Synth Britannia (2009) - full transcript

This programme contains

some strong language.

SYNTHESISER PLAYS VARYING NOTES

Welcome to a time when there

were no guitars and no drums,

just synthesisers.

It was the 1970s.

The place was Britain, and

our heroes were a maverick bunch

of young pioneers, obsessed

by Kraftwerk and science fiction.

All across the country, these

synthetic dreamers would imagine

the very sound of the future -

yesterday.

And by the '80s, their dreams

would become a reality,

as Britain went synth-pop.

Welcome to a time

when machines ruled the world.

# I stand still stepping

on the shady streets

# And I watch that man to a stranger

# You think you only know me

when you turn on the light

# Now the room is lit with danger

# Complicating, circulating

new life

# New life

# Operating, generating

# New life, new life. #

FANFARE

By the 1970s,

we were living in the future.

Our cities were going space age.

MUSIC: "William Tell Overture"

by G Rossini

Victorian slums had been

torn down and replaced by

ultra-modern concrete high-rises.

Entertainment

also looked to the future.

Our cinema and television screens

were full of tantalising glimpses

of a future

that seemed just around the corner.

Released in 1971, Stanley Kubrick's

Clockwork Orange was a futuristic

and violent vision of concrete

Britain that captured the zeitgeist.

The film's soundtrack was composed

by American synth pioneer Walter,

now Wendy, Carlos.

It would have a profound effect on

a generation of would-be musicians.

That was probably a lot of people's

maybe first time they'd

heard electronic music,

on the score to that film.

It made me forever associate

classical music with people

getting their heads kicked in,

which is kind of a bit strange.

The soundtrack to Clockwork Orange -

fantastic synth sounds in that.

Big Moog synthesiser

that Wendy Carlos used.

And there were all orchestrated.

Well, Wendy, who then said she was

Walter, I never quite worked out

what was going on there, was an

absolute inspiration, you know.

The first time we had ever heard

that sort of absorbent synth

bass sound...just raved about it.

Some of the people who would

be future post-punk people,

would listen to the three or four

original compositions that Carlos did

on that soundtrack that were much

more sinister and foreboding.

There was a kind of linkage made

there between those sounds and

the idea of a cold future, a bleak

future, and that probably sunk quite

deeply into the psyche of a lot

of young musicians at that time.

For a generation of

electronic dreamers,

Carlos's sound track would offer

a glimpse of an

alienated synthetic future.

But the true divine spark

would arrive on our

television screens in 1975.

Tomorrow's World gave Britain

its first glimpse of Kraftwerk,

a German band who played

only electronic instruments.

ELECTRONIC DRUM BEAT

They would invade our shores

later the same year.

We played

one of our first gigs in 1975

of our English tour in Liverpool.

The Wings Over Britain tour was

playing the same night in the town.

That was also the reason why

our hall was only half crowded.

# Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n

auf der Autobahn

# Fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n

auf der Autobahn. #

All of our posters were stuck right

next to the posters of the Wings,

so it made us proud

of course, you know.

# Die Fahrbahn ist ein graues Band

# Weisse Streifen, gruener Rand. #

Amazingly they came to Liverpool

in October of '75,

and I sat in seat Q36

and witnessed the

first day of rest of my life.

'75 was all the era of long hair and

flared trousers and guitar solos.

And these guys all came

out in suits and ties.

Two of them looked like they were

playing electronic tea trays

with wired-up knitting needles.

And I was just...blown away.

It really, it was incredible.

We had no long hair,

we didn't wear blue jeans.

We had suits on, grey suits.

Short hair, you know.

And we looked like the...

children of Wernher von Braun

or Werner von Siemens.

We saw ourselves

as engineer musicians, like that,

instead of dancing, a voice on stage

to arouse the girls, you know.

The interesting thing afterwards,

there was a knock at our

backstage door.

It was a band. They were called

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark.

And the leader, Andy McCluskey,

was really astonished and happy

that he was meeting us in person.

And he said, "You know, guys,

you have shown us the future!

"This is it! We throw away

our guitars tomorrow

and buy all synthesisers."

In terms of inspiring people to

not just have a synthesiser

in their rock band,

but to be completely electronic,

I think you can never underestimate

the impact of Kraftwerk.

Trans-Europe Express had the

same impact on the synth-pop

as anarchy in the UK had on people

who wanted to be punk rockers.

'Next year, Kraftwerk hope to

eliminate the keyboards altogether

'and build jackets with electronic

lapels which can be played

by touch.'

In British music

in the mid '70s,

the synth was a remote beast.

Although they would

become much cheaper later

in the decade, a synthesiser then

could cost as much as a small house.

They were associated

with rich and technically gifted

progressive musicians.

Until punk came along,

you had to be Keith Emerson.

If you wanted to be in a band, you

had to have learned your instrument

for at least eight or nine years

before you would dare

come out and play it.

And it was simply the inspiration

of The Damned and The Clash...

..that said, get up and do it,

you know.

Do your best. If it's crap, maybe

the simplicity will get you through.

Whilst the music didn't concern

itself with synthesisers,

the attitude of the punk movement

would inspire those with

an interest in electronic music

to do it themselves.

# Oh

# White riot - I wanna riot

# White riot - a riot of my own

# White riot - I wanna riot

# White riot - a riot... #

All the infrastructure around

punk we absolutely loved.

It's just that the actual music we

saw as being quite old-fashioned.

And I think they had been

a bit of a one-trick pony.

So what we did was, we took the

attitudes of punk and give it

a different context, ie, let's make

music that nobody's heard before.

Across the country, small pockets of

experimentation surfaced, inspired

primarily by punk and Kraftwerk.

We were in my studio at home

in south-east London.

One day I opened my e-mail inbox,

there were 10 e-mails from a very

disparate bunch of people saying,

you've got to go to eBay now

and buy this.

What was Kraftwerk's

original vocoder,

which was being sold on eBay.

And it was the one

that was used on Autobahn.

I thought, well, this is the

equivalent for a guitarist of getting

Jimi Hendrix's guitar that was

used on Purple Haze or something.

MUSIC STARTS

# TVOD... #

I first got a synthesiser in...1977.

And I bought a second-hand Korg 700S

from Macari's Music Shop

in Charing Cross Road.

The thing that pissed me off about

punk was you had to learn three

chords to be in a punk band.

If you had a synthesiser,

all you had to do was

press one key with a finger.

# I don't need a TV screen

# I just stick the aerial

# Into my skin. #

Advances in technology in the late

'70s heralded the invention

of the affordable synth, costing

no more than an electric guitar.

Daniel Miller used his to form

The Normal, an experimental act

that supported punk groups.

Miller drew on the work

of English author JG Ballard

whose Crash was another

futuristic vision of Britain.

# Warm

# Leatherette

# Warm

# Leatherette... #

I'd just broken up with a girlfriend

who I was very much in love with.

And a friend of mine said,

read this book. And I read it,

and it really had a huge...

I'm using all these puns,

like impact.

But it did have a huge impact.

# See the breaking glass

in the underpass... #

It wasn't like science fiction

in the sense it was outer space

and stuff like that.

It felt like it was five minutes

into the future, and I loved

that aspect of it,

the fact it was so outrageous,

but so possible at the same time.

# Leatherette... #

Warm Leatherette by The Normal.

The Normal was the alias of

Daniel Miller.

