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This programme contains some strong language. | 0:00:02 | 0:00:06 | |
SYNTHESISER PLAYS VARYING NOTES | 0:00:06 | 0:00:10 | |
Welcome to a time | 0:00:11 | 0:00:13 | |
when there were no guitars and no drums, just synthesisers. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:18 | |
It was the 1970s. | 0:00:21 | 0:00:23 | |
The place was Britain, and our heroes were a maverick bunch | 0:00:23 | 0:00:26 | |
of young pioneers, obsessed by Kraftwerk and science fiction. | 0:00:26 | 0:00:30 | |
All across the country, these synthetic dreamers would imagine | 0:00:33 | 0:00:37 | |
the very sound of the future - yesterday. | 0:00:37 | 0:00:40 | |
And by the '80s, their dreams would become a reality, as Britain went synth-pop. | 0:00:42 | 0:00:47 | |
Welcome to a time when machines ruled the world. | 0:00:55 | 0:00:59 | |
# I stand still stepping on the shady streets | 0:01:00 | 0:01:03 | |
# And I watch that man to a stranger | 0:01:03 | 0:01:05 | |
# You think you only know me when you turn on the light | 0:01:05 | 0:01:08 | |
# Now the room is lit with danger | 0:01:08 | 0:01:12 | |
# Complicating, circulating new life | 0:01:12 | 0:01:16 | |
# New life | 0:01:16 | 0:01:18 | |
# Operating, generating | 0:01:18 | 0:01:21 | |
# New life, new life. # | 0:01:21 | 0:01:24 | |
FANFARE | 0:01:30 | 0:01:33 | |
By the 1970s, we were living in the future. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:41 | |
Our cities were going space age. | 0:01:41 | 0:01:45 | |
MUSIC: "William Tell Overture" by G Rossini | 0:01:45 | 0:01:50 | |
Victorian slums had been torn down and replaced by ultra-modern concrete high-rises. | 0:01:50 | 0:01:56 | |
Entertainment also looked to the future. | 0:02:09 | 0:02:12 | |
Our cinema and television screens were full of tantalising glimpses | 0:02:12 | 0:02:16 | |
of a future that seemed just around the corner. | 0:02:16 | 0:02:19 | |
Released in 1971, Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange was a futuristic | 0:02:32 | 0:02:37 | |
and violent vision of concrete Britain that captured the zeitgeist. | 0:02:37 | 0:02:41 | |
The film's soundtrack was composed by American synth pioneer Walter, now Wendy, Carlos. | 0:02:45 | 0:02:51 | |
It would have a profound effect on a generation of would-be musicians. | 0:02:51 | 0:02:55 | |
That was probably a lot of people's maybe first time | 0:03:01 | 0:03:04 | |
they'd heard electronic music, | 0:03:04 | 0:03:06 | |
on the score to that film. It made me forever associate | 0:03:06 | 0:03:08 | |
classical music with people getting their heads kicked in, | 0:03:08 | 0:03:13 | |
which is kind of a bit strange. | 0:03:13 | 0:03:15 | |
The soundtrack to Clockwork Orange - fantastic synth sounds in that. | 0:03:16 | 0:03:22 | |
Big Moog synthesiser that Wendy Carlos used. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:26 | |
And they were all orchestrated. | 0:03:26 | 0:03:29 | |
Well, Wendy, who then said she was Walter, I never quite worked out | 0:03:30 | 0:03:34 | |
what was going on there, was an absolute inspiration, you know. | 0:03:34 | 0:03:39 | |
The first time we had ever heard that sort of absorbent synth | 0:03:39 | 0:03:43 | |
bass sound...just raved about it. | 0:03:43 | 0:03:46 | |
Some of the people who would be future post-punk people, | 0:03:47 | 0:03:50 | |
would listen to the three or four | 0:03:50 | 0:03:52 | |
original compositions that Carlos did on that soundtrack | 0:03:52 | 0:03:56 | |
that were much more sinister and foreboding. | 0:03:56 | 0:03:59 | |
There was a kind of linkage made there between those sounds and | 0:03:59 | 0:04:02 | |
the idea of a cold future, a bleak future, and that probably sunk quite deeply into the psyche | 0:04:02 | 0:04:09 | |
of a lot of young musicians at that time. | 0:04:09 | 0:04:11 | |
For a generation of electronic dreamers, | 0:04:11 | 0:04:15 | |
Carlos' soundtrack would offer a glimpse of an alienated synthetic future. | 0:04:15 | 0:04:19 | |
But the true divine spark | 0:04:19 | 0:04:21 | |
would arrive on our television screens in 1975. | 0:04:21 | 0:04:27 | |
Tomorrow's World gave Britain its first glimpse of Kraftwerk, | 0:04:27 | 0:04:30 | |
a German band who played only electronic instruments. | 0:04:30 | 0:04:35 | |
ELECTRONIC DRUM BEAT | 0:04:37 | 0:04:41 | |
They would invade our shores later the same year. | 0:04:42 | 0:04:45 | |
We played one of our first gigs in 1975 | 0:04:51 | 0:04:54 | |
of our English tour in Liverpool. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
The Wings Over Britain tour was playing the same night in the town. | 0:04:58 | 0:05:03 | |
That was also the reason why our hall was only half crowded. | 0:05:03 | 0:05:07 | |
# Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn | 0:05:07 | 0:05:09 | |
# Fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn. # | 0:05:09 | 0:05:12 | |
All of our posters were stuck right next to the posters of the Wings, | 0:05:12 | 0:05:16 | |
so it made us proud of course, you know. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:19 | |
# Die Fahrbahn ist ein graues Band | 0:05:19 | 0:05:20 | |
# Weisse Streifen, gruener Rand. # | 0:05:20 | 0:05:23 | |
Amazingly they came to Liverpool in October of '75, | 0:05:23 | 0:05:28 | |
and I sat in seat Q36 | 0:05:28 | 0:05:30 | |
and witnessed the first day of rest of my life. | 0:05:30 | 0:05:35 | |
'75 was all the era of long hair and flared trousers and guitar solos. | 0:05:35 | 0:05:39 | |
And these guys all came out in suits and ties. | 0:05:39 | 0:05:42 | |
Two of them looked like they were playing electronic tea trays with wired-up knitting needles. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:47 | |
And I was just...blown away. It really - it was incredible. | 0:05:47 | 0:05:51 | |
We had no long hair, we didn't wear blue jeans. | 0:05:54 | 0:05:57 | |
We had suits on, grey suits. Short hair, you know. | 0:05:57 | 0:06:00 | |
And we looked like the... | 0:06:00 | 0:06:02 | |
children of Wernher von Braun or Werner von Siemens. | 0:06:02 | 0:06:06 | |
We saw ourselves as engineer musicians, like that, | 0:06:06 | 0:06:11 | |
instead of dancing, a voice on stage to arouse the girls, you know. | 0:06:11 | 0:06:15 | |
The interesting thing afterwards, there was a knock at our backstage door. | 0:06:19 | 0:06:24 | |
It was a band. They were called Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. | 0:06:24 | 0:06:28 | |
And the leader, Andy McCluskey, was really astonished and happy | 0:06:28 | 0:06:33 | |
that he was meeting us in person. | 0:06:33 | 0:06:35 | |
And he said, "You know, guys, you have shown us the future! | 0:06:35 | 0:06:40 | |
"This is it! We throw away our guitars tomorrow and buy all synthesisers." | 0:06:40 | 0:06:45 | |
In terms of inspiring people to not just have a synthesiser in their rock band, | 0:06:45 | 0:06:53 | |
but to be completely electronic, | 0:06:53 | 0:06:55 | |
I think you can never underestimate the impact of Kraftwerk. | 0:06:55 | 0:06:58 | |
Trans-Europe Express had the same impact on the synth-pop | 0:06:58 | 0:07:02 | |
as anarchy in the UK had on people who wanted to be punk rockers. | 0:07:02 | 0:07:06 | |
'Next year, Kraftwerk hope to eliminate the keyboards altogether | 0:07:06 | 0:07:10 | |
'and build jackets with electronic lapels which can be played by touch.' | 0:07:10 | 0:07:14 | |
In British music in the mid '70s, the synth was a remote beast. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:25 | |
Although they would become much cheaper later | 0:07:25 | 0:07:27 | |
in the decade, a synthesiser then could cost as much as a small house. | 0:07:27 | 0:07:31 | |
They were associated with rich and technically gifted progressive musicians. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:37 | |
Until punk came along, you had to be Keith Emerson. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:48 | |
If you wanted to be in a band, you had to have learned your instrument for at least eight or nine years | 0:07:48 | 0:07:54 | |
before you would dare come out and play it. | 0:07:54 | 0:07:56 | |
And it was simply the inspiration of The Damned and The Clash... | 0:07:56 | 0:08:03 | |
that said, get up and do it, you know. | 0:08:03 | 0:08:06 | |
Do your best. If it's crap, maybe the simplicity will get you through. | 0:08:06 | 0:08:11 | |
Whilst the music didn't concern itself with synthesisers, the attitude of the punk movement | 0:08:17 | 0:08:21 | |
would inspire those with an interest in electronic music to do it themselves. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:27 | |
# Oh | 0:08:27 | 0:08:28 | |
# White riot - I wanna riot | 0:08:29 | 0:08:32 | |
# White riot - a riot of my own | 0:08:32 | 0:08:34 | |
# White riot - I wanna riot | 0:08:34 | 0:08:35 | |
# White riot - a riot... # | 0:08:35 | 0:08:37 | |
All the infrastructure around punk we absolutely loved. | 0:08:37 | 0:08:40 | |
It's just that the actual music we saw as being quite old-fashioned. | 0:08:40 | 0:08:44 | |
And I think they had been a bit of a one-trick pony. | 0:08:44 | 0:08:47 | |
So what we did was, we took the attitudes of punk and give it | 0:08:47 | 0:08:51 | |
a different context, ie, let's make music that nobody's heard before. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:56 | |
Across the country, small pockets of experimentation surfaced, inspired primarily by punk and Kraftwerk. | 0:08:58 | 0:09:05 | |
We were in my studio at home in south-east London. | 0:09:06 | 0:09:10 | |
One day I opened my e-mail inbox, there were 10 e-mails | 0:09:10 | 0:09:14 | |
from a very disparate bunch of people saying, | 0:09:14 | 0:09:17 | |
you've got to go to eBay now and buy this. | 0:09:17 | 0:09:20 | |
What was Kraftwerk's original vocoder, | 0:09:20 | 0:09:22 | |
which was being sold on eBay. And it was the one that was used on Autobahn. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:27 | |
I thought, well, this is the equivalent for a guitarist of getting | 0:09:30 | 0:09:34 | |
Jimi Hendrix's guitar that was used on Purple Haze or something. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:37 | |
MUSIC STARTS | 0:09:37 | 0:09:40 | |
# TVOD... # | 0:09:44 | 0:09:46 | |
I first got a synthesiser in...1977. | 0:09:46 | 0:09:51 | |
And I bought a second-hand Korg 700S from Macari's Music Shop | 0:09:53 | 0:09:58 | |
in Charing Cross Road. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:00 | |
The thing that pissed me off about punk was you had to learn three chords to be in a punk band. | 0:10:00 | 0:10:06 | |
If you had a synthesiser, all you had to do was press one key with a finger. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:10 | |
# I don't need a TV screen | 0:10:10 | 0:10:13 | |
# I just stick the aerial | 0:10:14 | 0:10:15 | |
# Into my skin. # | 0:10:16 | 0:10:18 | |
Advances in technology in the late '70s heralded the invention | 0:10:18 | 0:10:22 | |
of the affordable synth, costing no more than an electric guitar. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:26 | |
Daniel Miller used his to form The Normal, an experimental act that supported punk groups. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:32 | |
Miller drew on the work of English author JG Ballard | 0:10:37 | 0:10:40 | |
whose Crash was another futuristic vision of Britain. | 0:10:40 | 0:10:44 | |
# Warm | 0:10:44 | 0:10:45 | |
# Leatherette | 0:10:45 | 0:10:47 | |
# Warm | 0:10:47 | 0:10:49 | |
# Leatherette... # | 0:10:49 | 0:10:51 | |
I'd just broken up with a girlfriend who I was very much in love with. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:55 | |
And a friend of mine said, read this book. And I read it, | 0:10:55 | 0:10:58 | |
and it really had a huge... | 0:10:58 | 0:11:02 | |
I'm using all these puns, like impact. | 0:11:02 | 0:11:05 | |
But it did have a huge impact. | 0:11:05 | 0:11:08 | |
# See the breaking glass in the underpass... # | 0:11:08 | 0:11:11 | |
It wasn't like science fiction in the sense it was outer space and stuff like that. | 0:11:11 | 0:11:15 | |
It felt like it was five minutes into the future, and I loved that aspect of it, | 0:11:15 | 0:11:20 | |
the fact it was so outrageous, but so possible at the same time. | 0:11:20 | 0:11:24 | |
