'd lost direction.
I'd wonder what that was about.
I wasn't angry about it any more,
as we were supposed to be as punks.
I just wanted to make music for it, the kind of music that I could hear.
# Standing in the dark
# Watching you glow
# Lifting a receiver
# Nobody I know
# Underpass... #
Underpass, with the sodium lights and you might be mugged.
Very '70s dystopian.
The spectral city.
# Now it's all gone
# World War something... #
This was the industrial bit of London that had served the docks and done some manufacturing
and both of which have gone.
It was like living in a Quatermass movie
because I realised and discovered that underneath all of this area
are the plague pits where the bodies were thrown.
That inevitably leaks into your music.
That is why a lot of my music is so dark, I think.
I come from Lancashire and where did I end up?
In a place even more sinister.
# Underpass... #
Fox's music wasn't the only synthetic portrait
of the '70s metropolis.
An experimental group of artists, known as Throbbing Gristle,
had been forging their own electronic industrial sounds
in their Death Factory down the road in Hackney.
Grim. It was grim.
It was very run-down. The factory was an old trouser factory and it was near London Fields.
In the basement, we were level with the plague pits.
That's why it got called the Death Factory.
There was still a lot of antagonism left over from,
I know it sounds unbelievable, but post-war.
There were still people there like the park keeper who used to be one of Moseley's brown shirts.
It sounds a cliche now but at the time
we were trying to reflect the sounds around us in some weird way.
Our studio was in, like, an industrial area.
There were different noises going on all the time.
We were trying to reflect all these sounds
and the way they all come together in this weird mishmash of electronic experimental textures.
# Hot... #
We felt a kinship with a lot of bands, especially Sheffield bands.
Yes, Cabaret Voltaire, those people. But the kinship was the fact that we were all independent.
Chris Carter in Throbbing Gristle was a nut for
Tangerine Dream and that kind of music
so there were hypnotic dreaming electronic Throbbing Gristle tracks
that were pretty in a funny sort of misshapen way.
I had the synths and because they were homemade synths, they weren't bought off the shelf,
they went Rolands and Korgs, they sounded quite unique anyway. They didn't sound like regular synths.
And then I built this effects unit.
I saw this design in Practical Electronics. You could combine all the effects together
and put a guitar through it or a voice or anything.
I started building these units for Throbbing Gristle and called them Gristlisers.
We were never punk. We are not punk.
We were an industrial experimental music band.
Come 1979, British electronic music was still being ignored by mainstream labels.
So, Dan Miller, founded Britain's first electronic indie, Mute,
to release recordings by kindred spirit, Fad Gadget,
as well as his own work.
I wasn't interested in rock music.
I really was only interested in electronic music.
I thought that was the future of where exciting music
was going to come from and I wanted to part of promoting that.
One of Mute's first releases would be strangely prescient.
I came across an old Chuck Berry songbook I had at home and I thought,
"I wonder what that sounds like done on synthesisers?"
# Long-distance information
# Give me Memphis, Tennessee
# Help me find the party
# Tryin' to get in touch with me... #
Everybody said, "You've got to release it, it's amazing." I thought, "OK, what shall I do?"
It doesn't fit in under the normal kind of name.
And then I thought,
what about if there was a group that were all teenagers
and their first choice of instrument was a synthesiser
rather than a guitar, because that hadn't happened yet.
John Peel... I had given it to him.
I was listening to the radio with a couple of friends.
He said, "We've got three versions of Memphis Tennessee.
"One is the original, the other two covers."
"One is really terrible and the other is really great.
I thought, "Oh, God." Fortunately, he liked mine. He played it twice.
Take it away.
That was one of the biggest moments of my entire career in music.
That's the end of tonight's programme in which you heard
the Desperate Bicycles, The Slits, The Mekons, Alternative TV, The UK Subs and Sham 69.
More of the same unpleasant racket on tomorrow night's programme.
Until then, from me, John Peel, goodnight and good riddance.
Getting your record on the Peel show was one thing.
But nobody was ready for what happened next.
What sort of make-up do you put on? You appear very white.
It's all natural. It's Max Factor pan stick and it's 28 which is natural, not white make-up.
And then I just powder that with skin tone powder and then just eyeliner.
# It's cold outside
# And the paint's peeling off of my walls
# There's a man outside... #
On 24th May 1979, the future finally arrived.
# In a long coat, grey hat smoking a cigarette... #
He was a punk. He loved sci-fi.
He even read JG Ballard but most impressively,
Gary Numan was on Top Of The Pops.
I wish magic was real, you know.
I wish fairies were real and all of that kind of stuff.
I love all that sort of thing.
Probably never grow up, I suppose, from that point of view.