# Hear the crashing steel... #

The lyrics are just a precis

of some of the concepts in Crash,

Ballard's novel, which was

about people who have

car accidents and find that

thereafter their sexuality has been

diverted and they are obsessed with

being turned on by car crashes.

So you had the lyric like, "The hand

brake penetrates your thigh - quick,

let's make love before you die."

# Warm

# Leatherette... #

The music was supposed to be visual.

You know, like driving along

a highway with big buildings either

side and going into a tunnel.

There's quite a lot

of humour in it really.

It wasn't meant be apocalyptic

or dystopian.

Miller was one of Britain's first

synth poets. And he wasn't alone.

In the north of England,

a bunch of computer programmers

dreamt of a similar feature.

We loved JG Ballard.

In fact, Roxy had a song, To HB,

about Humphrey Bogart.

And we had a song, 4JG,

which was about JG Ballard.

The Future were a bunch

of sci-fi nerds from Sheffield.

They formed in '77

and played only synthesisers.

When I bought my Korg 700S

in...1976,

it was the first time there

was a monophonic synthesiser

which you could do stuff with,

which was kind of domestic level,

entry level, in terms of price.

It was £350, I think.

And I remember distinctly

thinking at the time -

I with a computer operator -

there was a decision day

where it was either buy a

second-hand car and learn to drive,

or go and buy

this monophonic synthesiser.

And that proved to be quite

a fateful day, because

I still can't drive.

But I've still got that synthesiser.

This is a Mini-Korg 700S, and was

the first affordable synth.

Fantastic machine.

Completely eccentric.

# Listen to voice of Buddha... #

They give you a book

of patches with it.

Because it was Japanese,

there would be things like

Synthy Cat or Funny Frog.

And you can't follow why it's doing

what it does, but it sounds great.

Usually with a synthesiser, you

can get it to do something for you.

You don't have to be manually

good at all.

That was why we turned to them

in the first place,

cos no-one could learn

how do the guitars either.

We'd all tried. My brother's a great

guitarist and he tried to teach me.

It just hurts your hand.

So we use these things.

You can press a switch on, and

they'll do things for about ten

minutes. It's quite interesting.

If you've got a tape recorder, you

can put it down, put something next

to it and it will sound all right.

# ..Doesn't mean

that she's your better... #

The day that I joined the band,

Martyn came round my house and he

had two records under his arm.

One was Trans-Europe Express,

and one was I Feel Love.

And he said, "Look, WE can do this."

I think that was his actual phrase.

MUSIC: "I Feel Love"

by Donna Summer

We loved all that stuff. The concept

albums that Giorgio Moroder did

with Donna Summer.

(MACHINE-DISTORTED VOICE)

# One, two, three, four, five. #

We used to play those continuously.

This wasn't some kind

of post-gay ironic thing.

It's because they sounded

great and interesting.

You were never really sure

what the next set of sounds

coming up was going to be.

I Feel Love just didn't sound like

any record that had been before.

It came on the radio,

and you couldn't quite believe

what you were hearing.

It was hypnotic, but it was driving.

# It's so good... #

Moroder's mood music

was the disco single of '77.

Its success would set the template

for the future of the future.

# I'm in love

I'm in love, I'm in love... #

We were in fact much more influenced

by Moroder than we were by Kraftwerk.

Everyone...ever since anyone that

knows we used synths, "Oh,

you sound like Kraftwerk, don't you?"

We use the same instruments, so some

of the sounds are a bit the same.

But we never really wanted to be

Kraftwerk, we wanted to be

a pop band.

We wanted to...

embody a sense of futurism

without being so literal.

It just so happened a friend of

ours, he had bought for him this

science-fiction board game

called Star Force.

And it was prodigiously tedious.

It was real geek stuff.

It was impenetrable.

You couldn't play it.

There was The Rise Of The

Human League, or something.

And I thought, The Human League,

that is such a cool name.

# No future, they say... #

The Human League set out to make

electronic pop for the modern city.

# The city is human

# Blind youth take hope

You're no Joe Soap

# Your time is due

Big fun come soon

# We've had it easy

We should be glad

# High-rise living's not so bad... #

The Human League have a totally

different spin on synthesisers

where it was much more like this

bright technocratic

optimism thing.

In fact, in one of their early songs,

Blind Youth, they make fun of people

who go on about dehumanisation.

# Dehumanisation

# Is such a big word

# It's been around

# Since

# Richard the Third

# Dehumanisation

# Is easy to say

# But if you're not a hermit

# You know the city's OK. #

I'd say most of the brightness

came from Martyn.

Martyn's very optimistic,

and if anyone's moaning about

anything, Martyn will go and write

a song in the opposite direction.

I think I felt a bit gloomy about

the concrete jungle and everything,

which is ridiculous,

cos I'm a townie.

I gravitate towards concrete...

If you put me in the country, I

would find the nearest town and I'll

be sitting in a bar quite quickly.

# Blind youth take hope

You're no Joe Soap

# Your time is due

Big fun come soon... #

Unfortunately, British pop music

wasn't quite ready

for a synth-led group

of futurists...just yet.

But in 1978, The Human League

weren't the only group experimenting

with electronics in Sheffield.

This is the old

Psalter Lane art college,

which used to be part of

Sheffield Polytechnic in the 1970s.

I believe The Human League also

played this very place

for their first-ever

live show in Sheffield.

Cabaret Voltaire

did perform in this very room.

Yeah, we just thought

there was nothing for us.

It was all kind of bloated

super groups

and progressive bands

who weren't even from the

same kind of social backgrounds.

They were probably

public school educated,

whereas most of the scene

in Sheffield was pretty solid

working class.

You'd find little bits of interest

interesting music within perhaps

some of the prog rock stuff

where there'd be a weird little

synth break.

But then once you kind of started

to discover all the German bands,

you realised that there were entire

albums that were made of electronics.

Whilst The Human League

dreamt of pop, Cabaret Voltaire

were anything but, using electronics

to explore Sheffield, a city torn

between the past and the future.

I remember watching loads

of science fiction things

in the '60s, like Doctor Who

and things like Quatermass.

And all these kinds of strange

things seemed to happen

in old gasworks

or industrial environments.

There was an

other-worldliness about it.

You might see an alien

or a giant blob creeping

across the floor,

glowing bright green

from radioactivity.

# Nag nag nag

# Nag nag nag. #

A very arty group.

Obviously their name echoes Dada.

They were really into

William Burroughs and ideas

like control and surveillance.

They actually used quite a lot

of guitar,

but it was so heavily processed,

it didn't sound like

rock 'n' roll guitar.

It sounded more like a synthesiser.

They also put

synthesising-type effects

on the voice, which is probably one

of the most disturbing things

they did.

You have a guy singing, but it sounds

more like a dalek than a human being.

At night-time, you'd hear distant

booming noises with which would

probably be something like

a drop forge or steam hammer

or something.

You certainly knew that you were

on the edge of heavy industry.

Everything in their music

is alienated.

The music that comes from people

who are divorced from natural life,

any natural rhythms.

The music for a hostile environment.

If I've ever been asked to explain

that movement, I always call it

the "alienated synthesists".

Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire,

Joy Division who were up a little

bit less obviously synthy...

Everyone...everyone

was sort of like that.

We were all going around in

long coats from second-hand shops

and saying how terrible things

were, with a synth.