# Leatherette... # | 0:11:24 | 0:11:26 | |
Warm Leatherette by The Normal. The Normal was the alias of Daniel Miller. | 0:11:26 | 0:11:31 | |
# Hear the crashing steel... # | 0:11:31 | 0:11:32 | |
The lyrics are just a precis of some of the concepts in Crash, | 0:11:32 | 0:11:36 | |
Ballard's novel, which was about people who have car accidents and find that | 0:11:36 | 0:11:41 | |
thereafter their sexuality has been diverted and they are obsessed with being turned on by car crashes. | 0:11:41 | 0:11:48 | |
So you had the lyric like, "The hand brake penetrates your thigh - quick, let's make love before you die." | 0:11:48 | 0:11:53 | |
# Warm | 0:11:53 | 0:11:56 | |
# Leatherette... # | 0:11:56 | 0:11:58 | |
The music was supposed to be visual. | 0:11:58 | 0:12:00 | |
You know, like driving along a highway with big buildings either side and going into a tunnel. | 0:12:00 | 0:12:06 | |
There's quite a lot of humour in it really. | 0:12:06 | 0:12:08 | |
It wasn't meant be apocalyptic or dystopian. | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
Miller was one of Britain's first synth poets. And he wasn't alone. | 0:12:14 | 0:12:19 | |
In the north of England, a bunch of computer programmers dreamt of a similar feature. | 0:12:20 | 0:12:27 | |
We loved JG Ballard. | 0:12:27 | 0:12:29 | |
In fact, Roxy had a song, To HB, about Humphrey Bogart. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:33 | |
And we had a song, 4JG, which was about JG Ballard. | 0:12:33 | 0:12:39 | |
The Future were a bunch of sci-fi nerds from Sheffield. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:42 | |
They formed in '77 and played only synthesisers. | 0:12:42 | 0:12:47 | |
When I bought my Korg 700S in...1976, | 0:12:53 | 0:12:58 | |
it was the first time there was a monophonic synthesiser | 0:12:58 | 0:13:02 | |
which you could do stuff with, which was kind of domestic level, entry level, in terms of price. | 0:13:02 | 0:13:06 | |
It was £350, I think. | 0:13:06 | 0:13:08 | |
And I remember distinctly thinking at the time - | 0:13:08 | 0:13:11 | |
I with a computer operator - there was a decision day | 0:13:11 | 0:13:14 | |
where it was either buy a second-hand car and learn to drive, | 0:13:14 | 0:13:18 | |
or go and buy this monophonic synthesiser. | 0:13:18 | 0:13:22 | |
And that proved to be quite a fateful day, because I still can't drive. | 0:13:22 | 0:13:26 | |
But I've still got that synthesiser. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:29 | |
This is a Mini-Korg 700S, and was the first affordable synth. | 0:13:29 | 0:13:35 | |
Fantastic machine. Completely eccentric. | 0:13:35 | 0:13:39 | |
# Listen to voice of Buddha... # | 0:13:39 | 0:13:42 | |
They give you a book of patches with it. | 0:13:42 | 0:13:44 | |
Because it was Japanese, there would be things like Synthy Cat or Funny Frog. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:49 | |
And you can't follow why it's doing what it does, but it sounds great. | 0:13:49 | 0:13:54 | |
Usually with a synthesiser, you can get it to do something for you. | 0:13:56 | 0:13:59 | |
You don't have to be manually good at all. | 0:13:59 | 0:14:02 | |
That was why we turned to them in the first place, | 0:14:02 | 0:14:04 | |
cos no-one could learn how do the guitars either. | 0:14:04 | 0:14:06 | |
We'd all tried. My brother's a great guitarist and he tried to teach me. | 0:14:06 | 0:14:09 | |
It just hurts your hand. So we use these things. | 0:14:09 | 0:14:12 | |
You can press a switch on, and they'll do things for about ten minutes. It's quite interesting. | 0:14:12 | 0:14:17 | |
If you've got a tape recorder, you can put it down, put something next to it and it will sound all right. | 0:14:17 | 0:14:21 | |
# ..Doesn't mean that she's your better... # | 0:14:21 | 0:14:26 | |
The day that I joined the band, Martyn came round my house and he had two records under his arm. | 0:14:26 | 0:14:31 | |
One was Trans-Europe Express, and one was I Feel Love. And he said, "Look, WE can do this." | 0:14:31 | 0:14:36 | |
I think that was his actual phrase. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:38 | |
MUSIC: "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer | 0:14:38 | 0:14:41 | |
We loved all that stuff. The concept albums that Giorgio Moroder did with Donna Summer. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:48 | |
-(MACHINE-DISTORTED VOICE) -# One, two, three, four, five. # | 0:14:48 | 0:14:51 | |
We used to play those continuously. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:53 | |
This wasn't some kind of post-gay ironic thing. | 0:14:53 | 0:14:58 | |
It's because they sounded great and interesting. | 0:14:58 | 0:15:00 | |
You were never really sure what the next set of sounds coming up was going to be. | 0:15:00 | 0:15:04 | |
I Feel Love just didn't sound like any record that had been before. | 0:15:04 | 0:15:09 | |
It came on the radio, and you couldn't quite believe what you were hearing. | 0:15:09 | 0:15:13 | |
It was hypnotic, but it was driving. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:16 | |
# It's so good... # | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
Moroder's mood music was the disco single of '77. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:24 | |
Its success would set the template for the future of the future. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:29 | |
# I'm in love I'm in love, I'm in love... # | 0:15:29 | 0:15:32 | |
We were in fact much more influenced by Moroder than we were by Kraftwerk. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:35 | |
Everyone...ever since anyone that knows we used synths, "Oh, you sound like Kraftwerk, don't you?" | 0:15:35 | 0:15:40 | |
We use the same instruments, so some of the sounds are a bit the same. | 0:15:40 | 0:15:44 | |
But we never really wanted to be Kraftwerk, we wanted to be a pop band. | 0:15:44 | 0:15:47 | |
We wanted to... | 0:15:53 | 0:15:54 | |
embody a sense of futurism | 0:15:54 | 0:15:57 | |
without being so literal. | 0:15:57 | 0:15:59 | |
It just so happened a friend of ours, he had bought for him this | 0:15:59 | 0:16:04 | |
science-fiction board game called Star Force. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:06 | |
And it was prodigiously tedious. | 0:16:06 | 0:16:09 | |
It was real geek stuff. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:12 | |
It was impenetrable. You couldn't play it. | 0:16:12 | 0:16:14 | |
There was The Rise Of The Human League, or something. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:19 | |
And I thought, The Human League, that is such a cool name. | 0:16:19 | 0:16:21 | |
# No future, they say... # | 0:16:21 | 0:16:23 | |
The Human League set out to make electronic pop for the modern city. | 0:16:23 | 0:16:27 | |
# The city is human | 0:16:29 | 0:16:32 | |
# Blind youth take hope You're no Joe Soap | 0:16:32 | 0:16:35 | |
# Your time is due Big fun come soon | 0:16:35 | 0:16:39 | |
# We've had it easy We should be glad | 0:16:39 | 0:16:42 | |
# High-rise living's not so bad... # | 0:16:42 | 0:16:45 | |
The Human League have a totally different spin on synthesisers | 0:16:45 | 0:16:48 | |
where it was much more like this bright technocratic | 0:16:48 | 0:16:51 | |
optimism thing. In fact, in one of their early songs, | 0:16:51 | 0:16:54 | |
Blind Youth, they make fun of people who go on about dehumanisation. | 0:16:54 | 0:16:57 | |
# Dehumanisation | 0:16:57 | 0:17:00 | |
# Is such a big word | 0:17:00 | 0:17:02 | |
# It's been around | 0:17:03 | 0:17:05 | |
# Since | 0:17:05 | 0:17:06 | |
# Richard the Third | 0:17:06 | 0:17:09 | |
# Dehumanisation | 0:17:09 | 0:17:11 | |
# Is easy to say | 0:17:12 | 0:17:14 | |
# But if you're not a hermit | 0:17:15 | 0:17:18 | |
# You know the city's OK. # | 0:17:18 | 0:17:21 | |
I'd say most of the brightness came from Martyn. | 0:17:21 | 0:17:24 | |
Martyn's very optimistic, and if anyone's moaning about | 0:17:24 | 0:17:27 | |
anything, Martyn will go and write a song in the opposite direction. | 0:17:27 | 0:17:31 | |
I think I felt a bit gloomy about the concrete jungle and everything, | 0:17:31 | 0:17:34 | |
which is ridiculous, cos I'm a townie. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:36 | |
I gravitate towards concrete... | 0:17:36 | 0:17:39 | |
If you put me in the country, I would find the nearest town and I'll be sitting in a bar quite quickly. | 0:17:40 | 0:17:45 | |
# Blind youth take hope You're no Joe Soap | 0:17:45 | 0:17:49 | |
# Your time is due Big fun come soon... # | 0:17:49 | 0:17:52 | |
Unfortunately, British pop music wasn't quite ready | 0:17:52 | 0:17:56 | |
for a synth-led group of futurists...just yet. | 0:17:56 | 0:18:00 | |
But in 1978, The Human League weren't the only group experimenting with electronics in Sheffield. | 0:18:00 | 0:18:07 | |
This is the old Psalter Lane art college, | 0:18:09 | 0:18:13 | |
which used to be part of Sheffield Polytechnic in the 1970s. | 0:18:13 | 0:18:18 | |
I believe The Human League also played this very place | 0:18:18 | 0:18:22 | |
for their first-ever live show in Sheffield. | 0:18:22 | 0:18:24 | |
Cabaret Voltaire did perform in this very room. | 0:18:24 | 0:18:31 | |
Yeah, we just thought there was nothing for us. | 0:18:33 | 0:18:36 | |
It was all kind of bloated supergroups | 0:18:36 | 0:18:39 | |
and progressive bands | 0:18:39 | 0:18:41 | |
who weren't even from the same kind of social backgrounds. | 0:18:41 | 0:18:44 | |
They were probably public school educated, | 0:18:44 | 0:18:48 | |
whereas most of the scene in Sheffield was pretty solid working class. | 0:18:48 | 0:18:53 | |
You'd find little bits of interest interesting music within perhaps | 0:18:56 | 0:19:02 | |
some of the prog rock stuff where there'd be a weird little synth break. | 0:19:02 | 0:19:06 | |
But then once you kind of started to discover all the German bands, | 0:19:10 | 0:19:14 | |
you realised that there were entire albums that were made of electronics. | 0:19:14 | 0:19:19 | |
Whilst The Human League dreamt of pop, Cabaret Voltaire | 0:19:20 | 0:19:24 | |
were anything but, using electronics to explore Sheffield, a city torn between the past and the future. | 0:19:24 | 0:19:31 | |
I remember watching loads of science fiction things | 0:19:33 | 0:19:38 | |
in the '60s, like Doctor Who and things like Quatermass. | 0:19:38 | 0:19:42 | |
And all these kinds of strange things seemed to happen | 0:19:42 | 0:19:47 | |
in old gasworks or industrial environments. | 0:19:47 | 0:19:50 | |
There was an other-worldliness about it. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:55 | |
You might see an alien or a giant blob creeping across the floor, | 0:19:55 | 0:20:00 | |
glowing bright green from radioactivity. | 0:20:00 | 0:20:04 | |
# Nag nag nag | 0:20:06 | 0:20:09 | |
# Nag nag nag. # | 0:20:09 | 0:20:12 | |
A very arty group. Obviously their name echoes Dada. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:16 | |
They were really into William Burroughs and ideas like control and surveillance. | 0:20:16 | 0:20:21 | |
They actually used quite a lot of guitar, | 0:20:21 | 0:20:23 | |
but it was so heavily processed, it didn't sound like rock 'n' roll guitar. | 0:20:23 | 0:20:26 | |
It sounded more like a synthesiser. | 0:20:26 | 0:20:28 | |
They also put synthesising-type effects | 0:20:28 | 0:20:31 | |
on the voice, which is probably one of the most disturbing things they did. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:33 | |
You have a guy singing, but it sounds more like a dalek than a human being. | 0:20:33 | 0:20:39 | |
At night-time, you'd hear distant booming noises with which would | 0:20:42 | 0:20:47 | |
probably be something like a drop forge or steam hammer or something. | 0:20:47 | 0:20:52 | |
You certainly knew that you were on the edge of heavy industry. | 0:20:57 | 0:21:04 | |
Everything in their music is alienated. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:06 | |
The music that comes from people who are divorced from natural life, any natural rhythms. | 0:21:06 | 0:21:14 | |
The music for a hostile environment. | 0:21:14 | 0:21:17 | |
If I've ever been asked to explain that movement, I always call it the "alienated synthesists". | 0:21:17 | 0:21:22 | |
Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division who were up a little bit less obviously synthy... | 0:21:22 | 0:21:30 | |
Everyone...everyone was sort of like that. | 0:21:32 | 0:21:34 | |
We were all going around in long coats from second-hand shops | 0:21:34 | 0:21:37 | |
and saying how terrible things were, with a synth. | 0:21:37 | 0:21:40 | |
Across the Pennines, another pocket of alienated synthesists dreamt | 0:21:42 | 0:21:46 | |
of an electronic future in the spiritual home of British pop music. | 0:21:46 | 0:21:51 | |
MUSIC DROWNS SPEECH | 0:21:51 | 0:21:54 | |
We are in Mathew Street in Liverpool, and I am actually standing outside of the door to what used | 0:21:58 | 0:22:04 | |
to be Eric's Club, which is where we played our first gig, where we invented OMD to play at this place. | 0:22:04 | 0:22:10 | |
And it was the club where we all used to come. | 0:22:10 | 0:22:13 | |
The Bunnymen and the Teardrops played within a month of us playing here as well. | 0:22:13 | 0:22:17 | |
This was the place I saw Devo play their first English concert. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:20 | |
And all of the influential bands that we could get to come to town | 0:22:20 | 0:22:23 | |
played here, apart from Kraftwerk who played the big theatre down the road. | 0:22:23 | 0:22:26 | |
And then literally ten yards away is the Cavern Club. | 0:22:26 | 0:22:31 | |
We've got Eric's and the Cavern right across the road from each other. | 0:22:31 | 0:22:34 | |
When Paul and I started being interested in electronic music, | 0:22:36 | 0:22:40 | |
we were very young. | 0:22:40 | 0:22:42 | |
We had no money. | 0:22:42 | 0:22:44 | |
And it was totally unrealistic to think about getting the big kind of keyboards you saw | 0:22:44 | 0:22:50 | |
on TV or on stage with some of the keyboard players in the '70s. | 0:22:50 | 0:22:54 | |
My mother had a Kays mail order catalogue, and they had some synthesisers. | 0:22:58 | 0:23:03 | |
Our first Korg Micro-Preset was bought from my mother's catalogue | 0:23:03 | 0:23:07 | |
for 36 weeks at £7.76 a week, I seem to recall. | 0:23:07 | 0:23:11 | |
This was the first synth, and we'd made the first two albums with this. | 0:23:11 | 0:23:16 | |
It's like, it's quite a basic synth. | 0:23:16 | 0:23:19 | |
INTRO TO "ENOLA GAY" | 0:23:19 | 0:23:23 | |
-HE LAUGHS -Can you believe that's the record?! | 0:23:29 | 0:23:31 | |
# Enola Gay | 0:23:31 | 0:23:33 | |
# You should have stayed at home yesterday | 0:23:33 | 0:23:36 | |
# Oh-oh, words can't describe | 0:23:36 | 0:23:39 | |
# The feeling and the way... # | 0:23:39 | 0:23:41 | |
The major record labels largely ignored synth music, | 0:23:41 | 0:23:45 | |
forcing bands like OMD to look to newly reformed indies instead. | 0:23:45 | 0:23:48 | |
In 1978, OMD would sign to Factory. A movement of sorts was beginning to coalesce. | 0:23:48 | 0:23:56 | |
I think the first wave of bands | 0:23:58 | 0:24:02 | |
that sort of came out of the closet in a late '70s... | 0:24:02 | 0:24:05 | |
..we were all working independently of each other. | 0:24:07 | 0:24:10 | |
There was no unified movement. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:11 | |
It didn't all start in one club or one town. | 0:24:11 | 0:24:14 | |
There was no gang of people who all had a manifesto | 0:24:14 | 0:24:17 | |
that we were going to do the new British electronic music. | 0:24:17 | 0:24:20 | |
It was small pockets of people in different parts of the country | 0:24:20 | 0:24:23 | |
who were independently obviously listening to the same things. | 0:24:23 | 0:24:27 | |
I did make an electronic drum machine, because I'd seen Kraftwerk with their sticks. | 0:24:32 | 0:24:36 | |
So I thought, I can make one of those. And so I did. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:39 | |
Some of the early synth drums was this very Heath Robinson-looking box | 0:24:39 | 0:24:45 | |
with all these plates on there with these sticks with wires | 0:24:45 | 0:24:49 | |
that we did the drums to Electricity. | 0:24:49 | 0:24:52 | |
# Our one source of energy | 0:25:00 | 0:25:03 | |
# The ultimate discovery | 0:25:03 | 0:25:06 | |
# Electric blue for me | 0:25:06 | 0:25:08 | |
# Never more to be free... # | 0:25:08 | 0:25:12 | |
We were horrified when Tony Wilson said, "What you do is the future of pop." | 0:25:12 | 0:25:17 | |
Pop? We were experimental German influenced. We are not pop at all! | 0:25:17 | 0:25:23 | |
How do you call us pop? We were absolutely mortified. | 0:25:23 | 0:25:26 | |
We couldn't see it at all. | 0:25:26 | 0:25:28 | |
Totally by accident, Paul and I | 0:25:31 | 0:25:34 | |
and I guess others at the time had distilled the electronic | 0:25:34 | 0:25:39 | |
experimentation and the glam pop of Britain from just a few years and earlier, into what was going to | 0:25:39 | 0:25:46 | |
become, which didn't seem at the time, but what was going to become the future of pop music. | 0:25:46 | 0:25:52 | |
By the start of 1979, the future of pop music seemed a long way off, | 0:25:52 | 0:25:57 | |
as the combined efforts of The Normal, OMD and The Human League had failed to trouble the charts. | 0:25:57 | 0:26:02 | |
But dabbling in synthesisers was becoming increasingly de rigueur. | 0:26:02 | 0:26:07 | |
Even for dyed in the wool punks. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
At the other end of the East Lancs Road, another Factory band, | 0:26:10 | 0:26:14 | |
who would become one of the greatest electronic acts, were taking their first synthetic steps. | 0:26:14 | 0:26:20 | |
The first synthesiser we had in Joy Division was a little thing called a Transcendent 2000. | 0:26:24 | 0:26:29 | |
I actually built it from a load of components. | 0:26:29 | 0:26:33 | |
At the time I had insomnia, I couldn't sleep very well. | 0:26:33 | 0:26:37 | |
So I used to get this magazine called Electronics Today, | 0:26:37 | 0:26:41 | |
something like that, and in it was this synthesiser. | 0:26:41 | 0:26:46 | |
And if you were to buy one in those days it was incredibly expensive. | 0:26:46 | 0:26:49 | |
And we didn't have any money. So I thought, this is really cheap, it's only 200 quid, | 0:26:49 | 0:26:54 | |
how difficult can it be to build it? | 0:26:54 | 0:26:57 | |
And it was like... Soldering components by hand. | 0:26:58 | 0:27:03 | |
It took about two months of doing that. | 0:27:03 | 0:27:07 | |
And then it didn't work incredibly well. | 0:27:07 | 0:27:10 | |
RUDIMENTARY SYNTHESISER NOTES PLAY | 0:27:10 | 0:27:14 | |
I remember we went to write a track in the studio called Cargo, in Rochdale. | 0:27:15 | 0:27:21 | |
And when we went it, we found a little Woolworths organ | 0:27:21 | 0:27:27 | |
that you switched the battery power, switched it on and it blew a fan. | 0:27:27 | 0:27:32 | |
You could play chord buttons on it. So I was messing about with these chord buttons. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:36 | |
And then Martin Hannah I think had brought in a Solina string synth. | 0:27:36 | 0:27:40 | |
What? You can play more than one note at a time on it! | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
So I got the organ and the synthesiser | 0:27:43 | 0:27:47 | |
and hit these chord buttons, and wrote Atmosphere, a Joy Division track. | 0:27:47 | 0:27:53 | |
I seemed to write it there in the studio. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:55 | |
# Walk in silence... # | 0:27:57 | 0:28:03 | |
I think we wrote the music | 0:28:03 | 0:28:06 | |
and then Ian wrote the words that night. | 0:28:06 | 0:28:09 | |
Then we recorded the vocals the next day. Which is amazing when I think about it. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:13 | |
# See the danger | 0:28:13 | 0:28:16 | |
# Always danger | 0:28:17 | 0:28:19 | |
# Endless talking | 0:28:20 | 0:28:25 | |
# Life rebuilding | 0:28:25 | 0:28:28 | |
# Don't walk away... # | 0:28:28 | 0:28:30 | |
Whilst it seemed the north had the lead in post-punk synth pioneers, | 0:28:34 | 0:28:38 | |
things were also stirring down south. | 0:28:38 | 0:28:40 | |
John Foxx was the former lead singer of Ultravox. | 0:28:42 | 0:28:46 | |
He worked in Shoreditch in London's then unfashionable East End. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:51 | |
SYNTHESISER CHORDS PLAY | 0:28:51 | 0:28:56 | |
SYNTHESISER MELODY PLAYS | 0:28:56 | 0:28:59 | |
These modular synths were the first generation really | 0:29:01 | 0:29:05 | |
of working synthesisers. | 0:29:05 | 0:29:06 | |
And then the companies decided to make a cheap version of it because no-one could afford these, | 0:29:07 | 0:29:14 | |
or very few people could afford them. | 0:29:14 | 0:29:16 | |
And they condensed all that down into this. | 0:29:16 | 0:29:21 | |
London seemed almost empty in the '70s. | 0:29:22 | 0:29:26 | |
I used to walk around the streets, newspapers blowing around and great concrete walls. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:30 | |
And everything seemed grittier | 0:29:30 | 0:29:33 | |
and lost somehow, like we'd lost direction. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:36 | |
I'd wonder what that was about. | 0:29:36 | 0:29:39 | |
I wasn't angry about it any more, | 0:29:43 | 0:29:45 | |
as we were supposed to be as punks. | 0:29:45 | 0:29:48 | |
I just wanted to make music for it, the kind of music that I could hear. | 0:29:48 | 0:29:53 | |
# Standing in the dark | 0:29:55 | 0:29:57 | |
# Watching you glow | 0:29:59 | 0:30:01 | |
# Lifting a receiver | 0:30:03 | 0:30:06 | |
# Nobody I know | 0:30:08 | 0:30:10 | |
# Underpass... # | 0:30:14 | 0:30:16 | |
Underpass, with the sodium lights and you might be mugged. | 0:30:17 | 0:30:23 | |
Very '70s dystopian. | 0:30:23 | 0:30:27 | |
The spectral city. | 0:30:28 | 0:30:29 | |
# Now it's all gone | 0:30:29 | 0:30:32 | |
# World War something... # | 0:30:32 | 0:30:36 | |
This was the industrial bit of London that had served the docks and done some manufacturing | 0:30:37 | 0:30:42 | |
and both of which have gone. | 0:30:42 | 0:30:44 | |
It was like living in a Quatermass movie | 0:30:44 | 0:30:46 | |
because I realised and discovered that underneath all of this area | 0:30:46 | 0:30:51 | |
are the plague pits where the bodies were thrown. | 0:30:51 | 0:30:57 | |
That inevitably leaks into your music. | 0:30:57 | 0:30:59 | |
That is why a lot of my music is so dark, I think. | 0:30:59 | 0:31:01 | |
I come from Lancashire and where did I end up? | 0:31:01 | 0:31:05 | |
In a place even more sinister. | 0:31:05 | 0:31:07 | |
# Underpass... # | 0:31:13 | 0:31:15 | |
Fox's music wasn't the only synthetic portrait | 0:31:19 | 0:31:22 | |
of the '70s metropolis. | 0:31:22 | 0:31:24 | |
An experimental group of artists, known as Throbbing Gristle, | 0:31:24 | 0:31:29 | |
had been forging their own electronic industrial sounds | 0:31:29 | 0:31:33 | |
in their Death Factory down the road in Hackney. | 0:31:33 | 0:31:36 | |
-Grim. -It was grim. | 0:31:36 | 0:31:38 | |
It was very run-down. The factory was an old trouser factory and it was near London Fields. | 0:31:38 | 0:31:46 | |
In the basement, we were level with the plague pits. | 0:31:46 | 0:31:49 | |
That's why it got called the Death Factory. | 0:31:49 | 0:31:55 | |
There was still a lot of antagonism left over from, | 0:31:55 | 0:31:59 | |
I know it sounds unbelievable, but post-war. | 0:31:59 | 0:32:02 | |
There were still people there like the park keeper who used to be one of Moseley's brown shirts. | 0:32:02 | 0:32:09 | |
It sounds a cliche now but at the time | 0:32:14 | 0:32:16 | |
we were trying to reflect the sounds around us in some weird way. | 0:32:16 | 0:32:23 | |
Our studio was in, like, an industrial area. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:27 | |
There were different noises going on all the time. | 0:32:27 | 0:32:31 | |
We were trying to reflect all these sounds | 0:32:31 | 0:32:34 | |
and the way they all come together in this weird mishmash of electronic experimental textures. | 0:32:34 | 0:32:41 | |
# Hot... # | 0:32:52 | 0:32:54 | |
We felt a kinship with a lot of bands, especially Sheffield bands. | 0:32:58 | 0:33:02 | |
Yes, Cabaret Voltaire, those people. But the kinship was the fact that we were all independent. | 0:33:02 | 0:33:10 | |