# Now the light fades out... #
The first time he was on Top Of The Pops,
Either she phoned me, or I phoned her, "Are you watching?
"Have you seen this man, he's fantastic."
# There's a knock on the door... #
The look and the sound was so different.
# And just for a second I thought I remembered you... #
Just sort of alien, wasn't it?
I was in a lot of trouble at school.
I was sent to a child psychiatrist and things like that
which turned out to be, apparently, Asperger's.
I felt more comfortable on my own. The classic loner, I suppose.
Didn't go out drinking, didn't go out clubbing too much.
# So now I'm alone
# I can think for myself... #
I went to a studio to make a punk album,
which would have been my first album. And when I got there,
in a corner of the studio, there was a Minimoog.
Luckily, it had been left,
and this sound - which was a huge, big bassy thing - and the room shook.
I just realised you can press one key and all of this other stuff happens.
There was a massive amount of power in them
and depth that I'd just never heard.
I'd never heard of anything like it before. One note.
People like ourselves and Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League,
had all got used to the fact that we existed and there was somebody else sharing our space
and then along comes,
who, I guess at the time we thought was Johnny-come-lately.
"Who the hell is this guy from London
"who's on telly and having a massive hit record? Never heard of him."
Numan was Britain's first synth pin-up.
Hello, Sarah. Hello, Gary. Hello, Sarah.
My friend Cheryl read in a newspaper
that your mum does your hair. Is this true?
Yes, that's right. She's been doing it since I was about four.
All right, thank you. Bye-bye. Did she put the streak in the side as well? Yeah.
I really liked Gary's music.
I think he made the best records at that time.
I think, he, if anyone, he really condensed it into a form that was perfect at that point.
Numan would immediately show that his number-one success was no fluke.
Cars was part eulogy to JG Ballard and part testimony to living in '70s London.
I was in my car and a couple of men in a van swerved round me, pulled up in front,
got out and were clearly going to give me a bit of a hammering.
Trying to get me out, kicking the car, screaming and shouting.
# Here in my car
# I feel safest of all
# I can lock all my doors
# It's the only way to live
# In cars... #
I was pretty scared. I locked all my doors
and ended up driving up onto the pavement and shot along the pavement
because I couldn't go anywhere.
People obviously leaping out of the way. I was in a bit of a panic.
Cars is just about feeling safe in amongst people in a car
because no-one can get to you.
You're in your own little bubble.
# Here in my car
# Where the image breaks down
# Will you visit me, please?
# If I open my door, in cars... #
I was gutted when Cars came out. I thought it was really good.
# ..I was starting to think about leaving tonight... #
All this time we were convinced,
it was just a matter of time before we had a number one record.
Part arrogance and part stupidity,
and then somebody comes out of the blue and does it.
With sales totalling in excess of ten million,
Gary Numan was a new kind of pop star,
but being at the front of the synth way had inevitable drawbacks.
The Musicians Union tried to ban me for, I think, the first year when I was around
because they said I was putting proper musicians out of work,
although I had to be a member to get on Top Of The Pops.
Caused me loads of grief, actually. The music press were pretty harsh.
It wasn't rock 'n' roll. It wasn't honest, it wasn't working class, it wasn't worthy, it wasn't earthy,
it wasn't real, it wasn't sweaty, it wasn't manly. It was pretentious, pseudo intellectual.
I am absolutely convinced that Numan's career was shortened by
a nasty, nasty, vitriolic journalism.
But, again, what had there been before me?
It had been punk. The whole anti-hero thing.
Not only was I doing electronic music which they wasn't pleased with anyway,
but I'm standing up saying, I want to be a pop star, I love it.
All this anti-hero stuff before that, I wasn't anything to do with that.
I want to be famous. I want to be standing on stages
and I don't speak for the people because I don't even know them.
The decade would end with Numan as the unlikely synth-pop hero come good.
What lay around the corner would see the synth transformed
from post-punk experimental tool into THE pop instrument of choice.
As the '80s dawned, the future finally arrived
and it wasn't going to be alienated.
A shift to the right heralded a new era in Britain,
an era in which prosperity and material wealth
would be vaunted above all else.
There would be no room for experimental dreamers in the Me Decade.
You were a success or you didn't exist.
# One man on a lonely platform
# One case sitting by his side... #
The big hit of 1980 was Visage
whose Fade To Grey followed fast on the heels of Numan's success.
It seemed the future had passed The Human League by.
# Ah, ah-h-h-h
# We fade to grey.
# Fade to grey... #
I think there were three number-one hits.
Certainly Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin, Gary Numan
and I think the Flying Lizards might have been number one with Money
and I stood there, I think we'd done a couple of LPs and I thought, "We've blown it."
