Listening to the Music the Machines Make - Inventing Electronic Pop 1978 to 1983: Inventing Electronic Pop 1978-1983

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Instead I went to the original music and popular culture media from 1978 to 1983 and collected as many interviews, reviews, features and news pieces as I could – literally thousands of them – from magazines and papers from the NME, Sounds and Melody Maker to Smash Hits, The Face and ZigZag and constructed the narrative of the book from those original materials. From the gritty and experimental to the camp and theatrical, this book charts the careers and impact of electronic pop's earliest innovators and luminaries, from Devo, The Normal, Telex and Cabaret Voltaire to Soft Cell, Gary Numan, OMD, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode. A much-needed synthesis of the stories told by the charts and music press in the early days of UK electronic pop … an excellent review of the dynamics at work in the culture of the time. Using the subtitle ‘Inventing Electronic Pop 1978 – 1983’, while the book primarily sources period archive material, additional input comes from Neil Arthur, Dave Ball, Andy Bell, Rusty Egan, John Foxx, Gareth Jones, Daniel Miller and Martyn Ware. The book kicks off with a chapter on INSPIRATION in 1977, namely the acts that hugely influenced the pioneers of the electronic music genre.

These were transformational times and what made it exciting was that a lot of artists, like myself, were just making it all up as we went along. There is a brief section at the beginning within the context of the whole book that joins together some of the dots, things that people were taking in their early electronic experiments. A thorough, well-executed delight for fans of the electronic music genre and puts together all the pieces of information together. But Simon Reynolds said in ‘Synth Britannia’ that it was Howard Jones that made him feel that electronic pop was now no longer special and part into the mainstream… was there a moment when this music changed for you? Yes, this situation impacted on the bands that we are talking about, there were pressures on people to be more commercial when one of the reasons that they were attracted to Virgin in the first place was so that they could be less commercial should they choose to be.

It ends by looking at how early electronic pop influenced acid house and rave music later in the decade.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Although most of my work outside the book was largely unaffected by lockdown, when everything went quiet it did give me extra time to start working on the book. Then in 2019 I had a little bit of space to take on a new project and I decided that I would use it to put together a book proposal which I could show publishers as a way of seeing if there might be actual interest in a book on this subject. Although on the whole this book is an easy read and the style of prose is enjoyable enough, the author has a bad habit of inserting lengthy asides into his sentences. Now when the electronic bands started coming through, they came with this aesthetic with the keyboards and it looked fantastic.Tubeway Army were born out of this punk revolution, and it was only a couple of years later when Gary Numan saw a Mini-Moog in the corner of a recording studio that his interest was piqued. A comprehensive and highly readable overview of a once-future … Listening To The Music The Machines Make is well-written: Evans has a warm, savvy approach, long on detail, with good humour. Talk Talk (entered the charts in 1982), Aneka, Kim Wilde, Toyah, Hazel O'Connor, Grace Jones, Madonna, Blondie. Like you say, there’s a stigma towards it, that it’s not “proper music”, that you are not a proper music fan if you listen to it, but a victim of some sort of a commercial heist! The strange thing was I was never really interested in it being retro, it was always about today’s news from those bands, I thought “that’s a good idea”.