Chris Carter in Throbbing Gristle was a nut for | 0:33:10 | 0:33:14 | |
Tangerine Dream and that kind of music | 0:33:14 | 0:33:16 | |
so there were hypnotic dreaming electronic Throbbing Gristle tracks | 0:33:16 | 0:33:21 | |
that were pretty in a funny sort of misshapen way. | 0:33:21 | 0:33:25 | |
I had the synths and because they were homemade synths, they weren't bought off the shelf, | 0:33:25 | 0:33:33 | |
they went Rolands and Korgs, they sounded quite unique anyway. They didn't sound like regular synths. | 0:33:33 | 0:33:39 | |
And then I built this effects unit. | 0:33:43 | 0:33:45 | |
I saw this design in Practical Electronics. You could combine all the effects together | 0:33:45 | 0:33:49 | |
and put a guitar through it or a voice or anything. | 0:33:49 | 0:33:54 | |
I started building these units for Throbbing Gristle and called them Gristlisers. | 0:33:54 | 0:34:02 | |
We were never punk. We are not punk. | 0:34:02 | 0:34:04 | |
We were an industrial experimental music band. | 0:34:04 | 0:34:07 | |
Come 1979, British electronic music was still being ignored by mainstream labels. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:23 | |
So, Dan Miller, founded Britain's first electronic indie, Mute, | 0:34:23 | 0:34:29 | |
to release recordings by kindred spirit, Fad Gadget, | 0:34:29 | 0:34:33 | |
as well as his own work. | 0:34:33 | 0:34:35 | |
I wasn't interested in rock music. | 0:34:39 | 0:34:41 | |
I really was only interested in electronic music. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:45 | |
I thought that was the future of where exciting music | 0:34:45 | 0:34:49 | |
was going to come from and I wanted to part of promoting that. | 0:34:49 | 0:34:54 | |
One of Mute's first releases would be strangely prescient. | 0:34:54 | 0:34:58 | |
I came across an old Chuck Berry songbook I had at home and I thought, | 0:34:58 | 0:35:02 | |
"I wonder what that sounds like done on synthesisers?" | 0:35:02 | 0:35:06 | |
# Long-distance information | 0:35:06 | 0:35:08 | |
# Give me Memphis, Tennessee | 0:35:08 | 0:35:12 | |
# Help me find the party | 0:35:12 | 0:35:13 | |
# Tryin' to get in touch with me... # | 0:35:13 | 0:35:16 | |
Everybody said, "You've got to release it, it's amazing." I thought, "OK, what shall I do?" | 0:35:16 | 0:35:23 | |
It doesn't fit in under the normal kind of name. | 0:35:23 | 0:35:26 | |
And then I thought, | 0:35:26 | 0:35:28 | |
what about if there was a group that were all teenagers | 0:35:28 | 0:35:33 | |
and their first choice of instrument was a synthesiser | 0:35:33 | 0:35:36 | |
rather than a guitar, because that hadn't happened yet. | 0:35:36 | 0:35:40 | |
John Peel... I had given it to him. | 0:35:40 | 0:35:43 | |
I was listening to the radio with a couple of friends. | 0:35:43 | 0:35:46 | |
He said, "We've got three versions of Memphis Tennessee. | 0:35:46 | 0:35:49 | |
"One is the original, the other two covers." | 0:35:49 | 0:35:51 | |
"One is really terrible and the other is really great. | 0:35:51 | 0:35:54 | |
I thought, "Oh, God." Fortunately, he liked mine. He played it twice. | 0:35:54 | 0:35:59 | |
Take it away. | 0:36:00 | 0:36:01 | |
That was one of the biggest moments of my entire career in music. | 0:36:01 | 0:36:04 | |
That's the end of tonight's programme in which you heard | 0:36:07 | 0:36:10 | |
the Desperate Bicycles, The Slits, The Mekons, Alternative TV, The UK Subs and Sham 69. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:15 | |
More of the same unpleasant racket on tomorrow night's programme. | 0:36:15 | 0:36:18 | |
Until then, from me, John Peel, goodnight and good riddance. | 0:36:18 | 0:36:22 | |
Getting your record on the Peel show was one thing. | 0:36:24 | 0:36:27 | |
But nobody was ready for what happened next. | 0:36:27 | 0:36:30 | |
What sort of make-up do you put on? You appear very white. | 0:36:30 | 0:36:35 | |
It's all natural. It's Max Factor pan stick and it's 28 which is natural, not white make-up. | 0:36:35 | 0:36:41 | |
And then I just powder that with skin tone powder and then just eyeliner. | 0:36:41 | 0:36:46 | |
# It's cold outside | 0:36:46 | 0:36:48 | |
# And the paint's peeling off of my walls | 0:36:51 | 0:36:53 | |
# There's a man outside... # | 0:36:56 | 0:36:57 | |
On 24th May 1979, the future finally arrived. | 0:36:57 | 0:37:01 | |
# In a long coat, grey hat smoking a cigarette... # | 0:37:01 | 0:37:04 | |
He was a punk. He loved sci-fi. | 0:37:04 | 0:37:08 | |
He even read JG Ballard but most impressively, | 0:37:08 | 0:37:10 | |
Gary Numan was on Top Of The Pops. | 0:37:10 | 0:37:14 | |
I wish magic was real, you know. | 0:37:15 | 0:37:18 | |
I wish fairies were real and all of that kind of stuff. | 0:37:18 | 0:37:21 | |
I love all that sort of thing. | 0:37:21 | 0:37:23 | |
Probably never grow up, I suppose, from that point of view. | 0:37:23 | 0:37:26 | |
# Now the light fades out... # | 0:37:27 | 0:37:29 | |
The first time he was on Top Of The Pops, | 0:37:29 | 0:37:31 | |
Either she phoned me, or I phoned her, "Are you watching? | 0:37:31 | 0:37:34 | |
"Have you seen this man, he's fantastic." | 0:37:34 | 0:37:37 | |
# There's a knock on the door... # | 0:37:37 | 0:37:39 | |
The look and the sound was so different. | 0:37:39 | 0:37:43 | |
# And just for a second I thought I remembered you... # | 0:37:43 | 0:37:45 | |
Just sort of alien, wasn't it? | 0:37:45 | 0:37:47 | |
I was in a lot of trouble at school. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:51 | |
I was sent to a child psychiatrist and things like that | 0:37:51 | 0:37:54 | |
which turned out to be, apparently, Asperger's. | 0:37:54 | 0:37:57 | |
I felt more comfortable on my own. The classic loner, I suppose. | 0:38:00 | 0:38:04 | |
Didn't go out drinking, didn't go out clubbing too much. | 0:38:04 | 0:38:07 | |
# So now I'm alone | 0:38:07 | 0:38:09 | |
# I can think for myself... # | 0:38:09 | 0:38:11 | |
I went to a studio to make a punk album, | 0:38:13 | 0:38:16 | |
which would have been my first album. And when I got there, | 0:38:16 | 0:38:19 | |
in a corner of the studio, there was a Minimoog. | 0:38:19 | 0:38:22 | |
Luckily, it had been left, | 0:38:22 | 0:38:24 | |
and this sound - which was a huge, big bassy thing - and the room shook. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:28 | |
I just realised you can press one key and all of this other stuff happens. | 0:38:28 | 0:38:34 | |
There was a massive amount of power in them | 0:38:34 | 0:38:37 | |
and depth that I'd just never heard. | 0:38:37 | 0:38:39 | |
I'd never heard of anything like it before. One note. | 0:38:39 | 0:38:42 | |
People like ourselves and Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League, | 0:38:44 | 0:38:48 | |
had all got used to the fact that we existed and there was somebody else sharing our space | 0:38:48 | 0:38:52 | |
and then along comes, | 0:38:52 | 0:38:54 | |
who, I guess at the time we thought was Johnny-come-lately. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:58 | |
"Who the hell is this guy from London | 0:38:58 | 0:39:00 | |
"who's on telly and having a massive hit record? Never heard of him." | 0:39:00 | 0:39:07 | |
Numan was Britain's first synth pin-up. | 0:39:07 | 0:39:11 | |
-Hello, Sarah. -Hello, Gary. -Hello, Sarah. | 0:39:11 | 0:39:14 | |
My friend Cheryl read in a newspaper | 0:39:14 | 0:39:16 | |
that your mum does your hair. Is this true? | 0:39:16 | 0:39:19 | |
Yes, that's right. She's been doing it since I was about four. | 0:39:19 | 0:39:23 | |
-All right, thank you. -Bye-bye. -Did she put the streak in the side as well? -Yeah. | 0:39:23 | 0:39:27 | |
I really liked Gary's music. | 0:39:27 | 0:39:29 | |
I think he made the best records at that time. | 0:39:29 | 0:39:33 | |
I think, he, if anyone, he really condensed it into a form that was perfect at that point. | 0:39:33 | 0:39:40 | |
Numan would immediately show that his number-one success was no fluke. | 0:39:42 | 0:39:48 | |
Cars was part eulogy to JG Ballard and part testimony to living in '70s London. | 0:39:48 | 0:39:54 | |
I was in my car and a couple of men in a van swerved round me, pulled up in front, | 0:39:59 | 0:40:05 | |
got out and were clearly going to give me a bit of a hammering. | 0:40:05 | 0:40:10 | |
Trying to get me out, kicking the car, screaming and shouting. | 0:40:10 | 0:40:15 | |
# Here in my car | 0:40:18 | 0:40:19 | |
# I feel safest of all | 0:40:19 | 0:40:21 | |
# I can lock all my doors | 0:40:21 | 0:40:23 | |
# It's the only way to live | 0:40:23 | 0:40:25 | |
# In cars... # | 0:40:25 | 0:40:27 | |
I was pretty scared. I locked all my doors | 0:40:28 | 0:40:31 | |
and ended up driving up onto the pavement and shot along the pavement | 0:40:31 | 0:40:36 | |
because I couldn't go anywhere. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:39 | |
People obviously leaping out of the way. I was in a bit of a panic. | 0:40:39 | 0:40:43 | |
Cars is just about feeling safe in amongst people in a car | 0:40:47 | 0:40:52 | |
because no-one can get to you. | 0:40:52 | 0:40:55 | |
You're in your own little bubble. | 0:40:55 | 0:40:56 | |
# Here in my car | 0:40:56 | 0:40:57 | |
# Where the image breaks down | 0:40:57 | 0:40:59 | |
# Will you visit me, please? | 0:40:59 | 0:41:01 | |
# If I open my door, in cars... # | 0:41:01 | 0:41:04 | |
I was gutted when Cars came out. I thought it was really good. | 0:41:05 | 0:41:10 | |
# ..I was starting to think about leaving tonight... # | 0:41:10 | 0:41:12 | |
All this time we were convinced, | 0:41:12 | 0:41:14 | |
it was just a matter of time before we had a number one record. | 0:41:14 | 0:41:18 | |
Part arrogance and part stupidity, | 0:41:18 | 0:41:21 | |
and then somebody comes out of the blue and does it. | 0:41:21 | 0:41:25 | |
With sales totalling in excess of ten million, | 0:41:25 | 0:41:28 | |
Gary Numan was a new kind of pop star, | 0:41:28 | 0:41:31 | |
but being at the front of the synth way had inevitable drawbacks. | 0:41:31 | 0:41:35 | |
The Musicians Union tried to ban me for, I think, the first year when I was around | 0:41:38 | 0:41:43 | |
because they said I was putting proper musicians out of work, | 0:41:43 | 0:41:46 | |
although I had to be a member to get on Top Of The Pops. | 0:41:46 | 0:41:49 | |
Caused me loads of grief, actually. The music press were pretty harsh. | 0:41:49 | 0:41:53 | |
It wasn't rock 'n' roll. It wasn't honest, it wasn't working class, it wasn't worthy, it wasn't earthy, | 0:41:53 | 0:42:00 | |
it wasn't real, it wasn't sweaty, it wasn't manly. It was pretentious, pseudo intellectual. | 0:42:00 | 0:42:07 | |
I am absolutely convinced that Numan's career was shortened by | 0:42:07 | 0:42:13 | |
a nasty, nasty, vitriolic journalism. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:17 | |
But, again, what had there been before me? | 0:42:17 | 0:42:21 | |
It had been punk. The whole anti-hero thing. | 0:42:21 | 0:42:24 | |
Not only was I doing electronic music which they wasn't pleased with anyway, | 0:42:24 | 0:42:29 | |
but I'm standing up saying, I want to be a pop star, I love it. | 0:42:29 | 0:42:32 | |
All this anti-hero stuff before that, I wasn't anything to do with that. | 0:42:32 | 0:42:37 | |
I want to be famous. I want to be standing on stages | 0:42:37 | 0:42:41 | |
and I don't speak for the people because I don't even know them. | 0:42:41 | 0:42:45 | |
The decade would end with Numan as the unlikely synth-pop hero come good. | 0:42:46 | 0:42:52 | |
What lay around the corner would see the synth transformed | 0:42:52 | 0:42:56 | |
from post-punk experimental tool into THE pop instrument of choice. | 0:42:56 | 0:43:00 | |
As the '80s dawned, the future finally arrived | 0:43:20 | 0:43:24 | |
and it wasn't going to be alienated. | 0:43:24 | 0:43:27 | |
A shift to the right heralded a new era in Britain, | 0:43:28 | 0:43:32 | |
an era in which prosperity and material wealth | 0:43:32 | 0:43:35 | |
would be vaunted above all else. | 0:43:35 | 0:43:38 | |
There would be no room for experimental dreamers in the Me Decade. | 0:43:38 | 0:43:42 | |
You were a success or you didn't exist. | 0:43:42 | 0:43:45 | |
# One man on a lonely platform | 0:43:45 | 0:43:48 | |
# One case sitting by his side... # | 0:43:48 | 0:43:52 | |
The big hit of 1980 was Visage | 0:43:52 | 0:43:55 | |