We now look like the also-rans
and everyone has taken the idea and done a lot better than us.
# The best things in life are free
# But you can give them to the birds and bees
# I want money Ooh, ooh-ooh
# That's what I want Ooh, ooh-ooh
# That's what I want... #
I turned up one day to be told I was being thrown out of the group.
And it was a bit like School Of Rock with Jack Black going,
"You can't throw me out of my own group."
We'd released Reproduction and Travelogue
and done all this touring.
There was a nagging undercurrent of dissatisfaction from the record company
that they weren't selling as many records as they hoped.
I think I'd made a big effort on a photo session
and Martin hadn't even turned up.
Suddenly, I was hearing these stories that Martin was never ever going to appear on a stage with me again
which I think he only said
because that was what Bryan Ferry had said about Eno in legend.
Whilst The Human League were crumbling,
something was brewing in the most unlikely of places.
Basildon was a new town. Built for the post-war East End overspill,
it wasn't one of pop music's more romantic places.
But a bunch of kids were going to ditch their guitars and reinvent synth music as pop.
When we were growing up, Basildon was a violent town.
We had the highest crime rate for five years on the trot.
I can remember going back to Basildon
and going down to the pub with some friends and I had, you know, black nail varnish.
Going to the bar and ordering a drink. I had forgotten about it
wasn't even thinking about it and some guy said to me,
"What the fuck have you got on your fingernails?"
Depeche Mode formed in 1980.
They had a spot at their local disco.
Croc's was a really ordinary disco. There was a crocodile, yeah.
It was quite a sorry-looking animal, but it was alive.
They had this night once a week where they'd play things like The Human League and Soft Cell
and also bands would appear there.
# I stand still stepping on the shady streets
# And I watch that man to a stranger
# You think you only know me when you turn on the light
# Now the room is lit with danger
# Complicating, circulating
# New life, new life
# Operating, generating
# New life, new life... #
When I first started playing synthesisers,
it would have been The Human League,
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, their very first album.
I was a big fan of Daniel Miller's work as the Silicon Teens
and as The Normal and also Fad Gadget who was on Mute Records.
Vince was sort of the boss of the band. He was unbelievably driven.
# Complicating, circulating New life... #
He earned £30 a week in the yoghurt factory and save £29.70, a week,
to save up to buy a synth.
He forced the pace.
This actually was the original Depeche Mode drum machine that we used for Life.
Dave's job before his song was to set the tempo.
Number seven would be fast, number two would be slow etc etc.
I owned Autobahn, that was really what got us to go out and buy our first synthesisers,
the whole...things that were happening around the time
with Kraftwerk and even early Human League stuff.
# ..New life, new life... #
I was really happy that the first time I heard them
was when they played live.
They started and I thought, this sounds interesting.
There were four little mono synths teetering on beer crates.
# I'm still stepping on shady streets
# And I watch that man to a stranger... #
They had a fan base with them and their fans weren't watching the band. They wear just dancing.
# ..The moon is lit with danger
# Complicated... #
Miller first saw Depeche Mode supporting Fad Gadget in east London and signed them to Mute.
None of us knew what we were doing.
By the time I met Depeche, we had just released our first album.
Compared to them, I was an experienced industry person but I knew nothing.
You know, they needed a bit of help in the studio,
so I introduced them to some ways of working.
Using sequencers, they'd never used a sequencer before.
Everything was played by hand.
This is the legendary Arp 2600. I bought it second-hand in 1979.
It was being sold, one of three being sold by Elton John's road crew after a world tour.
These were used on all the Depeche Mode albums I was involved with
especially on the first album,
where it was really one of only two synths that we used.
You can hear it going out of tune on that note there.
It's not really in tune at all.
MUSIC: "Just Can't Get Enough" by Depeche Mode
Depeche Mode would prove to be the real silicon teens.
The combination of sex appeal and synthesisers
would make them one of the biggest pop acts of 1981.
# When I'm with you baby I go out of my head
# And I just can't get enough And I just can't get enough
# All the things you do to me and everything you said
# I just can't get enough I just can't get enough
# We slip and slide as we fall in love
# And I just can't seem to get enough of... #
When Depeche Mode, when we were gigging
we'd all carry our synthesisers
and I, for some reason,
had to buy the heaviest synthesiser out of all of them, you know.
We didn't have cars or anything, we'd be on the train,
and this really is quite heavy.
So I'd have this thing under my arm, Fletcher would have a Moog,
Martin had a Yamaha, I think, on the train.
# I just can't get enough I just can't get enough... #
When we did our first Top Of The Pops we were on the train with these, our synthesisers.
You got the train to Top Of The Pops? Yeah.