Across the Pennines, another pocket

of alienated synthesists dreamt

of an electronic future in the

spiritual home of British pop music.

MUSIC DROWNS SPEECH

We are in Mathew Street in

Liverpool, and I am actually standing

outside of the door to what used

to be Eric's Club, which is where

we played our first gig, where we

invented OMD to play at this place.

And it was the club

where we all used to come.

The Bunnymen and the Teardrops played

within a month of us

playing here as well.

This was the place I saw Devo

play their first English concert.

And all of the influential bands

that we could get to come to town

played here, apart from Kraftwerk who

played the big theatre down the road.

And then literally

ten yards away is the Cavern Club.

We've got Eric's and the Cavern right

across the road from each other.

When Paul and I started

being interested in electronic music,

we were very young.

We had no money.

And it was totally unrealistic

to think about getting the

big kind of keyboards you saw

on TV or on stage with some of

the keyboard players in the '70s.

My mother had

a Kays mail order catalogue,

and they had some synthesisers.

Our first Korg Micro-Preset

was bought from my mother's catalogue

for 36 weeks at £7.76 a week,

I seem to recall.

This was the first synth, and we'd

made the first two albums with this.

It's like, it's quite a basic synth.

INTRO TO "ENOLA GAY"

HE LAUGHS

Can you believe that's the record?!

# Enola Gay

# You should have stayed

at home yesterday

# Oh-oh, words can't describe

# The feeling and the way... #

The major record labels

largely ignored synth music,

forcing bands like OMD to look

to newly reformed indies instead.

In 1978, OMD would sign to Factory.

A movement of sorts

was beginning to coalesce.

I think the first wave of bands

that sort of came out of the closet

in a late '70s...

..we were all working

independently of each other.

There was no unified movement.

It didn't all start

in one club or one town.

There was no gang of people

who all had a manifesto

that we were going to do

the new British electronic music.

It was small pockets of people

in different parts of the country

who were independently obviously

listening to the same things.

I did make an electronic

drum machine, because I'd seen

Kraftwerk with their sticks.

So I thought, I can make one

of those. And so I did.

Some of the early synth drums was

this very Heath Robinson-looking box

with all these plates on there

with these sticks with wires

that we did the drums to

Electricity.

# Our one source of energy

# The ultimate discovery

# Electric blue for me

# Never more to be free... #

We were horrified

when Tony Wilson said, "What you do

is the future of pop."

Pop? We were experimental German

influenced. We are not pop at all!

How do you call us pop?

We were absolutely mortified.

We couldn't see it at all.

Totally by accident, Paul and I

and I guess others at the

time had distilled the electronic

experimentation and the glam pop of

Britain from just a few years and

earlier, into what was going to

become, which didn't seem at the

time, but what was going to become

the future of pop music.

By the start of 1979, the future of

pop music seemed a long way off,

as the combined efforts of The

Normal, OMD and The Human League

had failed to trouble the charts.

But dabbling in synthesisers was

becoming increasingly de rigueur.

Even for dyed in the wool punks.

At the other end of the East

Lancs Road, another Factory band,

who would become one of the greatest

electronic acts, were taking their

first synthetic steps.

The first synthesiser we had in

Joy Division was a little thing

called a Transcendent 2000.

I actually

built it from a load of components.

At the time I had insomnia,

I couldn't sleep very well.

So I used to get this magazine called

Electronics Today,

something like that,

and in it was this synthesiser.

And if you were to buy one in those

days it was incredibly expensive.

And we didn't have any money.

So I thought, this is really

cheap, it's only 200 quid,

how difficult can it be to build it?

And it was like...

Soldering components by hand.

It took

about two months of doing that.

And then it didn't

work incredibly well.

RUDIMENTARY SYNTHESISER NOTES PLAY

I remember we went to write a track

in the studio called Cargo,

in Rochdale.

And when we went it,

we found a little Woolworths organ

that you switched the battery power,

switched it on and it blew a fan.

You could play chord buttons on it.

So I was messing about with

these chord buttons.

And then Martin Hannah I think had

brought in a Solina string synth.

What? You can play more than

one note at a time on it!

So I got the organ and the

synthesiser

and hit these chord buttons,

and wrote Atmosphere,

a Joy Division track.

I seemed to write

it there in the studio.

# Walk in silence... #

I think we wrote the music

and then

Ian wrote the words that night.

Then we recorded the vocals the

next day. Which is amazing

when I think about it.

# See the danger

# Always danger

# Endless talking

# Life rebuilding

# Don't walk away... #

Whilst it

seemed the north had the lead in

post-punk synth pioneers, things

were also stirring down south.

John Foxx was the former

lead singer of Ultravox.

He worked in Shoreditch in London's

then unfashionable East End.

SYNTHESISER CHORDS PLAY

SYNTHESISER MELODY PLAYS

These modular synths were the

first generation really

of working synthesisers.

And then the companies decided

to make a cheap version of it

because no-one could afford these,

or very few people could afford them.

And they condensed all

that down into this.

London seemed

almost empty in the '70s.

I used to walk around the streets,

newspapers blowing around

and great concrete walls.

And everything seemed grittier

and lost somehow,

like we'd lost direction.

I'd wonder what that was about.

I wasn't angry about it any more,

as we were supposed to be as punks.

I just wanted to make music for it,

the kind of music that I could hear.

# Standing in the dark

# Watching you glow

# Lifting a receiver

# Nobody I know

# Underpass... #

Underpass, with the sodium lights and

you might be mugged.

Very '70s dystopian.

The spectral city.

# Now it's all gone

# World War something... #

This was the industrial bit of

London that had served the docks

and done some manufacturing

and both of which have gone.

It was like living in a Quatermass

movie because I realised and

discovered that underneath all of

this area are the plague pits where

the bodies

were thrown.

That inevitably leaks into your

music. That is why a lot of my music

is so dark, I think.

I come from Lancashire and

where did I end up? In a place even

more sinister.

# Underpass... #

Fox's music wasn't the only

synthetic portrait of

the '70s metropolis.

An experimental group of

artists, known as Throbbing Gristle,

had been forging their own

electronic industrial sounds

in their Death

Factory down the road in Hackney.

Grim. It was grim.

It was very run-down. The factory

was an old trouser factory and it

was near London Fields.

In the basement we

were level with the plague pits.

That is why it could

called the Death Factory.

There was still a lot of

antagonism leftover from,

I know it

sounds unbelievable, but post war.

There were still people there like

the park keeper who used to be

one of Moseley's brown shirts.

It sounds a cliche now

but at the time

we were trying to reflect the

sounds around us in some weird way.

Our studio was in like

an industrial area.

There were different

noises going on all the time.

We were trying to

reflect all these sounds

and the way they all come

together in this weird mishmash

of electronic experimental textures.

# Hot... #

We felt a kinship with a lot of

bands, especially Sheffield bands.

Yes, Cabaret Voltaire, those

people. But the kinship was the

fact that we were all independent.

Chris Carter in Throbbing

Gristle was a nut for

Tangerine Dream and

that kind of music

so there were hypnotic dreaming

electronic Throbbing Gristle tracks

that were pretty in a

funny sort of misshapen way.

I had the synths and because they

were homemade synths, they weren't

bought off the shelf,

they went Rolands and Korgs, they

sounded quite unique anyway. They

didn't sound like regular synths.

And then I built

this effects unit.