whose Fade To Grey followed fast on the heels of Numan's success. | 0:43:55 | 0:44:00 | |
It seemed the future had passed The Human League by. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:06 | |
# Ah, ah-h-h-h | 0:44:06 | 0:44:09 | |
# We fade to grey. | 0:44:09 | 0:44:11 | |
# Fade to grey... # | 0:44:11 | 0:44:12 | |
I think there were three number-one hits. | 0:44:12 | 0:44:16 | |
Certainly Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin, Gary Numan | 0:44:16 | 0:44:19 | |
and I think the Flying Lizards might have been number one with Money | 0:44:19 | 0:44:24 | |
and I stood there, I think we'd done a couple of LPs and I thought, "We've blown it." | 0:44:24 | 0:44:29 | |
We now look like the also-rans | 0:44:29 | 0:44:31 | |
and everyone has taken the idea and done a lot better than us. | 0:44:31 | 0:44:35 | |
# The best things in life are free | 0:44:35 | 0:44:38 | |
# But you can give them to the birds and bees | 0:44:38 | 0:44:42 | |
-# I want money -Ooh, ooh-ooh | 0:44:42 | 0:44:46 | |
-# That's what I want -Ooh, ooh-ooh | 0:44:46 | 0:44:50 | |
-# That's what I want -Ooh, ooh-ooh | 0:44:50 | 0:44:53 | |
# That's what I want... # | 0:44:53 | 0:44:54 | |
I turned up one day to be told I was being thrown out of the group. | 0:44:54 | 0:44:58 | |
And it was a bit like School Of Rock with Jack Black going, | 0:45:00 | 0:45:05 | |
"You can't throw me out of my own group." | 0:45:05 | 0:45:07 | |
We'd released Reproduction and Travelogue | 0:45:07 | 0:45:10 | |
and done all this touring. | 0:45:10 | 0:45:12 | |
There was a nagging undercurrent of dissatisfaction from the record company | 0:45:12 | 0:45:17 | |
that they weren't selling as many records as they hoped. | 0:45:17 | 0:45:21 | |
I think I'd made a big effort on a photo session | 0:45:21 | 0:45:25 | |
and Martin hadn't even turned up. | 0:45:25 | 0:45:27 | |
Suddenly, I was hearing these stories that Martin was never ever going to appear on a stage with me again | 0:45:27 | 0:45:33 | |
which I think he only said | 0:45:33 | 0:45:35 | |
because that was what Bryan Ferry had said about Eno in legend. | 0:45:35 | 0:45:41 | |
Whilst The Human League were crumbling, | 0:45:41 | 0:45:44 | |
something was brewing in the most unlikely of places. | 0:45:44 | 0:45:47 | |
Basildon was a new town. Built for the post-war East End overspill, | 0:45:50 | 0:45:53 | |
it wasn't one of pop music's more romantic places. | 0:45:53 | 0:45:57 | |
But a bunch of kids were going to ditch their guitars and reinvent synth music as pop. | 0:45:58 | 0:46:04 | |
When we were growing up, Basildon was a violent town. | 0:46:04 | 0:46:08 | |
We had the highest crime rate for five years on the trot. | 0:46:08 | 0:46:12 | |
I can remember going back to Basildon | 0:46:12 | 0:46:15 | |
and going down to the pub with some friends and I had, you know, black nail varnish. | 0:46:15 | 0:46:22 | |
Going to the bar and ordering a drink. I had forgotten about it | 0:46:22 | 0:46:25 | |
wasn't even thinking about it and some guy said to me, | 0:46:25 | 0:46:28 | |
"What the fuck have you got on your fingernails?" | 0:46:28 | 0:46:31 | |
Depeche Mode formed in 1980. | 0:46:33 | 0:46:37 | |
They had a spot at their local disco. | 0:46:37 | 0:46:41 | |
Croc's was a really ordinary disco. There was a crocodile, yeah. | 0:46:43 | 0:46:46 | |
It was quite a sorry-looking animal, but it was alive. | 0:46:46 | 0:46:50 | |
They had this night once a week where they'd play things like The Human League and Soft Cell | 0:46:53 | 0:46:58 | |
and also bands would appear there. | 0:46:58 | 0:47:00 | |
# I stand still stepping on the shady streets | 0:47:02 | 0:47:05 | |
# And I watch that man to a stranger | 0:47:05 | 0:47:08 | |
# You think you only know me when you turn on the light | 0:47:09 | 0:47:11 | |
# Now the room is lit with danger | 0:47:11 | 0:47:14 | |
# Complicating, circulating | 0:47:14 | 0:47:17 | |
# New life, new life | 0:47:17 | 0:47:20 | |
# Operating, generating | 0:47:20 | 0:47:23 | |
# New life, new life... # | 0:47:23 | 0:47:27 | |
When I first started playing synthesisers, | 0:47:27 | 0:47:29 | |
it would have been The Human League, | 0:47:29 | 0:47:31 | |
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, their very first album. | 0:47:31 | 0:47:35 | |
I was a big fan of Daniel Miller's work as the Silicon Teens | 0:47:35 | 0:47:39 | |
and as The Normal and also Fad Gadget who was on Mute Records. | 0:47:39 | 0:47:44 | |
Vince was sort of the boss of the band. He was unbelievably driven. | 0:47:46 | 0:47:51 | |
# Complicating, circulating New life... # | 0:47:51 | 0:47:55 | |
He earned £30 a week in the yoghurt factory and save £29.70, a week, | 0:47:55 | 0:48:00 | |
to save up to buy a synth. | 0:48:00 | 0:48:04 | |
He forced the pace. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:07 | |
This actually was the original Depeche Mode drum machine that we used for Life. | 0:48:07 | 0:48:12 | |
Dave's job before his song was to set the tempo. | 0:48:12 | 0:48:16 | |
Number seven would be fast, number two would be slow etc etc. | 0:48:16 | 0:48:21 | |
I owned Autobahn, that was really what got us to go out and buy our first synthesisers, | 0:48:21 | 0:48:29 | |
the whole...things that were happening around the time | 0:48:29 | 0:48:34 | |
with Kraftwerk and even early Human League stuff. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:36 | |
# ..New life, new life... # | 0:48:36 | 0:48:39 | |
I was really happy that the first time I heard them | 0:48:39 | 0:48:42 | |
was when they played live. | 0:48:42 | 0:48:43 | |
They started and I thought, this sounds interesting. | 0:48:43 | 0:48:48 | |
There were four little mono synths teetering on beer crates. | 0:48:48 | 0:48:53 | |
# I'm still stepping on shady streets | 0:48:53 | 0:48:54 | |
# And I watch that man to a stranger... # | 0:48:54 | 0:48:57 | |
They had a fan base with them and their fans weren't watching the band. They wear just dancing. | 0:48:57 | 0:49:02 | |
# ..The moon is lit with danger | 0:49:02 | 0:49:03 | |
# Complicated... # | 0:49:03 | 0:49:05 | |
Miller first saw Depeche Mode supporting Fad Gadget in east London and signed them to Mute. | 0:49:05 | 0:49:11 | |
None of us knew what we were doing. | 0:49:12 | 0:49:14 | |
By the time I met Depeche, we had just released our first album. | 0:49:14 | 0:49:18 | |
Compared to them, I was an experienced industry person but I knew nothing. | 0:49:18 | 0:49:22 | |
You know, they needed a bit of help in the studio, | 0:49:22 | 0:49:25 | |
so I introduced them to some ways of working. | 0:49:25 | 0:49:28 | |
Using sequencers, they'd never used a sequencer before. | 0:49:28 | 0:49:30 | |
Everything was played by hand. | 0:49:30 | 0:49:32 | |
This is the legendary Arp 2600. I bought it second-hand in 1979. | 0:49:32 | 0:49:39 | |
It was being sold, one of three being sold by Elton John's road crew after a world tour. | 0:49:39 | 0:49:46 | |
These were used on all the Depeche Mode albums I was involved with | 0:49:46 | 0:49:52 | |
especially on the first album, | 0:49:52 | 0:49:54 | |
where it was really one of only two synths that we used. | 0:49:54 | 0:49:58 | |
You can hear it going out of tune on that note there. | 0:49:58 | 0:50:01 | |
It's not really in tune at all. | 0:50:01 | 0:50:03 | |
MUSIC: "Just Can't Get Enough" by Depeche Mode | 0:50:03 | 0:50:06 | |
Depeche Mode would prove to be the real silicon teens. | 0:50:08 | 0:50:11 | |
The combination of sex appeal and synthesisers | 0:50:11 | 0:50:14 | |
would make them one of the biggest pop acts of 1981. | 0:50:14 | 0:50:18 | |
# When I'm with you baby I go out of my head | 0:50:18 | 0:50:22 | |
# And I just can't get enough And I just can't get enough | 0:50:22 | 0:50:26 | |
# All the things you do to me and everything you said | 0:50:26 | 0:50:29 | |
# I just can't get enough I just can't get enough | 0:50:29 | 0:50:33 | |
# We slip and slide as we fall in love | 0:50:33 | 0:50:36 | |
# And I just can't seem to get enough of... # | 0:50:36 | 0:50:41 | |
When Depeche Mode, when we were gigging | 0:50:45 | 0:50:48 | |
we'd all carry our synthesisers | 0:50:48 | 0:50:50 | |
and I, for some reason, | 0:50:50 | 0:50:51 | |
had to buy the heaviest synthesiser out of all of them, you know. | 0:50:51 | 0:50:55 | |
We didn't have cars or anything, we'd be on the train, | 0:50:55 | 0:50:58 | |
and this really is quite heavy. | 0:50:58 | 0:51:01 | |
So I'd have this thing under my arm, Fletcher would have a Moog, | 0:51:01 | 0:51:04 | |
Martin had a Yamaha, I think, on the train. | 0:51:04 | 0:51:07 | |
# I just can't get enough I just can't get enough... # | 0:51:07 | 0:51:10 | |
When we did our first Top Of The Pops we were on the train with these, our synthesisers. | 0:51:10 | 0:51:15 | |
-You got the train to Top Of The Pops? -Yeah. | 0:51:15 | 0:51:18 | |
From Basildon to Fenchurch Street and then on the underground. | 0:51:18 | 0:51:23 | |
But like Human before, it wouldn't all be plain sailing for Depeche. | 0:51:27 | 0:51:30 | |
I think, you know, you've got to remember that | 0:51:32 | 0:51:35 | |
during our pop period we had lots of fans and a lot of people liked us, | 0:51:35 | 0:51:39 | |
but there were a lot of people hated us. | 0:51:39 | 0:51:41 | |
Certainly the '80s was a real old battle royale | 0:51:43 | 0:51:47 | |
between us and journalism in general, music journalism. | 0:51:47 | 0:51:53 | |
It was just really, you know, pop. | 0:51:53 | 0:51:57 | |
You know, I think... | 0:51:57 | 0:51:59 | |
I can understand why people hated what we did, you know, looking back on it now. | 0:51:59 | 0:52:04 | |
It wasn't just the sound. It was... | 0:52:04 | 0:52:06 | |
Every TV that we were asked to do, we did, and it didn't matter how stupid it was. | 0:52:06 | 0:52:10 | |
You know, there's something very un-British about electronic music | 0:52:10 | 0:52:15 | |
to start with. They want bands to be like they were in the '60s - | 0:52:15 | 0:52:18 | |
four guys, guitar, bass and drums, | 0:52:18 | 0:52:22 | |
pretty lead singer, skinny jeans, | 0:52:22 | 0:52:25 | |
you know, conventional kind of thing. | 0:52:25 | 0:52:28 | |
That's really what sells newspapers, I guess. | 0:52:28 | 0:52:30 | |
# Playing on my radio and saying that you had to go... # | 0:52:30 | 0:52:34 | |
They'd written Depeche Mode off anyway as a teeny-bop band, | 0:52:34 | 0:52:37 | |
a one-hit wonder, especially once Vince left, they thought "Well, that's over." | 0:52:37 | 0:52:41 | |
# New day, turn away Wipe away the tear... # | 0:52:41 | 0:52:44 | |
In November '81, Clarke unexpectedly quit. | 0:52:44 | 0:52:48 | |
I was, and still am, a bit of a control freak. | 0:52:48 | 0:52:52 | |
So, with the advent of computers and sequencers, | 0:52:52 | 0:52:56 | |
I realised that I could make all of the music myself. | 0:52:56 | 0:52:59 | |
You know, I didn't need necessarily other people to play the parts. | 0:52:59 | 0:53:04 | |
I got a real satisfaction out of programming all of the parts myself. | 0:53:04 | 0:53:09 | |
Without their chief songwriter, it seemed the game was up for Depeche Mode before they really got going. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:20 | |
MUSIC: "Don't You Want Me?" by The Human League | 0:53:22 | 0:53:25 | |
In the same year, a reversal of fortune | 0:53:25 | 0:53:27 | |
had seen a new-look Human League finally get in on the pop action, | 0:53:27 | 0:53:31 | |
partly thanks to a line-up change | 0:53:31 | 0:53:33 | |
that took them out of the pages of the NME and put them on the front page of Smash Hits. | 0:53:33 | 0:53:37 | |
# You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar | 0:53:37 | 0:53:43 | |
# When I met you | 0:53:43 | 0:53:46 | |
# I picked you out, I shook you up and turned you around | 0:53:46 | 0:53:50 | |
# Turned you into someone new... # | 0:53:50 | 0:53:53 | |
We got Joanne and Susan simply because we were booked to do a European tour | 0:53:53 | 0:53:58 | |
and Martyn and myself became unable to be in the same group and we just thought, | 0:53:58 | 0:54:03 | |
"Well, get some nice high vocals, yeah, let's try a girl. | 0:54:03 | 0:54:09 | |
"Let's be a bit different and try a girl." | 0:54:09 | 0:54:12 | |
From that the step was that if we were gonna take a girl on the road | 0:54:12 | 0:54:18 | |