From Basildon to Fenchurch Street and then on the underground.
But like Human before, it wouldn't all be plain sailing for Depeche.
I think, you know, you've got to remember that
during our pop period we had lots of fans and a lot of people liked us,
but there were a lot of people hated us.
Certainly the '80s was a real old battle royale
between us and journalism in general, music journalism.
It was just really, you know, pop.
You know, I think...
I can understand why people hated what we did, you know, looking back on it now.
It wasn't just the sound. It was...
Every TV that we were asked to do, we did, and it didn't matter how stupid it was.
You know, there's something very un-British about electronic music
to start with. They want bands to be like they were in the '60s -
four guys, guitar, bass and drums,
pretty lead singer, skinny jeans,
you know, conventional kind of thing.
That's really what sells newspapers, I guess.
# Playing on my radio and saying that you had to go... #
They'd written Depeche Mode off anyway as a teeny-bop band,
a one-hit wonder, especially once Vince left, they thought "Well, that's over."
# New day, turn away Wipe away the tear... #
In November '81, Clarke unexpectedly quit.
I was, and still am, a bit of a control freak.
So, with the advent of computers and sequencers,
I realised that I could make all of the music myself.
You know, I didn't need necessarily other people to play the parts.
I got a real satisfaction out of programming all of the parts myself.
Without their chief songwriter, it seemed the game was up for Depeche Mode before they really got going.
MUSIC: "Don't You Want Me?" by The Human League
In the same year, a reversal of fortune
had seen a new-look Human League finally get in on the pop action,
partly thanks to a line-up change
that took them out of the pages of the NME and put them on the front page of Smash Hits.
# You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar
# When I met you
# I picked you out, I shook you up and turned you around
# Turned you into someone new... #
We got Joanne and Susan simply because we were booked to do a European tour
and Martyn and myself became unable to be in the same group and we just thought,
"Well, get some nice high vocals, yeah, let's try a girl.
"Let's be a bit different and try a girl."
From that the step was that if we were gonna take a girl on the road
with a load of terrible randy idiots like us
there ought to be two of them to look after each other.
Joanne and Susan turned up...
I was being sarcastic there, by the way, we were sitting there reading books, really.
# You better change it back or we will both be sorry
# Don't you want me, baby?
# Don't you want me, oh?
# Don't you want me, baby...? #
Oakley spotted the girls dancing in a futurist night club in Sheffield.
Our parents thought, "There's some ulterior motive,
"something's going on."
But then Philip came round and met both sets of parents
and they thought he was a decent enough guy
and then we went to school with our parents and they talked to the head teacher,
who thought that it would be good for our education
to have six weeks going round Europe
because we could go to art galleries and things like that.
# Put your hand in a party wave
# Pass around
# Make a shroud pulling combs through a backwash frame... #
We never went to said art galleries!
We did go to a lot of clubs.
Yeah. We went to Cologne Cathedral,
that was about the most cultural thing we ever did.
# Get around town, get around town
# Where the people look good Where the music is loud
# Get around town No need to stand proud
# Add your voice to the sound of the crowd... #
It also meant that we could appeal to women as well as men.
The early Human League was a very male-based group
and really only lads in long coats liked us.
And some transvestites.
OK, pop music, let's go.
Anyone here like The Human League?
# The shades from a pencil peer... #
Released in 1981, Dare crystallised the new synth-pop sound.
# A fold in an eyelid... #
We did something that could only be done at that stage.
While we were doing it, they were bringing the machines in that enabled us to do it.
For instance, the very first Lynn drum I think that arrived in England
came into our studio and we took the drums off Sound Of The Crowd and put the Lynn drum on.
Without that, probably, it wouldn't have worked.
I remember when Martyn got the Lynn drum
and it was like a child at Christmas getting the first fire engine or something.
He was jumping up and down and all the boys were, "Oh, it's a drum!"
Before that, apparently, the drums had been one of the hardest things to do
and now there was this box that was this big and you could program it.
They were all very excited and we were a bit like, "OK, boys."
Now the flood gates were open.
The rush to market swept every aspect of British life in the early '80s.
Everything was now up for grabs, including pop music.
In an attempt to eclipse his ex-bandmates, former Human League member Martyn Ware
would cash in on the times with a concept album.
We were doing the day shifts, they were doing the night shifts in the same studio.
They were making Dare, we were making Penthouse And Pavement.
I've never been so motivated in my life, believe me.
I said, "We're gonna make it stylish, fantastic.
"Finally, the shackles are off, we can start using other instruments
"cos the original manifesto is broken,
"but we're still gonna make it predominantly electronic."
And so the idea was that suddenly we're not a group,
we are ripping open the facade and going,
"No, this is great music, but it's a business."