I saw this design in Practical

Electronics. You could combine

all the effects together

and put a guitar through

it or a voice or anything.

I started building these units

for Throbbing Gristle and called them

Gristlisers.

We were never punk. We are not punk.

We were an industrial

experimental music band.

Come 1979,

British electronic music was still

being ignored by mainstream labels.

So, Dan Miller, founded Britain's

first electronic indie, Mute,

to release recordings by kindred

spirit, Fad Gadget as well as

his own work.

I wasn't interested in rock music.

I really was only

interested in electronic music.

I thought that was

the future of where exciting music

was going to come from and I

wanted to part of promoting that.

One of Mute's first releases

would be strangely prescient.

I came across an old Chuck Berry

songbook I had at home and I thought,

"I wonder what that sounds like

done on synthesisers?"

# Long-distance information

# Give me Memphis, Tennessee

# Help me find the party

# Tryin' to get in touch with me... #

Everybody said, "You've got

to release it, it's amazing."

I thought, "OK, what shall I do?"

It doesn't fit in under

the normal kind of name.

And then I thought,

what about if there was a group that

were all teenagers

and their first choice of

instrument was a synthesiser rather

than a guitar

because that hadn't happened yet.

John Peel... I had

given it to him. I was listening to

the radio with a couple of friends.

He said, "We've got three versions

of Memphis Tennessee. One is the

original, the other two covers."

"One is really terrible and the other

is really great. I thought, "Oh,

God." Fortunately, he liked mine.

Take it away.

That was one of the biggest moments

of my entire career in music.

That's the end of tonight's

programme in which you heard

the Desperate Bicycles, The Slits,

The Mekons, Alternative TV,

The UK Subs and Sham 69.

More of the same unpleasant racket

on tomorrow night's programme.

Until then,

from me, John Peel, good night and

good riddance.

Getting your record

on the Peel show was one thing.

But nobody

was ready for what happened next.

What sort of make-up do you put on?

You appear very white.

It's all natural. It's Max Factor

pan stick and it's 28 which is

natural, not white make-up.

And then I just powder that with skin

tone powder and then just eyeliner.

# It's cold outside

# And the paint's peeling off of

my walls

# There's a man outside... #

On 24th May 1979,

the future finally arrived.

# In a long coat, grey hat

smoking a cigarette... #

He was a punk. He loved sci-fi.

He even read JG Ballard

but most impressively,

Gary Numan was on Top Of The Pops.

I wish magic was real, you know.

I wish fairies were real and all

of that kind of stuff.

I love all that sort of thing.

Probably never grow up, I suppose,

from that point of view.

# Now the light fades out... #

The first time he was

on Top Of The Pops,

Either she phoned me, or I

phoned her, "Are you watching?

"Have you seen this man,

he's fantastic."

# There's a knock on the door... #

The look and the sound was so

different.

# And just for a second I thought

I remembered you... #

Just sort of alien, wasn't it?

I was in a lot of trouble at school.

I was sent to a child psychiatrist

and things like that

which turned out to be Asperger's.

I felt more comfortable on my own.

The classic loner, I suppose.

Didn't go out drinking,

didn't go out clubbing too much.

# So now I'm alone

# I can think for myself... #

I went to a studio to

make a punk album, which would

have been my first album

and when I got there,

in a corner of the studio,

there was a mini Moog.

Luckily, it had been left and the

sound, which was a huge big

bassy thing and the room shook.

I just realised you can press one key

and all of this other stuff happens.

There was a massive

amount of power in them

and depth that I had never heard.

I'd never heard of anything

like it before. One note.

People like ourselves and Cabaret

Voltaire and The Human League,

had all got used to the fact that we

existed and there was somebody else

sharing our space

and then along comes,

who, I guess at the time we

thought was Johnny come lately.

"Who the hell is

this guy from London

"who is on telly and having

a massive hit record?

Never heard of him."

Numan was

Britain's first synth pin-up.

Hello, Sarah.

Hello, Gary. Hello, Sarah.

My friend Cheryl read in a newspaper

that your mum

does your hair. Is this true?

Yes, that's right. She's been doing

it since I was about four.

All right, thank you. Bye-bye. Did

she put the streak in the side

as well? Yeah.

I really liked Gary's music.

I think he made the best

records at that time.

I think, he, if anyone,

he really condensed it into a form

that was perfect at that point.

Numan would immediately show that

his number-one success was no fluke.

Cars was part eulogy to JG Ballard

and part testimony to

living in '70s London.

I was in my car and a couple

of men in a van swerved round me,

pulled up in front,

got out and were clearly going to

give me a bit of a hammering.

Trying to get me out, kicking

the car, screaming and shouting.

# Here in my car

# I feel safest of all

# I can lock all my doors

# It's the only way to live

# In cars... #

I was pretty scared.

I locked all my doors and

ended up driving up onto the

pavement and shot along the pavement

because I couldn't go anywhere.

People obviously leaping out of

the way. I was in a bit of a panic.

Cars is just about feeling safe in

amongst people in a car because

no-one can get to you.

You're in your own little bubble.

# Here in my car

# Where the image breaks down

# Will you visit me, please?

# If I open my door, in cars... #

I was gutted when Cars came out.

I thought it was really good.

# ..I was starting to think about

leaving tonight... #

All this time we were convinced,

it was just a matter of time

before we had a number one record.

Part arrogance and part stupidity and

then somebody comes out of the blue

and does it.

With sales totalling in excess

of ten million, Gary Numan was

a new kind of pop star

but being at the front of the synth

way had inevitable drawbacks.

The Musicians Union tried to ban me

for, I think, the first year when I

was around

because they said I was

putting proper musicians out of work,

although I had to be a member

to get on Top Of The Pops.

Caused me loads of grief, actually.

The music press were pretty harsh.

It wasn't rock 'n' roll. It wasn't

honest, it wasn't working class,

it wasn't worthy, it wasn't earthy,

it wasn't real, it wasn't sweaty,

it wasn't manly. It was pretentious,

pseudo intellectual.

I am absolutely convinced that

Numan's career was shortened by

a nasty, nasty, vitriolic

journalism.

But, again,

what had there been before me?

It had been punk.

The whole anti-hero thing. Not only

was I doing electronic music which

they wasn't pleased with anyway,

but I'm standing up saying,

I want to be a pop star, I love it.

All this anti-hero stuff before that,

I wasn't anything to do with that. I

want to be famous.

I want to be

standing on stages and I

don't speak for the people

because I don't even know them.

The decade would end with Numan

as the unlikely synth-pop hero

come good.

What lay around the corner would

see the synth transformed from

post-punk experimental tool

into THE pop instrument of choice.

As the '80s dawned, the

future finally arrived and it

wasn't going to be alienated.

A shift to the right heralded

a new era in Britain, an era in

which prosperity and material wealth

would be vaunted above all else.

There would

be no room for experimental

dreamers in the me decade.

You were a success or you didn't

exist.

# One man on a lonely platform

# One case sitting by his side... #

The big hit of 1980 was Visage

whose Fade To Grey followed fast

on the heels of Numan's success.

It seemed the future had passed

The Human League by.

# Ah, ah-h-h-h

# We fade to grey.

# Fade to grey... #

I think there were three number-one

hits.

Certainly Dave Stewart

and Barbara Gaskin

Gary Numan and

the Flying Lizards

might have been number one

with Money and I stood there,

I think we'd done a couple of LPs

and I thought, "We've blown it."