with a load of terrible randy idiots like us | 0:54:18 | 0:54:20 | |
there ought to be two of them to look after each other. | 0:54:20 | 0:54:23 | |
Joanne and Susan turned up... | 0:54:23 | 0:54:25 | |
I was being sarcastic there, by the way, we were sitting there reading books, really. | 0:54:25 | 0:54:31 | |
# You better change it back or we will both be sorry | 0:54:31 | 0:54:35 | |
# Don't you want me, baby? | 0:54:35 | 0:54:39 | |
# Don't you want me, oh? | 0:54:39 | 0:54:43 | |
# Don't you want me, baby...? # | 0:54:43 | 0:54:46 | |
Oakley spotted the girls dancing in a futurist night club in Sheffield. | 0:54:46 | 0:54:51 | |
Our parents thought, "There's some ulterior motive, | 0:54:51 | 0:54:53 | |
"something's going on." | 0:54:53 | 0:54:55 | |
But then Philip came round and met both sets of parents | 0:54:55 | 0:54:59 | |
and they thought he was a decent enough guy | 0:54:59 | 0:55:03 | |
and then we went to school with our parents and they talked to the head teacher, | 0:55:03 | 0:55:07 | |
who thought that it would be good for our education | 0:55:07 | 0:55:11 | |
to have six weeks going round Europe | 0:55:11 | 0:55:14 | |
because we could go to art galleries and things like that. | 0:55:14 | 0:55:18 | |
# Put your hand in a party wave | 0:55:18 | 0:55:21 | |
# Pass around | 0:55:21 | 0:55:23 | |
# Make a shroud pulling combs through a backwash frame... # | 0:55:24 | 0:55:28 | |
We never went to said art galleries! | 0:55:30 | 0:55:33 | |
We did go to a lot of clubs. | 0:55:33 | 0:55:35 | |
Yeah. We went to Cologne Cathedral, | 0:55:35 | 0:55:39 | |
that was about the most cultural thing we ever did. | 0:55:39 | 0:55:42 | |
# Get around town, get around town | 0:55:42 | 0:55:45 | |
# Where the people look good Where the music is loud | 0:55:45 | 0:55:48 | |
# Get around town No need to stand proud | 0:55:48 | 0:55:51 | |
# Add your voice to the sound of the crowd... # | 0:55:51 | 0:55:55 | |
It also meant that we could appeal to women as well as men. | 0:55:55 | 0:56:00 | |
The early Human League was a very male-based group | 0:56:00 | 0:56:03 | |
and really only lads in long coats liked us. | 0:56:03 | 0:56:06 | |
And some transvestites. | 0:56:06 | 0:56:09 | |
OK, pop music, let's go. | 0:56:11 | 0:56:13 | |
Anyone here like The Human League? | 0:56:13 | 0:56:15 | |
# The shades from a pencil peer... # | 0:56:18 | 0:56:20 | |
Released in 1981, Dare crystallised the new synth-pop sound. | 0:56:20 | 0:56:25 | |
# A fold in an eyelid... # | 0:56:25 | 0:56:27 | |
We did something that could only be done at that stage. | 0:56:27 | 0:56:31 | |
While we were doing it, they were bringing the machines in that enabled us to do it. | 0:56:31 | 0:56:36 | |
For instance, the very first Lynn drum I think that arrived in England | 0:56:36 | 0:56:40 | |
came into our studio and we took the drums off Sound Of The Crowd and put the Lynn drum on. | 0:56:40 | 0:56:46 | |
Without that, probably, it wouldn't have worked. | 0:56:46 | 0:56:49 | |
I remember when Martyn got the Lynn drum | 0:56:49 | 0:56:55 | |
and it was like a child at Christmas getting the first fire engine or something. | 0:56:55 | 0:57:00 | |
He was jumping up and down and all the boys were, "Oh, it's a drum!" | 0:57:00 | 0:57:06 | |
Before that, apparently, the drums had been one of the hardest things to do | 0:57:06 | 0:57:11 | |
and now there was this box that was this big and you could program it. | 0:57:11 | 0:57:17 | |
They were all very excited and we were a bit like, "OK, boys." | 0:57:17 | 0:57:21 | |
Now the flood gates were open. | 0:57:23 | 0:57:25 | |
The rush to market swept every aspect of British life in the early '80s. | 0:57:25 | 0:57:30 | |
Everything was now up for grabs, including pop music. | 0:57:30 | 0:57:34 | |
In an attempt to eclipse his ex-bandmates, former Human League member Martyn Ware | 0:57:34 | 0:57:40 | |
would cash in on the times with a concept album. | 0:57:40 | 0:57:43 | |
We were doing the day shifts, they were doing the night shifts in the same studio. | 0:57:43 | 0:57:48 | |
They were making Dare, we were making Penthouse And Pavement. | 0:57:48 | 0:57:52 | |
I've never been so motivated in my life, believe me. | 0:57:52 | 0:57:55 | |
I said, "We're gonna make it stylish, fantastic. | 0:57:55 | 0:57:59 | |
"Finally, the shackles are off, we can start using other instruments | 0:57:59 | 0:58:02 | |
"cos the original manifesto is broken, | 0:58:02 | 0:58:06 | |
"but we're still gonna make it predominantly electronic." | 0:58:06 | 0:58:10 | |
And so the idea was that suddenly we're not a group, | 0:58:10 | 0:58:14 | |
we are ripping open the facade and going, | 0:58:14 | 0:58:17 | |
"No, this is great music, but it's a business." | 0:58:17 | 0:58:21 | |
It really is a business. It doesn't matter. | 0:58:21 | 0:58:24 | |
Bob Dylan can sing all he wants. | 0:58:24 | 0:58:26 | |
He's busy brown-nosing the A&R men behind the scenes. | 0:58:26 | 0:58:30 | |
# Now here comes my job | 0:58:30 | 0:58:33 | |
# Credit bleeding with the mob | 0:58:33 | 0:58:38 | |
# Dreams become ideals... # | 0:58:38 | 0:58:41 | |
But, ironically, and we were totally anti-Thatcher | 0:58:41 | 0:58:45 | |
and always had been, you know, Fascist Groove Thang etc. | 0:58:45 | 0:58:48 | |
It got taken on board by the aspirational yuppie culture | 0:58:48 | 0:58:53 | |
in the early '80s as their kind of theme tunes a lot of the time. | 0:58:53 | 0:58:57 | |
Like Let's All Make A Bomb. | 0:58:57 | 0:58:58 | |
They completely missed the point of the song, totally, and it was like, | 0:58:58 | 0:59:02 | |
"Yeah, mate, remember listening to that, yeah. it's fantastic, mate. | 0:59:02 | 0:59:06 | |
"Love the ponytails." | 0:59:06 | 0:59:09 | |
MUSIC: "Penthouse And Pavement" by Heaven 17 | 0:59:09 | 0:59:13 | |
Not everyone wanted in on booming Britain. | 0:59:13 | 0:59:15 | |
Cabaret Voltaire were neither into ponytails nor popularity. | 0:59:15 | 0:59:20 | |
Their vision of Britain was concerned with the inner city riots | 0:59:20 | 0:59:23 | |
that erupted across the country in summer '81. | 0:59:23 | 0:59:28 | |
People say that The Specials' Ghost Town | 0:59:28 | 0:59:32 | |
was the soundtrack to the unrest of that year, but a lot of people | 0:59:32 | 0:59:38 | |
alternatively think that Red Mecca was the sound of that. | 0:59:38 | 0:59:42 | |
I think I've said in the past, | 0:59:42 | 0:59:44 | |
somehow that insurrection on the streets kind of found its way into the music. | 0:59:44 | 0:59:48 | |
You kind of took some heart in the fact | 0:59:53 | 0:59:57 | |
that some people were kicking back against the system, | 0:59:57 | 1:00:01 | |
albeit in quite a crude manner, and were prepared to take on the police. | 1:00:01 | 1:00:06 | |
You know, we weren't paranoid, this stuff was slowly happening, you know, | 1:00:14 | 1:00:18 | |
the rise of surveillance culture, | 1:00:18 | 1:00:20 | |
the rise of the right wing in America and the fundamentalist Christians. | 1:00:20 | 1:00:25 | |
Eh, oh la, in the name of Jesus. | 1:00:25 | 1:00:30 | |
Then you've got like the revolution in Iran | 1:00:30 | 1:00:32 | |
with the Shah being deposed | 1:00:32 | 1:00:35 | |
and the general feeling that things are moving to the right. | 1:00:35 | 1:00:41 | |
Meanwhile, something strangely synthetic was happening in the sleazy underbelly of London's Soho. | 1:00:47 | 1:00:54 | |
MUSIC: "Tainted Love" by Soft Cell | 1:01:01 | 1:01:03 | |
I was going to lots of Northern Soul clubs so I was listening to | 1:01:03 | 1:01:07 | |
kind of Kraftwerk and Northern Soul, | 1:01:07 | 1:01:12 | |
which is where things developed from, really, in my head. | 1:01:12 | 1:01:15 | |
HE PLAYS "Tainted Love" | 1:01:15 | 1:01:18 | |
There... I missed it. | 1:01:21 | 1:01:23 | |
If we had the money we'd come to Soho and just hang around Soho, | 1:01:23 | 1:01:28 | |
just getting ideas, which is where the name came from. | 1:01:28 | 1:01:31 | |
# Sometimes I feel I've got to | 1:01:31 | 1:01:35 | |
# Run away... # | 1:01:35 | 1:01:37 | |
And Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret was a bar back in 1980 or whatever. | 1:01:37 | 1:01:43 | |
That's where that photograph's from. We were just kind of fascinated, | 1:01:43 | 1:01:48 | |
being these two northern hicks from the sticks | 1:01:48 | 1:01:51 | |
and suddenly, "Wow, this is amazing." | 1:01:51 | 1:01:53 | |
It was kind of glamorous and dangerous. | 1:01:53 | 1:01:58 | |
Lots of neon lights and stuff, which we were fascinated by. | 1:01:58 | 1:02:01 | |
# Now I run from you | 1:02:02 | 1:02:05 | |
# This tainted love you've given | 1:02:05 | 1:02:08 | |
# I give you all a boy could give you | 1:02:08 | 1:02:12 | |
# Take my tears and that's not nearly all | 1:02:12 | 1:02:16 | |
# Tainted love Oh, oh, oh, tainted love... # | 1:02:16 | 1:02:20 | |
The first people doing the electro thing | 1:02:20 | 1:02:23 | |
really caned the alienation, "I am hollow inside" thing, | 1:02:23 | 1:02:27 | |
like Gary Numan, and you get this second wave | 1:02:27 | 1:02:29 | |
where you've got the cold, glistening synth sound but the singer's actually very emotional. | 1:02:29 | 1:02:35 | |
Marc Almond's a good example of that, torridly emotional. | 1:02:35 | 1:02:39 | |
# ..Someone to hold you tight And you'll think love is to pray... # | 1:02:39 | 1:02:44 | |
It's like there's a super-passionate singer | 1:02:44 | 1:02:47 | |
and then the one other person, usually a guy with a synthesiser, | 1:02:47 | 1:02:50 | |
and I think they're using the synth more as like | 1:02:50 | 1:02:53 | |
a miniature or condensed orchestra, | 1:02:53 | 1:02:56 | |
like they can get all the sounds they need out of this one box. | 1:02:56 | 1:03:00 | |
So really it's more like electronic soul music. | 1:03:00 | 1:03:02 | |
# Take my tears and that's not nearly all... # | 1:03:02 | 1:03:06 | |
Where Soft Cell led, others would follow. | 1:03:06 | 1:03:08 | |
Having left Depeche Mode, Vince Clarke would form his own duo | 1:03:08 | 1:03:12 | |
with a rhythm-and-blues singer, also from Basildon. | 1:03:12 | 1:03:15 | |
Vince I met for the first time | 1:03:17 | 1:03:19 | |
when I was 11. We both went to the same Saturday morning music school. | 1:03:19 | 1:03:23 | |
It was a council-run thing where | 1:03:23 | 1:03:25 | |
I believe he was playing violin and I was playing oboe. | 1:03:25 | 1:03:28 | |
Even though we'd never spoken in that time I recognised him for the fact that there was three of them, | 1:03:28 | 1:03:33 | |
three brothers with this white-blond hair looking like a family of ducks going across the road, you know. | 1:03:33 | 1:03:39 | |
Once I left Depeche I had some songs | 1:03:40 | 1:03:43 | |
which I wanted to demo for the record company. | 1:03:43 | 1:03:48 | |
One of them being Only You. | 1:03:48 | 1:03:50 | |
# Looking from the window above | 1:03:50 | 1:03:53 | |
# It's like a story of love... # | 1:03:53 | 1:03:55 | |
Anyway, I got in touch with Alison cos I vaguely knew her. | 1:03:55 | 1:03:58 | |
We didn't have plans to form a band or anything, we had no history together. | 1:03:58 | 1:04:03 | |
We just went from the demo to the recording studio | 1:04:03 | 1:04:07 | |
to making the first record. | 1:04:07 | 1:04:09 | |
# All I needed was the love you gave | 1:04:09 | 1:04:13 | |
# All I needed for another day | 1:04:13 | 1:04:17 | |
# And all I ever knew | 1:04:17 | 1:04:20 | |
# Only you... # | 1:04:20 | 1:04:22 | |
I wasn't overly interested in technology, | 1:04:22 | 1:04:25 | |
I couldn't even afford a record player or cassette player so the idea of buying hardware... | 1:04:25 | 1:04:29 | |
There's no point in lusting after the things you can't have. | 1:04:29 | 1:04:33 | |
Like me thinking about a mini-skirt. | 1:04:33 | 1:04:35 | |
# Listen to the words that you say | 1:04:35 | 1:04:38 | |
# It's getting harder to stay | 1:04:38 | 1:04:41 | |
# When I see you... # | 1:04:41 | 1:04:45 | |
Vince Clarke then forms another one of these classic | 1:04:45 | 1:04:49 | |
sort of fire and ice groups. | 1:04:49 | 1:04:50 | |
The ice is the synth and the fire is Alison Moyet, | 1:04:50 | 1:04:53 | |
so that's almost like a template for '80s pop - | 1:04:53 | 1:04:56 | |
the synthesiser guy, the synthesiser boffin, | 1:04:56 | 1:05:00 | |
