Graham Reid | | 3 min read
More often than not, music captures spirit of the age: Post-war bebop tuned in to the tough urban world and ran parallel to Jack Kerouac's freewheeling prose and the physicality of Jackson Pollock's art; the Beatles and beat-pop arrived alongside Carnaby Street fashion and the hairstyling of Vidal Sassoon; British punk surging on the phlegm and fury of a young generation failed by institutions – school, religion, political parties – and faced unemployment, so why not anarchy?
If punk was angry and sometimes inchoate, synth-pop which emerged around the same time respected the pop end of the equation.
The look and style was often cool, detached and slightly sterile because of the the technology that created it.
The first big star was Gary Numan -- born Gary Webb, but now Numan/new man in buttoned-down military adjacent clothes or tight suits. He took Are Friends Electric? (as Tubeway Army) and Cars to the top of the UK charts.
Cars embraced cool isolation as a way of life and survival: “Here in my car I feel safest of all, I can lock all the doors, it's the only way to live.”
Synth-pop filtered into local music in this country through bands like Car Crash Set, The Body Electric and Auckland Walk who brought solemn local synth-pop to attention. Mi-Sex, Split Enz' True Colours and Shona Laing's Glad I'm Not a Kennedy and Soviet Snow took care of the ambitious pop-rock end.
By way of introduction . . . here's Danse Macabre with a video very much of its era (sped up motorway footage, stop motion photography, band shot from odd angles = disconcerting)
Nigel Russell (synth player of Danse Macabre) quit and the band broke up, but he formed Car Crash Set.
Car Crash Set with Imagination of '84
The Body Electric with Interior Exile
and the cynical, emotionally cool Pulsing
Synth-pop's instrumentation – not just the keyboard synths but perhaps more so the slash of Linndrums – became a defining element of Eighties pop and production.
Just as in the late Fifties when electric guitars became affordable, so too in the Eighties this new synth technology was to hand and cheap enough for aspiring musicians in the post-punk DIY age.
The many famous synth-pop bands are well documented, usually through their Greatest Hits/Best of collections, but further down the totem poll were the fellow travellers who did their best but never quite made it.
The compilation All The Young Droids; Junkshop Synth Pop 1978-1985 picks up a decent cross-section of the also-rans.
On vinyl it comes as a well-annotated 24 song compilation of mostly British and North American acts, the Spotify edition just a 10 song selection.
But wherever you find it, it includes Do You Read Me by Alastair Riddell better known for his glam rock persona Space Waltz (although he did contribute the electronic drums to Patea Maori's Poi E).
Lifted from his 1983 solo album, Do You Read Me is one of the better synth-pop tracks, largely because Riddell was slightly older than those new to the game and had been in bands where songwriting – more than the seduction of the new sound – was paramount.
And that is Riddell on the album's cover.
Here were artists exploring the new and relatively cheap technology with no money, not many clues about how to wrestle it but with an enthusiastic punk DIY ethic. Many of the songs are reductive.
Compiled by Philip King who has prior form in such projects, the collection offers plenty of zeitgeist grabbing songs with suitably automaton vocals and telling titles like Alien Girl, I Tune Into You, Science Fiction, I'm a Computer, I Am a Timebomb (excellent jerky pop) . . .
Most of these artists disappeared quickly: The Goo-Q, Gerry and the Holograms, Billy London (with a detached Lou Reed-like delivery on the minimalist Louie Louie-influenced Woman), Incandescent Luminaire, Microbes (“I am a computer don't let me overheat”) and Selwin Image (here with a collision of identikit Chinn-Chapman pop and early OMD on The Unknown) are hardly household names.
But maybe that doesn't matter. It happened and they happened, albeit briefly for them.
All The Young Droids; Junkshop Synth Pop 1978-1985 enjoyable, obviously dated and patchy collection of twiddly, obscure computer pop for the curious.
But the best is enjoyable pop which laid the groundwork for the electronica movement in the 1990s because it brought synthesisers into the pop-rock idiom . . . and it was often about dancing.
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