We now look like the also-rans

and everyone has taken the idea

and done a lot better than us.

# The best things in life are free

# But you can give them

to the birds and bees

# I want money

# Ooh, ooh-ooh

# That's what I want

# Ooh, ooh-ooh

# That's what I want

# Ooh, ooh-ooh

# That's what I want... #

I turned up one day to be told I was

being thrown out of the group.

And it was a bit like School Of

Rock with Jack Black going,

"You can't throw me out

of my own group."

We'd released Reproduction and

Travelogue and done all this

touring.

There was a nagging undercurrent

of dissatisfaction from

the record company

that they weren't selling as

many records as they hoped.

I think I'd made a big effort

on a photo session and

Martin hadn't even turned up.

Suddenly, I was hearing these

stories that Martin was never ever

going to appear on a stage with me

again which I think he only said

because that was what Bryan Ferry

had said about Eno in legend.

Whilst The Human League

were crumbling, something was

brewing in the most

unlikely of places.

Basildon was a new town. Built

for the post-war East End overspill,

it wasn't one of pop

music's more romantic places.

But a bunch of kids were going to

ditch their guitars and reinvent

synth music as pop.

When we were growing up,

Basildon was a violent town.

We had the highest crime rate

for five years on the trot.

I can remember going back to Basildon

and going down to

the pub with some friends and I had,

you know, black nail varnish.

Going to the bar and ordering a

drink. I had forgotten about it

wasn't even thinking about it and

some guy said to me, "What the fuck

have you got on your fingernails?"

Depeche Mode formed in 1980.

They had a spot at their

local disco.

Croc's was a really ordinary disco.

There was a crocodile, yeah.

It was quite a sorry

looking animal but it was alive.

They had this night once a week

where they'd play things like

The Human League and Soft Cell

and also bands would appear there.

# I stand still stepping on

the shady streets

# And I watch that man to a stranger

# You think you only know me when you

turn on the light

# Now the room is lit with danger

# Complicating, circulating

# New life, new life

# Operating, generating

# New life, new life... #

When I first started playing

synthesisers,

it would have been The Human League,

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark,

their very first album.

I was a big fan of Daniel Miller's

work as the Silicon Teens and

as The Normal and also Fad Gadget

who was on Mute records.

Vince was sort of the boss of the

band. He was unbelievably driven.

# Complicating, circulating

New life... #

He earned £30 a week in the yoghurt

factory and save £29.70, a week,

to save up to buy a synth.

He forced the pace. This actually

was the original Depeche Mode drum

machine that we used for Life.

Dave's job before his song

was to set the tempo.

Number seven would be fast,

number two would be slow etc etc.

I owned Autobahn, that was really

what got us to go out and buy our

first synthesisers,

the whole...things that were

happening around the time with

Kraftwerk and even early

Human League stuff.

# ..New life, new life... #

I was really happy that

the first time I heard them

was when they played live.

They started and I thought,

this sounds interesting.

There were four little mono

synths teetering on beer crates.

# I'm still stepping on shady streets

# And I watch that man to a

stranger... #

They had a fan base with them

and their fans weren't watching

the band. They wear just dancing.

# ..The moon is lit with danger

# Complicated... #

Miller first saw Depeche Mode

supporting Fad Gadget in east London

and signed them to Mute.

None of us knew what we were doing.

By the time I met Depeche we had just

released our first album.

Compared to them, I was an

experienced industry person but

I knew nothing.

You know, they needed a

bit of help in the studio

so I introduced

them to some ways of working.

using sequencers, they'd

never used a sequencer before.

Everything was played by hand.

This is the legendary Arp 2600.

I bought it second-hand in 1979.

It was being sold, one

of three being sold by Elton John's

road crew after a world tour.

These were used on all the Depeche

Mode albums I was involved with

especially on the first

album where it was really

one of only two synths that we used.

You can hear it going out of tune

on that note there.

It's not really in tune at all.

MUSIC: "Just Can't Get Enough"

by Depeche Mode

Depeche Mode would prove to be

the real silicon teens.

The combination of sex appeal

and synthesisers

would make them one of

the biggest pop acts of 1981.

# When I'm with you baby

I go out of my head

# And I just can't get enough

And I just can't get enough

# All the things you do to me

and everything you said

# I just can't get enough

I just can't get enough

# We slip and slide

as we fall in love

# And I just can't seem to

get enough of... #

When Depeche Mode,

when we were gigging

we'd all carry our synthesisers

and I, for some reason,

had to buy the heaviest synthesiser

out of all of them, you know.

We didn't have cars or anything,

we'd be on the train,

and this really is quite heavy.

So I'd have this thing under my arm,

Fletcher would have a Moog,

Martin had a Yamaha, I think,

on the train.

# I just can't get enough

I just can't get enough... #

When we did our first

Top Of The Pops we were on the train

with these, our synthesisers.

You got the train

to Top Of The Pops? Yeah.

From Basildon to Fenchurch Street

and then on the underground.

But like Human before, it wouldn't

all be plain sailing for Depeche.

I think, you know,

you've got to remember that

during our pop period we had lots of

fans and a lot of people liked us

but there were a lot of people

hated us.

Certainly the '80s

was a real old battle royal

between us and journalism

in general, music journalism.

It was just really, you know, pop.

You know, I think...

I can understand why

people hated what we did,

you know, looking back on it now.

It wasn't just the sound. It was...

You know, we were young kids and we

just did anything that came along.

You know, every TV that we were

asked to do, we did, and it

didn't matter how stupid it was.

She said "Do you think he might give

me a kiss before the end

of the day,"

and I said, "Ask him yourself."

But if I ask you, you might...

If I turn my back you might just...

Well, you know,

there's something very un-British

about electronic music

to start with. They want bands

to be like they were in the '60s -

four guys, guitar, bass and drums,

pretty lead singer, skinny jeans,

you know, conventional kind of thing.

That's really what sells newspapers,

I guess.

# Playing on my radio

and saying that you had to go... #

They'd written Depeche Mode off

anyway as a teeny-bop band,

a one-hit wonder,

especially once Vince left,

they thought "Well, that's over."

# New day, turn away

Wipe away the tear... #

In November '81,

Clarke unexpectedly quit.

I was, and still am,

a bit of a control freak.

So, with the advent of computers

and sequencers

I realised that I could

make all of the music myself.

You know, I didn't need necessarily

other people to play the parts.

I got a real satisfaction out of

programming all of the parts myself.

Without their chief songwriter, it

seemed the game was up for Depeche

Mode before they really got going.

MUSIC: "Don't You Want Me?"

by The Human League

In the same year,

a reversal of fortune

had seen a new-look Human League

finally get in on the pop action,

partly thanks to a line-up change

that took them out of the pages

of the NME and put them

on the front page of Smash Hits.

# You were working as a waitress

in a cocktail bar

# When I met you

# I picked you out, I shook you up

and turned you around

# Turned you into someone new... #

We got Joanne and Susan

simply because we were

booked to do a European tour

and Martyn and myself became

unable to be in the same group

and we just thought,

"Well, get some nice high vocals,

yeah, let's try a girl.

"Let's be a bit different

and try a girl."

From that the step was that if we

were gonna take a girl on the road

with a load of terrible randy idiots

like us

there ought to be two of them

to look after each other.

Joanne and Susan turned up...