and then the super-passionate singer, | 1:05:00 | 1:05:03 | |
usually female or maybe gay male. It's kind of... | 1:05:03 | 1:05:06 | |
The duo replaces the rock band. | 1:05:06 | 1:05:09 | |
It's an affront to rockism, isn't it? | 1:05:16 | 1:05:19 | |
Just the look of those bands. | 1:05:19 | 1:05:21 | |
# All I needed was the love you gave... # | 1:05:21 | 1:05:25 | |
When we first started working in Yazoo, | 1:05:25 | 1:05:28 | |
it was like he was effectively suffering from a very recent divorce. | 1:05:28 | 1:05:33 | |
# Only you. # | 1:05:33 | 1:05:35 | |
It's like these were his childhood mates, Depeche Mode. | 1:05:35 | 1:05:38 | |
This was a huge thing for him, to go from being a local boy, | 1:05:38 | 1:05:43 | |
like the rest of us, without a great deal of hope, | 1:05:43 | 1:05:45 | |
without many prospects or any qualifications. | 1:05:45 | 1:05:48 | |
The last thing I'd heard was he was driving vans for R White's, crashing them and leaving them. | 1:05:48 | 1:05:53 | |
MUSIC: "Don't Go" by Yazoo | 1:05:53 | 1:05:56 | |
Yazoo signed to Mute Records in 1982 and, to his surprise, | 1:05:59 | 1:06:03 | |
Daniel Miller found himself with another wildly successful pop act. | 1:06:03 | 1:06:09 | |
# Came in from the city Walked into the door | 1:06:09 | 1:06:12 | |
# I turned around when I heard the sound of footsteps on the floor | 1:06:12 | 1:06:16 | |
# Love just like addiction Now I'm hooked on you | 1:06:16 | 1:06:19 | |
# I need some time to get it right Your love's gonna see me through | 1:06:19 | 1:06:24 | |
# Can't stop now, don't you know I ain't ever gonna let you go | 1:06:26 | 1:06:30 | |
# Don't go... # | 1:06:30 | 1:06:32 | |
There was nothing right about it. | 1:06:32 | 1:06:35 | |
It was quite soulful music with a very cold, electronic beat. | 1:06:35 | 1:06:39 | |
She didn't fit the typecast female pop-star image at all. | 1:06:39 | 1:06:44 | |
# Hey, go get the doctor... # | 1:06:44 | 1:06:47 | |
You know, and it's become a cliche now, but at that time, | 1:06:47 | 1:06:50 | |
the quiet second bloke on synth wasn't a cliche. | 1:06:50 | 1:06:54 | |
# Can't stop now, don't you know | 1:06:54 | 1:06:56 | |
# I ain't ever gonna let you go | 1:06:56 | 1:06:58 | |
# Don't go... # | 1:06:58 | 1:07:00 | |
In the 18 months that we existed, myself and Alison never got to know each other. | 1:07:01 | 1:07:06 | |
We never went out to a pub to have a drink | 1:07:06 | 1:07:10 | |
or did any of that stuff, any socialising. | 1:07:10 | 1:07:12 | |
It was just in the studio, working. | 1:07:12 | 1:07:16 | |
To actually come across somebody who was unfathomable, | 1:07:16 | 1:07:21 | |
who you could not penetrate, and at the same time had, | 1:07:21 | 1:07:26 | |
regardless of what he says, a burning ambition, he was an ambitious boy. | 1:07:26 | 1:07:31 | |
What was amazing about it is he actually achieved his ambitions, which again, | 1:07:31 | 1:07:36 | |
coming from where I came from, you didn't see that very often. | 1:07:36 | 1:07:40 | |
And I wanted to penetrate him! | 1:07:42 | 1:07:44 | |
Not biblically, obviously. | 1:07:44 | 1:07:47 | |
# I ain't never gonna let you go Don't go... # | 1:07:47 | 1:07:49 | |
I just wanted to be in the studio so much. | 1:07:49 | 1:07:53 | |
I would have been in there 24 hours a day. | 1:07:53 | 1:07:57 | |
It was like being in a sweet shop. | 1:07:57 | 1:08:01 | |
Synth-pop was becoming increasingly popular and increasingly grand. | 1:08:03 | 1:08:09 | |
OMD would enjoy three top 10 hits in 1982, | 1:08:11 | 1:08:15 | |
two of which were about Joan of Arc. | 1:08:15 | 1:08:19 | |
We were quite intellectual, you know. | 1:08:19 | 1:08:21 | |
Pompous, stuck up our own arses, I guess you could say. | 1:08:21 | 1:08:25 | |
We were going on Top Of The Pops | 1:08:29 | 1:08:31 | |
with Bonnie Langford and Elton John and Cliff Richard amongst others, | 1:08:31 | 1:08:34 | |
and we were playing a song that was in waltz time, | 1:08:34 | 1:08:37 | |
that started with 45 seconds of distortion and had no chorus, | 1:08:37 | 1:08:41 | |
and had a Mellotron playing what sounded like bagpipes. | 1:08:41 | 1:08:45 | |
-Explain how it works. -Well, actually, it's fairly straightforward. | 1:08:46 | 1:08:50 | |
It's a musical computer. | 1:08:50 | 1:08:52 | |
The right hand is lead instruments with a choice of 18 different ones, | 1:08:52 | 1:08:56 | |
and the left hand is rhythms in this half and backgrounds in this half. | 1:08:56 | 1:09:01 | |
It's all been fed on to hundreds of tape tracks. | 1:09:01 | 1:09:04 | |
The Mellotron is a very early sampler before samplers went digital. | 1:09:04 | 1:09:09 | |
It was a very analogue thing. | 1:09:09 | 1:09:12 | |
Here's a French accordion with a Viennese waltz. | 1:09:12 | 1:09:15 | |
It was nightmare to use on stage. | 1:09:17 | 1:09:19 | |
We were playing in this tiny town in the middle of France and the Mellotron was completely out of tune | 1:09:19 | 1:09:24 | |
because all the town were drawing the power down so much cooking, | 1:09:24 | 1:09:29 | |
the motor wouldn't spin fast enough. | 1:09:29 | 1:09:31 | |
Thank you. Well, David isn't a musician, as you know, | 1:09:31 | 1:09:35 | |
but I have a professional pianist here who can really show you what the Mellotron can do. | 1:09:35 | 1:09:40 | |
The number of people who thought that the equipment | 1:09:40 | 1:09:45 | |
wrote the song for you... | 1:09:45 | 1:09:47 | |
"Well, anybody could do it with the same equipment you've got." | 1:09:47 | 1:09:50 | |
Fuck off. | 1:09:50 | 1:09:52 | |
# If Joan of Arc had a heart | 1:09:52 | 1:09:58 | |
# Would she give it as a gift? # | 1:09:58 | 1:10:05 | |
It's all played by hand. | 1:10:05 | 1:10:08 | |
Believe me, if there was a button on a synth or a drum machine | 1:10:08 | 1:10:11 | |
that said, "hit single", I would have pressed it | 1:10:11 | 1:10:14 | |
as often as anybody else would have, but there isn't. | 1:10:14 | 1:10:17 | |
It was all written by real human beings and it was all played by hand, | 1:10:17 | 1:10:22 | |
to the point where Paul and I thought we were gonna get arthritis | 1:10:22 | 1:10:25 | |
in our fingers from playing bass lines like that for hours on end. | 1:10:25 | 1:10:29 | |
MUSIC: "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" by Eurythmics | 1:10:29 | 1:10:31 | |
Between 1981 and 1983, synth-pop reigned supreme. | 1:10:31 | 1:10:36 | |
Our charts were chock full of duos and groups | 1:10:36 | 1:10:39 | |
who set aside changing the world | 1:10:39 | 1:10:41 | |
in favour of making it with a synth on Top Of The Pops. | 1:10:41 | 1:10:45 | |
# Some of them want to use you | 1:10:45 | 1:10:48 | |
# Some of them want to get used by you | 1:10:48 | 1:10:52 | |
# Some of them want to abuse you... # | 1:10:52 | 1:10:56 | |
You've got to remember that it was the first time ever | 1:10:56 | 1:10:59 | |
that someone could sit and make a record on their own. | 1:10:59 | 1:11:01 | |
Eurythmics came along | 1:11:07 | 1:11:10 | |
and they did Sweet Dreams in their basement. | 1:11:10 | 1:11:13 | |
They recorded it on an eight-track tape machine. | 1:11:13 | 1:11:16 | |
Annie sang Sweet Dreams into a little Shure microphone, | 1:11:16 | 1:11:20 | |
holding it in her hand, and won a Grammy for it. | 1:11:20 | 1:11:23 | |
MUSIC: "Vienna" by Ultravox | 1:11:23 | 1:11:27 | |
And in 1982, along came a song | 1:11:27 | 1:11:30 | |
that turned the alienation of the original synth pioneers | 1:11:30 | 1:11:33 | |
into a full-blown epic. | 1:11:33 | 1:11:36 | |
Ultravox would score one of the biggest synth-pop hits ever, | 1:11:36 | 1:11:41 | |
called Vienna, which has that total fetishism of Mitteleuropa, Vienna. | 1:11:41 | 1:11:47 | |
It's the Habsburg Empire, the romance of central Europe. | 1:11:47 | 1:11:52 | |
# Freezing breath on the window pane | 1:11:54 | 1:11:57 | |
# Lying and waiting... # | 1:11:57 | 1:12:00 | |
The movies we were watching and the music we were listening to at the time all came out of Europe | 1:12:00 | 1:12:05 | |
and the history that Europe had, you know, Vienna being | 1:12:05 | 1:12:08 | |
this beautifully romantic city, this beautiful place. | 1:12:08 | 1:12:11 | |
You put all that together and you've got this fantastic image, this wonderful... | 1:12:11 | 1:12:15 | |
I'd never been to Vienna when we wrote the song, I didn't know anything about Vienna. | 1:12:15 | 1:12:19 | |
# Reaching out in a piercing cry It stays with you until... # | 1:12:19 | 1:12:23 | |
You try putting that down, that you're gonna write a song | 1:12:23 | 1:12:26 | |
that is a four-and-a-half-minute long electronic ballad | 1:12:26 | 1:12:29 | |
that speeds up in the middle with a viola solo thrown in - | 1:12:29 | 1:12:32 | |
it doesn't equate, it doesn't work. | 1:12:32 | 1:12:35 | |
But at the time when you're young and naive, naivety is a wonderful thing. | 1:12:35 | 1:12:38 | |
# This means nothing to me | 1:12:38 | 1:12:44 | |
# Oh, Vienna. # | 1:12:44 | 1:12:48 | |
Not to be outdone by their English synth-pop derivatives, | 1:12:53 | 1:12:57 | |
Kraftwerk would return in 1982 | 1:12:57 | 1:13:00 | |
to score their only number one single success, | 1:13:00 | 1:13:03 | |
cashing in with a song that they'd originally recorded in 1978. | 1:13:03 | 1:13:08 | |
MUSIC: "The Model" by Kraftwerk | 1:13:08 | 1:13:12 | |
With The Model that was, in England, | 1:13:13 | 1:13:15 | |
to be a hit, that was a complete different story. | 1:13:15 | 1:13:19 | |
We didn't expect it ourselves. | 1:13:19 | 1:13:22 | |
# She's a model and she's looking good... # | 1:13:23 | 1:13:28 | |
The reasons was the following - we had already a single to be played | 1:13:28 | 1:13:33 | |
on the radio in England and it was Computer World. | 1:13:33 | 1:13:37 | |
The man of the EMI London house, | 1:13:37 | 1:13:42 | |
he didn't know what to put on the B-side. | 1:13:42 | 1:13:46 | |
And he thought and he thought and he thought, maybe two days longer, | 1:13:46 | 1:13:51 | |
and suddenly, he had the great idea to put The Model from the last album, | 1:13:51 | 1:13:56 | |
Man Machine, on the B-side. | 1:13:56 | 1:13:59 | |
And then they sent the single to radios, and 80% of the radios played the B-side. | 1:13:59 | 1:14:04 | |
# She's going out tonight Loves drinking just champagne... # | 1:14:09 | 1:14:14 | |
By 1983, Britain had entered an era of conspicuous consumption and greed | 1:14:14 | 1:14:19 | |
that made the late '70s seem like a foreign country. | 1:14:19 | 1:14:24 | |
Loadsamoney! | 1:14:24 | 1:14:26 | |
It would provide inspiration for Depeche Mode's new chief songwriter. | 1:14:26 | 1:14:32 | |
# The handshake seals a contract | 1:14:34 | 1:14:38 | |
# From the contract There's no turning back | 1:14:38 | 1:14:42 | |
# The turning point of a career... # | 1:14:42 | 1:14:48 | |
The early '80s were just a terrible time in Britain. | 1:14:48 | 1:14:52 | |
And I was young and impressionable, | 1:14:52 | 1:14:55 | |
and that was really when I first felt like | 1:14:55 | 1:14:58 | |
I was writing from the heart, really. | 1:14:58 | 1:15:01 | |
# The grabbing hands grab all they can | 1:15:01 | 1:15:06 | |
# All for themselves, after all | 1:15:06 | 1:15:10 | |
# The grabbing hands grab all they can | 1:15:10 | 1:15:14 | |
# All for themselves, after all | 1:15:14 | 1:15:18 | |
# It's a competitive world... # | 1:15:18 | 1:15:21 | |
Around the time of Construction Time Again, | 1:15:21 | 1:15:25 | |
samplers had just really come out. | 1:15:25 | 1:15:28 | |
We would just... It was a whole revelation to us. | 1:15:28 | 1:15:31 | |
We were just going out and smashing pieces of metal | 1:15:31 | 1:15:36 | |
with sledgehammers, raiding the kitchen drawer | 1:15:36 | 1:15:40 | |
for all the utensils to make percussion sounds. | 1:15:40 | 1:15:43 | |
Just anything we could get our hands on. | 1:15:43 | 1:15:45 | |
We've got this vague idea at the moment which was used on the demo. | 1:15:45 | 1:15:49 | |
We've got this pebble, which we got from the mud. | 1:15:49 | 1:15:53 | |
Yeah, look, white spots. | 1:15:53 | 1:15:55 | |
They're the stinging nettles. | 1:15:55 | 1:15:57 | |
Anyway, the idea is to roll the pebble on this piece of metal along here, | 1:15:57 | 1:16:02 | |
this window frame, | 1:16:02 | 1:16:05 | |
thus causing... | 1:16:05 | 1:16:07 | |
thus making this sort of sound. | 1:16:07 | 1:16:09 | |