It really is a business. It doesn't matter.
Bob Dylan can sing all he wants.
He's busy brown-nosing the A&R men behind the scenes.
# Now here comes my job
# Credit bleeding with the mob
# Dreams become ideals... #
But, ironically, and we were totally anti-Thatcher
and always had been, you know, Fascist Groove Thang etc.
It got taken on board by the aspirational yuppie culture
in the early '80s as their kind of theme tunes a lot of the time.
Like Let's All Make A Bomb.
They completely missed the point of the song, totally, and it was like,
"Yeah, mate, remember listening to that, yeah. it's fantastic, mate.
"Love the ponytails."
MUSIC: "Penthouse And Pavement" by Heaven 17
Not everyone wanted in on booming Britain.
Cabaret Voltaire were neither into ponytails nor popularity.
Their vision of Britain was concerned with the inner city riots
that erupted across the country in summer '81.
People say that The Specials' Ghost Town
was the soundtrack to the unrest of that year, but a lot of people
alternatively think that Red Mecca was the sound of that.
I think I've said in the past,
somehow that insurrection on the streets kind of found its way into the music.
You kind of took some heart in the fact
that some people were kicking back against the system,
albeit in quite a crude manner, and were prepared to take on the police.
You know, we weren't paranoid, this stuff was slowly happening, you know,
the rise of surveillance culture,
the rise of the right wing in America and the fundamentalist Christians.
Eh, oh la, in the name of Jesus.
Then you've got like the revolution in Iran
with the Shah being deposed
and the general feeling that things are moving to the right.
Meanwhile, something strangely synthetic was happening in the sleazy underbelly of London's Soho.
MUSIC: "Tainted Love" by Soft Cell
I was going to lots of Northern Soul clubs so I was listening to
kind of Kraftwerk and Northern Soul,
which is where things developed from, really, in my head.
HE PLAYS "Tainted Love"
There... I missed it.
If we had the money we'd come to Soho and just hang around Soho,
just getting ideas, which is where the name came from.
# Sometimes I feel I've got to
# Run away... #
And Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret was a bar back in 1980 or whatever.
That's where that photograph's from. We were just kind of fascinated,
being these two northern hicks from the sticks
and suddenly, "Wow, this is amazing."
It was kind of glamorous and dangerous.
Lots of neon lights and stuff, which we were fascinated by.
# Now I run from you
# This tainted love you've given
# I give you all a boy could give you
# Take my tears and that's not nearly all
# Tainted love Oh, oh, oh, tainted love... #
The first people doing the electro thing
really caned the alienation, "I am hollow inside" thing,
like Gary Numan, and you get this second wave
where you've got the cold, glistening synth sound but the singer's actually very emotional.
Marc Almond's a good example of that, torridly emotional.
# ..Someone to hold you tight And you'll think love is to pray... #
It's like there's a super-passionate singer
and then the one other person, usually a guy with a synthesiser,
and I think they're using the synth more as like
a miniature or condensed orchestra,
like they can get all the sounds they need out of this one box.
So really it's more like electronic soul music.
# Take my tears and that's not nearly all... #
Where Soft Cell led, others would follow.
Having left Depeche Mode, Vince Clarke would form his own duo
with a rhythm-and-blues singer, also from Basildon.
Vince I met for the first time
when I was 11. We both went to the same Saturday morning music school.
It was a council-run thing where
I believe he was playing violin and I was playing oboe.
Even though we'd never spoken in that time I recognised him for the fact that there was three of them,
three brothers with this white-blond hair looking like a family of ducks going across the road, you know.
Once I left Depeche I had some songs
which I wanted to demo for the record company.
One of them being Only You.
# Looking from the window above
# It's like a story of love... #
Anyway, I got in touch with Alison cos I vaguely knew her.
We didn't have plans to form a band or anything, we had no history together.
We just went from the demo to the recording studio
to making the first record.
# All I needed was the love you gave
# All I needed for another day
# And all I ever knew
# Only you... #
I wasn't overly interested in technology,
I couldn't even afford a record player or cassette player so the idea of buying hardware...
There's no point in lusting after the things you can't have.
Like me thinking about a mini-skirt.
# Listen to the words that you say
# It's getting harder to stay
# When I see you... #
Vince Clarke then forms another one of these classic
sort of fire and ice groups.
The ice is the synth and the fire is Alison Moyet,
so that's almost like a template for '80s pop -
the synthesiser guy, the synthesiser boffin,
and then the super-passionate singer,
usually female or maybe gay male. It's kind of...
The duo replaces the rock band.
It's an affront to rockism, isn't it?
Just the look of those bands.