I was being sarcastic there,

by the way, we were sitting there

reading books, really.

# You better change it back

or we will both be sorry

# Don't you want me, baby?

# Don't you want me, oh?

# Don't you want me, baby...? #

Oakley spotted the girls dancing in

a futurist night club in Sheffield.

Our parents thought,

"There's some ulterior motive,

"something's going on."

But then Philip came round

and met both sets of parents

and they thought

he was a decent enough guy

and then we went to school

with our parents and they

talked to the head teacher,

who thought that it would be

good for our education

to have six weeks

going round Europe

because we could go to art galleries

and things like that.

# Put your hand in a party wave

# Pass around

# Make a shroud pulling combs

through a backwash frame... #

We never went to

said art galleries!

We did go to a lot of clubs.

Yeah. We went to Cologne Cathedral,

that was about the most cultural

thing we ever did.

# Get around town, get around town

# Where the people look good

Where the music is loud

# Get around town

No need to stand proud

# Add your voice

to the sound of the crowd... #

It also meant that we could

appeal to women as well as men.

The early Human League

was a very male-based group

and really only lads in long coats

liked us.

And some transvestites.

OK, pop music, let's go.

Anyone here like The Human League?

# The shades from a pencil peer... #

Released in 1981, Dare crystallised

the new synth-pop sound.

# A fold in an eyelid... #

We did something that

could only be done at that stage.

While we were doing it they

were bringing the machines in

that enabled us to do it.

For instance, the very first Lynn

drum I think that arrived in England

came into our studio and we took

the drums off Sound Of The Crowd

and put the Lynn drum on.

Without that, probably,

it wouldn't have worked.

I remember when Martyn

got the Lynn drum

and it was like

a child at Christmas getting

the first fire engine or something.

He was jumping up and down and all

the boys were, "Oh, it's a drum!"

Before that, apparently,

the drums had been one of

the hardest things to do

and now there was this box that was

this big and you could program it.

They were all very excited

and we were a bit like, "OK, boys."

Now the flood gates were open.

The rush to market

swept every aspect of

British life in the early '80s.

Everything was now up for grabs,

including pop music.

In an attempt to eclipse his

ex-bandmates, former Human League

member Martyn Ware

would cash in on the times

with a concept album.

We were doing the day shifts,

they were doing the night shifts

in the same studio.

They were making Dare, we were

making Penthouse And Pavement.

I've never been so motivated

in my life, believe me.

I said, "We're gonna make it stylish,

fantastic.

"Finally, the shackles are off, we

can start using other instruments

"cos the original manifesto

is broken,

"but we're still gonna make it

predominantly electronic."

And so the idea was that suddenly

we're not a group,

we are ripping open the facade

and going,

"No, this is great music,

but it's a business."

It really is a business.

It doesn't matter.

Bob Dylan can sing all he wants.

He's busy brown-nosing

the A&R men behind the scenes.

# Now here comes my job

# Credit bleeding with the mob

# Dreams become ideals... #

But, ironically,

and we were totally anti-Thatcher

and always had been, you know,

Fascist Groove Thang etc.

It got taken on board

by the aspirational yuppie culture

in the early '80s as their kind of

theme tunes a lot of the time.

Like Let's All Make A Bomb.

They completely missed the point of

the song, totally, and it was like,

"Yeah, mate, remember listening

to that, yeah. it's fantastic, mate.

"Love the ponytails."

MUSIC: "Penthouse And Pavement"

by Heaven 17

Not everyone wanted in

on booming Britain.

Cabaret Voltaire were neither

into ponytails nor popularity.

Their vision of Britain was

concerned with the inner city riots

that erupted across the country

in summer '81.

People say that

The Specials' Ghost Town

was the soundtrack to the unrest

of that year, but a lot of people

alternatively think that

Red Mecca was the sound of that.

I think I've said in the past,

somehow that insurrection

on the streets kind of

found its way into the music.

You kind of took some

heart in the fact

that some people were kicking back

against the system,

albeit in quite a crude manner, and

were prepared to take on the police.

You know, we weren't paranoid, this

stuff was slowly happening, you know,

the rise of surveillance culture,

the rise of the right wing in America

and the fundamentalist Christians.

Eh, oh la, in the name of Jesus.

Then you've got like

the revolution in Iran

with the Shah being deposed

and the general feeling

that things are moving to the right.

Meanwhile, something strangely

synthetic was happening in the

sleazy underbelly of London's Soho.

MUSIC: "Tainted Love"

by Soft Cell

I was going to lots of Northern

Soul clubs so I was listening to

kind of Kraftwerk

and Northern Soul,

which is where things developed from,

really, in my head.

HE PLAYS "Tainted Love"

There... I missed it.

If we had the money we'd come

to Soho and just hang around Soho,

just getting ideas,

which is where the name came from.

# Sometimes I feel I've got to

# Run away... #

And Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret was

a bar back in 1980 or whatever.

That's where that photograph's from.

We were just kind of fascinated,

being these two northern hicks

from the sticks

and suddenly, "Wow, this is amazing."

It was kind of glamorous

and dangerous.

Lots of neon lights and stuff,

which we were fascinated by.

# Now I run from you

# This tainted love you've given

# I give you all

a boy could give you

# Take my tears

and that's not nearly all

# Tainted love

Oh, oh, oh, tainted love... #

The first people

doing the electro thing

really caned the alienation,

"I am hollow inside" thing,

like Gary Numan,

and you get this second wave

where you've got the cold,

glistening synth sound but

the singer's actually very emotional.

Marc Almond's a good example of that,

torridly emotional.

# ..Someone to hold you tight

And you'll think love is to pray... #

It's like

there's a super-passionate singer

and then the one other person,

usually a guy with a synthesiser,

and I think they're using the synth

more as like

a miniature or condensed orchestra,

like they can get all the sounds

they need out of this one box.

So really it's more like

electronic soul music.

# Take my tears

and that's not nearly all #

Where Soft Cell led,

others would follow.

Having left Depeche Mode,

Vince Clarke would form his own duo

with a rhythm-and-blues singer,

also from Basildon.

Vince I met for the first time

when I was 11. We both went to the

same Saturday morning music school.

It was a council-run thing where

I believe he was playing violin

and I was playing oboe.

Even though we'd never spoken in

that time I recognised him for the

fact that there was three of them,

three brothers with this white-blond

hair looking like a family of ducks

going across the road, you know.

Once I left Depeche I had some songs

which I wanted to demo

for the record company.

One of them being Only You.

# Looking from the window above

# It's like a story of love... #

Anyway, I got in touch with Alison

cos I vaguely knew her.

We didn't have plans to

form a band or anything,

we had no history together.

We just went from the demo

to the recording studio

to making the first record.

# All I needed was the love you gave

# All I needed for another day

# And all I ever knew

# Only you... #

I wasn't overly interested

in technology,

I couldn't even afford a record

player or cassette player

so the idea of buying hardware...

There's no point in lusting after

the things you can't have.

Like me thinking about a mini-skirt.

# Listen to the words that you say

# It's getting harder to stay

# When I see you... #

Vince Clarke then forms

another one of these classic

sort of fire and ice groups.

The ice is the synth

and the fire is Alison Moyet,

so that's almost like a template

for 80s pop -

the synthesiser guy,

the synthesiser boffin,

and then

the super-passionate singer,

usually female or maybe gay male.