RATTLING | 1:16:09 | 1:16:10 | |
Construction Time Again really started to see us form as the basis | 1:16:10 | 1:16:17 | |
of what we are today. | 1:16:17 | 1:16:20 | |
RATTLING | 1:16:20 | 1:16:21 | |
That was a lot better. Anyway, the idea is to take that sequence | 1:16:21 | 1:16:26 | |
and to make an interesting rhythm out of it, | 1:16:26 | 1:16:30 | |
and to sequence it all through the song, | 1:16:30 | 1:16:34 | |
so people dance. | 1:16:34 | 1:16:35 | |
Depeche Mode pioneered their new sampler-based sound in London's Shoreditch. | 1:16:39 | 1:16:45 | |
In those days, Shoreditch, there was not a soul around. | 1:16:45 | 1:16:49 | |
Now, of course, with Hoxton etc etc, | 1:16:49 | 1:16:51 | |
it is the trendy place to be, | 1:16:51 | 1:16:53 | |
but it wasn't when we were at the Garden Studios. | 1:16:53 | 1:16:56 | |
There was not a soul to be seen. | 1:16:56 | 1:16:58 | |
# Get out the crane Construction time again | 1:16:58 | 1:17:04 | |
# What is it this time... # | 1:17:04 | 1:17:07 | |
I remember, there was one sound in particular | 1:17:07 | 1:17:10 | |
that was us actually hitting a piece of corrugated iron | 1:17:10 | 1:17:14 | |
that was the side of a building site, | 1:17:14 | 1:17:16 | |
and the sample sort of went like... | 1:17:16 | 1:17:19 | |
"Krr! Oi!", and that was the site foreman. | 1:17:19 | 1:17:23 | |
-# It's a lot -It's a lot | 1:17:23 | 1:17:25 | |
-# It's a lot -It's a lot | 1:17:25 | 1:17:27 | |
-# It's a lot -It's a lot... # | 1:17:27 | 1:17:28 | |
We seemed, in the '80s, to be doing a one-band crusade for electronic music | 1:17:28 | 1:17:35 | |
against the music press, that was overwhelmingly rock-based. | 1:17:35 | 1:17:40 | |
We would often do interviews with journalists and we'd have | 1:17:40 | 1:17:47 | |
a big argument, because they just didn't consider | 1:17:47 | 1:17:50 | |
electronic music to be real music. | 1:17:50 | 1:17:52 | |
# There's a new game we like to play, you see | 1:17:53 | 1:17:57 | |
# The game with added reality | 1:17:57 | 1:18:01 | |
# You treat me like a dog Get me down on my knees | 1:18:01 | 1:18:06 | |
# We call it master and servant... # | 1:18:06 | 1:18:09 | |
You know, we got accused at certain times of being like a very subversive pop band, and I do think that we did | 1:18:09 | 1:18:16 | |
get away with some stuff that was probably risque for the radio, just because we used it in a pop context. | 1:18:16 | 1:18:22 | |
# With you on top and me underneath... # | 1:18:22 | 1:18:28 | |
In our early career, there was things like Master And Servant and stuff. | 1:18:28 | 1:18:32 | |
# Let's play master and servant | 1:18:32 | 1:18:36 | |
# Let's play master and servant... # | 1:18:36 | 1:18:38 | |
Some of the reviews were unbelievably vicious. | 1:18:38 | 1:18:42 | |
You just couldn't... Real hatred for the band. | 1:18:42 | 1:18:45 | |
Real hatred. I don't know why. It wasn't British, really. | 1:18:45 | 1:18:48 | |
A journalist once said, | 1:18:49 | 1:18:52 | |
"The music will appeal to alienated youth everywhere, and Germans." | 1:18:52 | 1:18:57 | |
HE LAUGHS | 1:18:57 | 1:18:59 | |
Depeche Mode would eventually find a sympathetic home for their music in America. | 1:19:03 | 1:19:08 | |
For a lot of Americans, England just means gay. | 1:19:12 | 1:19:16 | |
They think it's like a conflation of Oscar Wilde and various ideas about British boarding school. | 1:19:16 | 1:19:23 | |
For people who feel different, or misfits in America, | 1:19:23 | 1:19:28 | |
England does actually seem like this utopia. | 1:19:28 | 1:19:31 | |
They imagine everyone in England walks around wearing eyeliner and plays synthesisers, you know? | 1:19:31 | 1:19:35 | |
And so to be a Depeche Mode fan in America | 1:19:35 | 1:19:38 | |
was actually quite a dissident thing. | 1:19:38 | 1:19:40 | |
Depeche Mode were the only act who were truly successful in exporting the British electronic sound. | 1:19:44 | 1:19:51 | |
The band would enjoy massive popularity in America | 1:19:51 | 1:19:54 | |
throughout the '80s and beyond, | 1:19:54 | 1:19:56 | |
consistently filling stadiums across the land. | 1:19:56 | 1:20:00 | |
Back in Britain, in '83, | 1:20:00 | 1:20:02 | |
the sampler was moving synth-pop in a different direction. | 1:20:02 | 1:20:06 | |
Suppose I want to send my loved one a rather special musical greeting, well, I can. | 1:20:06 | 1:20:11 | |
First, let me give the computer an idea of the sound that I actually want to send. | 1:20:11 | 1:20:16 | |
So, I'll prime it again. | 1:20:16 | 1:20:18 | |
And now I'll speak into the mic. Hello! | 1:20:24 | 1:20:26 | |
And we have to wait a couple of seconds now for the sound wave to come up. There it is. | 1:20:26 | 1:20:32 | |
SAMPLER: # Hello, hello, hello Hello, hello, hello. # | 1:20:32 | 1:20:37 | |
Hello, dear. | 1:20:37 | 1:20:38 | |
When we arrived in it, the Emulator had just been invented. | 1:20:38 | 1:20:43 | |
It was completely riveting, because it had James Brown going, "Please!" | 1:20:43 | 1:20:48 | |
You played up and down the keyboard. | 1:20:48 | 1:20:50 | |
Had a string quartet or an orchestra. | 1:20:50 | 1:20:52 | |
It had a famous Beethoven "Rumph, rumph." | 1:20:52 | 1:20:55 | |
# West End girl... # | 1:20:57 | 1:20:59 | |
The first record we made, West End Girl, | 1:20:59 | 1:21:01 | |
every sound was actually a sample played on the same keyboard | 1:21:01 | 1:21:04 | |
which looked just like a Bontempi chord organ. | 1:21:04 | 1:21:07 | |
The idea was to take real life and put it against beautiful or dance or both music. | 1:21:09 | 1:21:15 | |
Because we were the last of the thing that started with The Human League, | 1:21:15 | 1:21:20 | |
and we were probably the first of the thing where pop music was raised to dance music. | 1:21:20 | 1:21:25 | |
# In a West End town a dead end world | 1:21:25 | 1:21:28 | |
# The East End boys and West End girls | 1:21:28 | 1:21:31 | |
# Ooh, in a West End town a dead end world | 1:21:33 | 1:21:37 | |
# East End boys West End girls... # | 1:21:37 | 1:21:40 | |
The Pet Shop Boys gave us a glimpse of what the future held for British electronic music. | 1:21:42 | 1:21:47 | |
But the band that would truly spearhead the shift from synth-pop | 1:21:47 | 1:21:51 | |
to dance music had evolved out of the ashes of Joy Division. | 1:21:51 | 1:21:55 | |
Whilst in America, New Order would have a synthetic epiphany. | 1:21:57 | 1:22:02 | |
Kind of at the period where Ian had died | 1:22:06 | 1:22:09 | |
and we were going recording in New York. | 1:22:09 | 1:22:12 | |
We were spending a lot of time in New York and I was going | 1:22:12 | 1:22:15 | |
to night clubs after the studio. | 1:22:15 | 1:22:18 | |
Every night. | 1:22:18 | 1:22:20 | |
I remember sitting there on these kind of steps in a club and thinking, | 1:22:20 | 1:22:25 | |
"Wouldn't it be great if one day, | 1:22:25 | 1:22:27 | |
"our music was played in a place like this." | 1:22:27 | 1:22:30 | |
That sort of planted a seed in my head, really, | 1:22:32 | 1:22:36 | |
that got me interested in more in synthesisers. | 1:22:36 | 1:22:39 | |
You know, if you play an encore or something, you know, | 1:22:41 | 1:22:44 | |
it's like, you're just falling into the trap, you know, | 1:22:44 | 1:22:48 | |
it's a phoney thing doing an encore, everyone expects it. | 1:22:48 | 1:22:51 | |
"Ooh, let's get these machines to do a track and we'll just go on | 1:22:52 | 1:22:56 | |
"as if we're doing an encore, press a button and then bugger off." | 1:22:56 | 1:22:59 | |
That was the idea. | 1:22:59 | 1:23:01 | |
When Blue Monday came out, a lot of people didn't like it. | 1:23:11 | 1:23:14 | |
They went, "What, what... | 1:23:14 | 1:23:16 | |
"it doesn't sound like New Order, what are you doing? | 1:23:16 | 1:23:20 | |
"It doesn't sound like you're supposed to sound." | 1:23:20 | 1:23:23 | |
A lot of people were like, "I don't like that." Then, it just took off. | 1:23:23 | 1:23:27 | |
# How does it feel? | 1:23:28 | 1:23:31 | |
# To treat me like you do? | 1:23:31 | 1:23:33 | |
# When you laid your hands upon me | 1:23:35 | 1:23:39 | |
# And told me who you are... # | 1:23:39 | 1:23:42 | |
I guess, people went on holidays | 1:23:42 | 1:23:44 | |
and they hear it in night clubs in Spain and Greece and stuff, | 1:23:44 | 1:23:48 | |
and when they came back, | 1:23:48 | 1:23:50 | |
they would buy it'd be a big hit over and over again. | 1:23:50 | 1:23:53 | |
Blue Monday's inscrutable club cool would make it become the biggest-selling 12-inch of all time, | 1:23:55 | 1:24:02 | |
originally released in 1983, it heralded the future for British electronica. | 1:24:02 | 1:24:07 | |
A new age of dance music, unconcerned with pop charts and commercial appeal, | 1:24:07 | 1:24:12 | |
would gain a massive following that thrives to this day. | 1:24:12 | 1:24:16 | |
For those electronic pioneers who had brought the synth into British pop music, it was the end of an era. | 1:24:18 | 1:24:25 | |
It sort of starts, I guess, round about '83. | 1:24:25 | 1:24:28 | |
It was just overdone. It was saturated. | 1:24:28 | 1:24:30 | |
There was too much synth-pop around. | 1:24:30 | 1:24:33 | |
# This is the sound of all of our friends... # | 1:24:33 | 1:24:35 | |
It's all very well if it's being on a synth, but the actual melodies and the way the songs | 1:24:35 | 1:24:40 | |
were structured were really pretty traditional and quite trite. | 1:24:40 | 1:24:44 | |
It wasn't that inventive as electronic music. | 1:24:44 | 1:24:47 | |
# Somebody's got their eye on me | 1:24:47 | 1:24:51 | |
# Perhaps I should invite him up for tea... # | 1:24:51 | 1:24:55 | |
Towards the middle of the '80s, there wasn't so much encouragement | 1:24:55 | 1:24:59 | |
from the record companies to do more experimental stuff. | 1:24:59 | 1:25:03 | |
I meant that initial supernova of post-punk, it was dying away. | 1:25:03 | 1:25:08 | |
And slowly but surely, | 1:25:08 | 1:25:11 | |
the cancerous growth of market-led A&R-ing | 1:25:11 | 1:25:15 | |
started invidiously creeping up | 1:25:15 | 1:25:18 | |
and blandifying and homogenising the musical market, in my view. | 1:25:18 | 1:25:23 | |
We were a bit lost by then. | 1:25:23 | 1:25:25 | |
It was all a bit... We felt we'd achieved it. | 1:25:25 | 1:25:28 | |
We thought we'd proved our point, and it just looked like | 1:25:28 | 1:25:32 | |
we didn't have anything left to prove. | 1:25:32 | 1:25:34 | |
The commodification of synth-pop marked the end of a golden era | 1:25:37 | 1:25:41 | |
in which a generation of post-punk musicians had taken the synth | 1:25:41 | 1:25:45 | |
from the fringes of experimentation to the centre of the pop stage. | 1:25:45 | 1:25:50 | |
Out of the '70s and into the '80s. | 1:25:51 | 1:25:55 | |
At the time, it was just really, really exciting, and it was exciting to be a part of a musical movement | 1:25:58 | 1:26:05 | |
that had never been done before, that was completely different. | 1:26:05 | 1:26:08 | |
It wasn't a rehash of anything. | 1:26:08 | 1:26:10 | |
Those early electronic records, they'd ever been done before, so, it was a fine time. | 1:26:12 | 1:26:19 | |
# I only knew you for a while... # | 1:26:19 | 1:26:22 | |
We were trying to do something new. That's specifically why we chose electronics | 1:26:22 | 1:26:27 | |
and embraced every new piece of equipment we could get our hands on or afford. | 1:26:27 | 1:26:32 | |
We wanted to sweep away all of the old rock cliches and stereotypes | 1:26:32 | 1:26:35 | |
and the lead guitar solos and long hair and everything. | 1:26:35 | 1:26:39 | |
And then what happens towards the end of the '80s and even worse in the mid '90s, | 1:26:39 | 1:26:43 | |
everybody decides that guitars are back in, synthesisers are somehow old-fashioned, | 1:26:43 | 1:26:47 | |
and you get Oasis! Horror! | 1:26:47 | 1:26:50 | |
# We'll always be together | 1:26:50 | 1:26:53 | |
# However far it seems | 1:26:53 | 1:26:55 | |
# Love never ends | 1:26:55 | 1:26:58 | |
# We'll always be together | 1:26:58 | 1:27:01 | |
# Together in electric dreams | 1:27:01 | 1:27:08 | |
# Because the friendship that you gave | 1:27:18 | 1:27:21 | |
# Has taught me to be brave | 1:27:21 | 1:27:24 | |
# No matter where I go | 1:27:24 | 1:27:25 | |
# I'll never find a better prize... # | 1:27:25 | 1:27:30 |