# All I needed was the love you gave... #
When we first started working in Yazoo,
it was like he was effectively suffering from a very recent divorce.
# Only you. #
It's like these were his childhood mates, Depeche Mode.
This was a huge thing for him, to go from being a local boy,
like the rest of us, without a great deal of hope,
without many prospects or any qualifications.
The last thing I'd heard was he was driving vans for R White's, crashing them and leaving them.
MUSIC: "Don't Go" by Yazoo
Yazoo signed to Mute Records in 1982 and, to his surprise,
Daniel Miller found himself with another wildly successful pop act.
# Came in from the city Walked into the door
# I turned around when I heard the sound of footsteps on the floor
# Love just like addiction Now I'm hooked on you
# I need some time to get it right Your love's gonna see me through
# Can't stop now, don't you know I ain't ever gonna let you go
# Don't go... #
There was nothing right about it.
It was quite soulful music with a very cold, electronic beat.
She didn't fit the typecast female pop-star image at all.
# Hey, go get the doctor... #
You know, and it's become a cliche now, but at that time,
the quiet second bloke on synth wasn't a cliche.
# Can't stop now, don't you know
# I ain't ever gonna let you go
# Don't go... #
In the 18 months that we existed, myself and Alison never got to know each other.
We never went out to a pub to have a drink
or did any of that stuff, any socialising.
It was just in the studio, working.
To actually come across somebody who was unfathomable,
who you could not penetrate, and at the same time had,
regardless of what he says, a burning ambition, he was an ambitious boy.
What was amazing about it is he actually achieved his ambitions, which again,
coming from where I came from, you didn't see that very often.
And I wanted to penetrate him!
Not biblically, obviously.
# I ain't never gonna let you go Don't go... #
I just wanted to be in the studio so much.
I would have been in there 24 hours a day.
It was like being in a sweet shop.
Synth-pop was becoming increasingly popular and increasingly grand.
OMD would enjoy three top 10 hits in 1982,
two of which were about Joan of Arc.
We were quite intellectual, you know.
Pompous, stuck up our own arses, I guess you could say.
We were going on Top Of The Pops
with Bonnie Langford and Elton John and Cliff Richard amongst others,
and we were playing a song that was in waltz time,
that started with 45 seconds of distortion and had no chorus,
and had a Mellotron playing what sounded like bagpipes.
Explain how it works. Well, actually, it's fairly straightforward.
It's a musical computer.
The right hand is lead instruments with a choice of 18 different ones,
and the left hand is rhythms in this half and backgrounds in this half.
It's all been fed on to hundreds of tape tracks.
The Mellotron is a very early sampler before samplers went digital.
It was a very analogue thing.
Here's a French accordion with a Viennese waltz.
It was nightmare to use on stage.
We were playing in this tiny town in the middle of France and the Mellotron was completely out of tune
because all the town were drawing the power down so much cooking,
the motor wouldn't spin fast enough.
Thank you. Well, David isn't a musician, as you know,
but I have a professional pianist here who can really show you what the Mellotron can do.
The number of people who thought that the equipment
wrote the song for you...
"Well, anybody could do it with the same equipment you've got."
Fuck off.
# If Joan of Arc had a heart
# Would she give it as a gift? #
It's all played by hand.
Believe me, if there was a button on a synth or a drum machine
that said, "hit single", I would have pressed it
as often as anybody else would have, but there isn't.
It was all written by real human beings and it was all played by hand,
to the point where Paul and I thought we were gonna get arthritis
in our fingers from playing bass lines like that for hours on end.
MUSIC: "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" by Eurythmics
Between 1981 and 1983, synth-pop reigned supreme.
Our charts were chock full of duos and groups
who set aside changing the world
in favour of making it with a synth on Top Of The Pops.
# Some of them want to use you
# Some of them want to get used by you
# Some of them want to abuse you... #
You've got to remember that it was the first time ever
that someone could sit and make a record on their own.
Eurythmics came along
and they did Sweet Dreams in their basement.
They recorded it on an eight-track tape machine.
Annie sang Sweet Dreams into a little Shure microphone,
holding it in her hand, and won a Grammy for it.
MUSIC: "Vienna" by Ultravox
And in 1982, along came a song
that turned the alienation of the original synth pioneers
into a full-blown epic.
Ultravox would score one of the biggest synth-pop hits ever,
called Vienna, which has that total fetishism of Mitteleuropa, Vienna.
It's the Habsburg Empire, the romance of central Europe.
# Freezing breath on the window pane
# Lying and waiting... #
The movies we were watching and the music we were listening to at the time all came out of Europe
and the history that Europe had, you know, Vienna being
this beautifully romantic city, this beautiful place.