It's kind of...

The duo replaces the rock band.

It's an affront to rockism,

isn't it?

Just the look of those bands.

# All I needed

was the love you gave... #

When we first started

working in Yazoo,

it was like he was

effectively suffering

from a very recent divorce.

# Only you. #

It's like these were

his childhood mates, Depeche Mode.

This was a huge thing for him,

to go from being a local boy,

like the rest of us,

without a great deal of hope,

without many prospects

or any qualifications.

The last thing I'd heard was

he was driving vans for R White's,

crashing them and leaving them.

MUSIC: "Don't Go" by Yazoo

Yazoo signed to Mute Records in 1982

and to his surprise,

Daniel Miller found himself with

another wildly successful pop act.

# Came in from the city

Walked into the door

# I turned around when I heard

the sound of footsteps on the floor

# Love just like addiction

Now I'm hooked on you

# I need some time to get it right

Your love's gonna see me through

# Can't stop now, don't you know

I ain't ever gonna let you go

# Don't go... #

There was nothing right about it.

It was quite soulful music

with a very cold, electronic beat.

She didn't fit the typecast

female pop-star image at all.

# Hey, go get the doctor... #

You know, and it's become

a cliche now, but at that time,

the quiet second bloke

on synth wasn't a cliche.

# Can't stop now, don't you know

# I ain't ever gonna let you go

# Don't go... #

In the 18 months that we existed,

myself and Alison never

got to know each other.

We never went out to a pub

to have a drink

or did any of that stuff,

any socialising.

It was just in the studio, working.

To actually come across somebody

who was unfathomable,

who you could not penetrate,

and at the same time had,

regardless of what he says, a burning

ambition, he was an ambitious boy.

What was amazing about it

is he actually achieved

his ambitions, which again,

coming from where I came from,

you didn't see that very often.

And I wanted to penetrate him!

Not biblically, obviously.

# I ain't never gonna let you go

Don't go... #

I just wanted to be

in the studio so much.

I would have been in there

24 hours a day.

It was like being in a sweet shop.

Synth-pop was becoming increasingly

popular and increasingly grand.

OMD would enjoy

three top 10 hits in 1982,

two of which were about

Joan of Arc.

We were quite intellectual, you know.

Pompous, stuck up our own arses,

I guess you could say.

We were going on Top Of The Pops

with Bonnie Langford and Elton John

and Cliff Richard amongst others,

and we were playing a song

that was in waltz time,

that started with 45 seconds of

distortion and had no chorus,

and had a Mellotron playing

what sounded like bagpipes.

Explain how it works.

Well, actually,

it's fairly straightforward.

It's a musical computer.

The right hand is lead instruments

with a choice of 18 different ones,

and the left hand is rhythms in this

half and backgrounds in this half.

It's all been fed

on to hundreds of tape tracks.

The Mellotron is a very early sampler

before samplers went digital.

It was a very analogue thing.

Here's a French accordion

with a Viennese waltz.

It was nightmare to use on stage.

We were playing in this tiny town

in the middle of France and the

Mellotron was completely out of tune

because all the town were drawing

the power down so much cooking,

the motor wouldn't spin fast enough.

Thank you. Well, David

isn't a musician, as you know,

but I have a professional pianist

here who can really show you

what the Mellotron can do.

The number of people

who thought that the equipment

wrote the song for you...

"Well, anybody could do it with

the same equipment you've got."

Fuck off.

# If Joan of Arc had a heart

# Would she give it as a gift? #

It's all played by hand.

Believe me, if there was a button

on a synth or a drum machine

that said, "hit single",

I would have pressed it

as often as anybody else would have,

but there isn't.

It was all written by real human

beings and it was all played by hand,

to the point where Paul and I thought

we were gonna get arthritis

in our fingers from playing bass

lines like that for hours on end.

MUSIC: "Sweet Dreams (Are Made

Of This)" by Eurythmics

Between 1981 and 1983,

synth-pop reigned supreme.

Our charts were chock full

of duos and groups

who set aside changing the world

in favour of making it

with a synth on Top Of The Pops.

# Some of them want to use you

# Some of them want to

get used by you

# Some of them want to

abuse you... #

You've got to remember

that it was the first time ever

that someone could sit

and make a record on their own.

Eurythmics came along

and they did Sweet Dreams

in their basement.

They recorded it

on an eight-track tape machine.

Annie sang Sweet Dreams

into a little Shure microphone,

holding it in her hand,

and won a Grammy for it.

MUSIC: "Vienna" by Ultravox

And in 1982, along came a song

that turned the alienation

of the original synth pioneers

into a full-blown epic.

Ultravox would score one of

the biggest synth-pop hits ever,

called Vienna, which has that total

fetishism of Mitteleuropa, Vienna.

It's the Habsburg Empire,

the romance of central Europe.

# Freezing breath

on the window pane

# Lying and waiting... #

The movies we were watching and

the music we were listening to

at the time all came out of Europe

and the history that Europe had,

you know, Vienna being

this beautifully romantic city,

this beautiful place.

You put all that together

and you've got this fantastic image,

this wonderful...

I'd never been to Vienna

when we wrote the song,

I didn't know anything about Vienna.

# Reaching out in a piercing cry

It stays with you until... #

You try putting that down,

that you're gonna write a song

that is a four-and-a-half-minute long

electronic ballad

that speeds up in the middle

with a viola solo thrown in -

it doesn't equate, it doesn't work.

But at the time when you're young and

naive, naivety is a wonderful thing.

# This means nothing to me

# Oh, Vienna. #

Not to be outdone by their English

synth-pop derivatives,

Kraftwerk would return in 1982

to score their only number one

single success,

cashing in with a song that

they'd originally recorded in 1978.

MUSIC: "The Model" by Kraftwerk

With The Model that was, in England,

to be a hit, that was

a complete different story.

We didn't expect it ourselves.

# She's a model

and she's looking good... #

The reasons was the following -

we had already a single to be played

on the radio in England

and it was Computer World.

The man of the EMI London house,

he didn't know what to

put on the B-side.

And he thought and he thought and

he thought, maybe two days longer,

and suddenly, he had the great idea

to put The Model from the last album,

Man Machine, on the B-side.

And then they sent the single

to radios, and 80% of the radios

played the B-side.

# She's going out tonight

Loves drinking just champagne... #

By 1983, Britain had entered an era

of conspicuous consumption and greed

that made the late '70s

seem like a foreign country.

Loadsamoney!

It would provide inspiration for

Depeche Mode's new chief songwriter.

# The handshake seals a contract

# From the contract

There's no turning back

# The turning point of a career... #

The early '80s were just

a terrible time in Britain.

And I was young and impressionable,

and that was really when I first felt

like I was writing

from the heart really.

# The grabbing hands

grab all they can

# All for themselves, after all

# The grabbing hands

grab all they can

# All for themselves, after all

# It's a competitive world... #

Around the time of

Construction Time Again,

samplers had just really come out.

We would just...

It was a whole revelation to us.

We were just going out and smashing

pieces of metal

with sledgehammers,

raiding the kitchen drawer

for all the utensils

to make percussion sounds.

Just anything

we could get our hands on.

We've got this vague idea at the

moment which was used on the demo.

We've got this pebble,

which we got from the mud.

Yeah, look, white spots.

They're the stinging nettles.

Anyway, the idea is to roll

the pebble on this piece of metal

along here,

this window frame,

thus causing...

thus making this sort of sound.

RATTLING

Construction Time Again really

started to see us form as the basis

of what we are today.

RATTLING

That was a lot better. Anyway,

the idea is to take that sequence

and to make an interesting

rhythm out of it,

and to sequence it

all through the song,

so people dance.

Depeche Mode pioneered their

new sampler-based sound

in London's Shoreditch.

In those days, Shoreditch,

there was not a soul around.

Now, of course, with Hoxton

etc etc,

it is the trendy place to be,

but it wasn't when we

were at the Garden Studios.

There was not a soul to be seen.

# Get out the crane

Construction time again

# What is it this time... #

I remember, there was one sound

in particular

that was us actually hitting a piece

of corrugated iron

that was the side of a building site,

and the sample sort of went like...

"Krr! Oi!", and that

was the site foreman.

# It's a lot

It's a lot

# It's a lot

It's a lot

# It's a lot

It's a lot... #

We seemed, in the '80s,

to be doing a one-band crusade

for electronic music

against the music press, that was

overwhelmingly rock-based.

We would often do interviews

with journalists and we'd have

a big argument,

because they just didn't consider

electronic music to be real music.

# There's a new game

we like to play, you see

# The game with added reality

# You treat me like a dog

Get me down on my knees

# We call it master

and servant... #

You know, we got accused at certain

times of being like a very subversive

pop band, and I do think that we did

get away with some stuff that was

probably risque for the radio, just

because we used it in a pop context.

# With you on top and me

underneath... #

In our early career, there was things

like Master And Servant and stuff.

# Let's play master and servant

# Let's play master and servant... #

Some of the reviews were

unbelievably vicious.

You just couldn't...

Real hatred for the band.

Real hatred. I don't know why.

It wasn't British, really.

A journalist once said,

"The music will

appeal to alienated youth

everywhere, and Germans."

Depeche Mode would eventually find

a sympathetic home for their music

in America.

For a lot of Americans,

England just means gay.

They think it's like a conflation of

Oscar Wilde and various ideas about

British boarding school.

For people who feel different,

or misfits in America,

England does actually seem

like this utopia.

They imagine everyone in England

walks around wearing eyeliner and

plays synthesisers, you know?

To be a Depeche Mode fan

was actually a quite was actually

quite a dissident thing.

Depeche Mode were the only act who

were truly successful in exporting

the British electronic sound.

The band would enjoy massive

popularity in America

throughout the '80s and beyond.

Consistently filling

stadiums across the land.

Back in Britain, in '83,

the sampler was moving synth-pop

in a different direction.

Suppose I want to send my loved one

a rather special musical greeting,

well I can.

First, let me give the computer

an idea of the sound that

I actually want to send.

So, I'll prime it again.

And now I'll speak into the mic.

Hello!

And we have to wait

a couple of seconds now for the

sound wave to come up. There it is.

SAMPLER: # Hello, hello, hello

Hello, hello, hello. #

Hello, dear.

When we arrived in it,

the Emulator had just been invented.

It was completely riveting, because

it had James Brown going, "Please!"

You played up

and down the keyboard.

Had a string quartet

or an orchestra.

It had a famous Beethoven

"Rumph, rumph."

# West End girl... #

The first record we made,

West End Girl,

every sound was actually a sample

played on the same keyboard

which looked just like

a Bontempi chord organ.

The idea was to take real life

and put it against beautiful or

dance or both music.

Because we were the last of the

thing that started with

The Human League,

and we were probably the

first of the thing where

pop music was raised to dance music.

# In a West End town

a dead end world

# The East End boys

and West End girls

# Oh, in a West End town

a dead end world

# East End boys

West End girls... #

The Pet Shop Boys

gave us a glimpse of what the future

held for British electronic music.

But the band that would truly

spearhead the shift from synth-pop

to dance music had evolved out

of the ashes of Joy Division.

Whilst in America, New Order

would have a synthetic epiphany.

Kind of at the period

where Ian had died

and we were going

recording in New York.

We were spending a lot of time

in New York and I was going

to night clubs after the studio.

Every night.

I remember sitting there on these

kind of steps in a club and thinking,

"Wouldn't it be great

if one day,

"our music was played

in a place like this."

That sort of planted

a seed in my head, really,

that got me interested

in more in synthesisers.

You know, if you play an encore

or something, you know,

it's like, you're just falling

into the trap, you know,

it's a phoney thing

doing an encore, everyone expects it.

"Ooh, let's get these machines

to do a track and we'll just go on

"as if we're doing an encore,

press a button and then bugger off."

That was the idea.

When Blue Monday came out,

a lot of people didn't like it.

They went, "What, what...

"it doesn't sound like New Order,

what are you doing?

"It doesn't sound like

you're supposed to sound."

A lot of people were like, "I don't

like that." Then, it just took off.

# How does it feel?

# To treat me like you do?

# When you laid your hands upon me

# And told me who you are... #

I guess, people went on holidays

and they hear it in night clubs

in Spain and Greece and stuff,

and when they came back,

they would buy it'd be

a big hit over and over again.

Blue Monday's inscrutable

club cool would make it become the

biggest-selling 12-inch of all time,

originally released in 1983,

it heralded the future

for British electronica.

A new age of dance music,

unconcerned with pop charts

and commercial appeal,

would gain a massive following

that thrives to this day.

For those electronic pioneers who

had brought the synth into British

pop music, it was the end of an era.

It sort of starts,

I guess, round about '83.

It was just overdone.

It was saturated.

There was too much

synth-pop around.

# This is the sound

of all of our friends... #

It's on a synth, but the

melodies and the way the songs

were structured were really

pretty traditional and quite trite.

It wasn't that inventive

as electronic music.

# Somebody's got their eye on me

# Perhaps I should

invite him up for tea... #

Towards the middle of the '80s,

there wasn't so much encouragement

from the record companies to

do more experimental stuff.

I meant that initial supernova

of post-punk, it was dying away.

And slowly but surely,

the cancerous growth

of market-led A&R-ing

started invidiously creeping up

and blandifying and homogenising

the musical market, in my view.

We were a bit lost by then.

It was all a bit...

We felt we'd achieved it.

We thought we'd proved our point,

and it just looked like

we didn't have

anything left to prove.

The commodification of synth-pop

marked the end of a golden era

in which a generation of post-punk

musicians had taken the synth

from the fringes of experimentation

to the centre of the pop stage.

Out of the '70s and into the '80s.

At the time, it was just really,

really exciting, and it was exciting

to be a part of a musical movement

that had never been done before,

that was different.

It wasn't a rehash of anything.

Those early electronic records,

they'd ever been done before, so,

it was a fine time.

# I only knew you for a while... #

We were trying to do something new.

That's specifically why we chose

electronics

and embraced every new piece

of equipment we could

get our hands on or afford.

We wanted to sweep away all of the

old rock cliches and stereotypes

and the lead guitar solos

and long hair and everything.

And then what happens towards

the end of the '80s and

even worse in the mid '90s,

everybody decides that guitars

are back in, synthesisers

are somehow old-fashioned,

and you get Oasis! Horror!

# We'll always be together

# However far it seems

# Love never ends

# We'll always be together

# Together in electric dreams

# Because the friendship

that you gave

# Has taught me to be brave

# No matter where I go

# I'll never find

a better prize... #