You put all that together and you've got this fantastic image, this wonderful...
I'd never been to Vienna when we wrote the song, I didn't know anything about Vienna.
# Reaching out in a piercing cry It stays with you until... #
You try putting that down, that you're gonna write a song
that is a four-and-a-half-minute long electronic ballad
that speeds up in the middle with a viola solo thrown in -
it doesn't equate, it doesn't work.
But at the time when you're young and naive, naivety is a wonderful thing.
# This means nothing to me
# Oh, Vienna. #
Not to be outdone by their English synth-pop derivatives,
Kraftwerk would return in 1982
to score their only number one single success,
cashing in with a song that they'd originally recorded in 1978.
MUSIC: "The Model" by Kraftwerk
With The Model that was, in England,
to be a hit, that was a complete different story.
We didn't expect it ourselves.
# She's a model and she's looking good... #
The reasons was the following - we had already a single to be played
on the radio in England and it was Computer World.
The man of the EMI London house,
he didn't know what to put on the B-side.
And he thought and he thought and he thought, maybe two days longer,
and suddenly, he had the great idea to put The Model from the last album,
Man Machine, on the B-side.
And then they sent the single to radios, and 80% of the radios played the B-side.
# She's going out tonight Loves drinking just champagne... #
By 1983, Britain had entered an era of conspicuous consumption and greed
that made the late '70s seem like a foreign country.
Loadsamoney!
It would provide inspiration for Depeche Mode's new chief songwriter.
# The handshake seals a contract
# From the contract There's no turning back
# The turning point of a career... #
The early '80s were just a terrible time in Britain.
And I was young and impressionable,
and that was really when I first felt like
I was writing from the heart, really.
# The grabbing hands grab all they can
# All for themselves, after all
# The grabbing hands grab all they can
# All for themselves, after all
# It's a competitive world... #
Around the time of Construction Time Again,
samplers had just really come out.
We would just... It was a whole revelation to us.
We were just going out and smashing pieces of metal
with sledgehammers, raiding the kitchen drawer
for all the utensils to make percussion sounds.
Just anything we could get our hands on.
We've got this vague idea at the moment which was used on the demo.
We've got this pebble, which we got from the mud.
Yeah, look, white spots.
They're the stinging nettles.
Anyway, the idea is to roll the pebble on this piece of metal along here,
this window frame,
thus causing...
thus making this sort of sound.
RATTLING
Construction Time Again really started to see us form as the basis
of what we are today.
RATTLING
That was a lot better. Anyway, the idea is to take that sequence
and to make an interesting rhythm out of it,
and to sequence it all through the song,
so people dance.
Depeche Mode pioneered their new sampler-based sound in London's Shoreditch.
In those days, Shoreditch, there was not a soul around.
Now, of course, with Hoxton etc etc,
it is the trendy place to be,
but it wasn't when we were at the Garden Studios.
There was not a soul to be seen.
# Get out the crane Construction time again
# What is it this time... #
I remember, there was one sound in particular
that was us actually hitting a piece of corrugated iron
that was the side of a building site,
and the sample sort of went like...
"Krr! Oi!", and that was the site foreman.
# It's a lot It's a lot
# It's a lot It's a lot... #
We seemed, in the '80s, to be doing a one-band crusade for electronic music
against the music press, that was overwhelmingly rock-based.
We would often do interviews with journalists and we'd have
a big argument, because they just didn't consider
electronic music to be real music.
# There's a new game we like to play, you see
# The game with added reality
# You treat me like a dog Get me down on my knees
# We call it master and servant... #
You know, we got accused at certain times of being like a very subversive pop band, and I do think that we did
get away with some stuff that was probably risque for the radio, just because we used it in a pop context.
# With you on top and me underneath... #
In our early career, there was things like Master And Servant and stuff.
# Let's play master and servant
# Let's play master and servant... #
Some of the reviews were unbelievably vicious.
You just couldn't... Real hatred for the band.
Real hatred. I don't know why. It wasn't British, really.
A journalist once said,
"The music will appeal to alienated youth everywhere, and Germans."
HE LAUGHS
Depeche Mode would eventually find a sympathetic home for their music in America.
For a lot of Americans, England just means gay.
They think it's like a conflation of Oscar Wilde and various ideas about British boarding school.
For people who feel different, or misfits in America,
England does actually seem like this utopia.
They imagine everyone in England walks around wearing eyeliner and plays synthesisers, you know?
And so to be a Depeche Mode fan in America
was actually quite a dissident thing.
Depeche Mode were the only act who were truly successful in exporting the British electronic sound.
The band would enjoy massive popularity in America
throughout the '80s and beyond,
consistently filling stadiums across the land.
Back in Britain, in '83,
the sampler was moving synth-pop in a different direction.
Suppose I want to send my loved one a rather special musical greeting, well, I can.
First, let me give the computer an idea of the sound that I actually want to send.
So, I'll prime it again.
And now I'll speak into the mic. Hello!
And we have to wait a couple of seconds now for the sound wave to come up. There it is.
SAMPLER: # Hello, hello, hello Hello, hello, hello. #
Hello, dear.
When we arrived in it, the Emulator had just been invented.
It was completely riveting, because it had James Brown going, "Please!"
You played up and down the keyboard.
Had a string quartet or an orchestra.
It had a famous Beethoven "Rumph, rumph."
# West End girl... #
The first record we made, West End Girl,
every sound was actually a sample played on the same keyboard
which looked just like a Bontempi chord organ.
The idea was to take real life and put it against beautiful or dance or both music.
Because we were the last of the thing that started with The Human League,
and we were probably the first of the thing where pop music was raised to dance music.
# In a West End town a dead end world
# The East End boys and West End girls
# Ooh, in a West End town a dead end world
# East End boys West End girls... #
The Pet Shop Boys gave us a glimpse of what the future held for British electronic music.
But the band that would truly spearhead the shift from synth-pop
to dance music had evolved out of the ashes of Joy Division.
Whilst in America, New Order would have a synthetic epiphany.
Kind of at the period where Ian had died
and we were going recording in New York.
We were spending a lot of time in New York and I was going
to night clubs after the studio.
Every night.
I remember sitting there on these kind of steps in a club and thinking,
"Wouldn't it be great if one day,
"our music was played in a place like this."
That sort of planted a seed in my head, really,
that got me interested in more in synthesisers.
You know, if you play an encore or something, you know,
it's like, you're just falling into the trap, you know,
it's a phoney thing doing an encore, everyone expects it.
"Ooh, let's get these machines to do a track and we'll just go on
"as if we're doing an encore, press a button and then bugger off."
That was the idea.
When Blue Monday came out, a lot of people didn't like it.
They went, "What, what...
"it doesn't sound like New Order, what are you doing?
"It doesn't sound like you're supposed to sound."
A lot of people were like, "I don't like that." Then, it just took off.
# How does it feel?
# To treat me like you do?
# When you laid your hands upon me
# And told me who you are... #
I guess, people went on holidays
and they hear it in night clubs in Spain and Greece and stuff,
and when they came back,
they would buy it'd be a big hit over and over again.
Blue Monday's inscrutable club cool would make it become the biggest-selling 12-inch of all time,
originally released in 1983, it heralded the future for British electronica.
A new age of dance music, unconcerned with pop charts and commercial appeal,
would gain a massive following that thrives to this day.
For those electronic pioneers who had brought the synth into British pop music, it was the end of an era.
It sort of starts, I guess, round about '83.
It was just overdone. It was saturated.
There was too much synth-pop around.
# This is the sound of all of our friends... #
It's all very well if it's being on a synth, but the actual melodies and the way the songs
were structured were really pretty traditional and quite trite.
It wasn't that inventive as electronic music.
# Somebody's got their eye on me
# Perhaps I should invite him up for tea... #
Towards the middle of the '80s, there wasn't so much encouragement
from the record companies to do more experimental stuff.
I meant that initial supernova of post-punk, it was dying away.
And slowly but surely,
the cancerous growth of market-led A&R-ing
started invidiously creeping up
and blandifying and homogenising the musical market, in my view.
We were a bit lost by then.
It was all a bit... We felt we'd achieved it.
We thought we'd proved our point, and it just looked like
we didn't have anything left to prove.
The commodification of synth-pop marked the end of a golden era
in which a generation of post-punk musicians had taken the synth
from the fringes of experimentation to the centre of the pop stage.
Out of the '70s and into the '80s.
At the time, it was just really, really exciting, and it was exciting to be a part of a musical movement
that had never been done before, that was completely different.
It wasn't a rehash of anything.
Those early electronic records, they'd ever been done before, so, it was a fine time.
# I only knew you for a while... #
We were trying to do something new. That's specifically why we chose electronics
and embraced every new piece of equipment we could get our hands on or afford.
We wanted to sweep away all of the old rock cliches and stereotypes
and the lead guitar solos and long hair and everything.
And then what happens towards the end of the '80s and even worse in the mid '90s,
everybody decides that guitars are back in, synthesisers are somehow old-fashioned,
and you get Oasis! Horror!
# We'll always be together
# However far it seems
# Love never ends
# We'll always be together
# Together in electric dreams
# Because the friendship that you gave
# Has taught me to be brave
# No matter where I go
# I'll never find a better prize... #