One Nation Under a Moog- a pretty good read for music nerds

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As new BBC4 documentary Synth Britannia shows, the synthesizer first dehumanised then re-humanised British pop, fulfilled the DIY promise of punk, and changed how bands looked forever

The synth-pop era really kicked off in June 1979, when Tubeway Army's Are 'Friends' Electric? hit No 1. The sound and visuals owed a substantial debt to David Bowie's Berlin trilogy and his stranded alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Chuck in some Europe Between The Wars atmospherics and you had the recipe for Visage's Fade To Grey and The Damned Don't Cry; Japan's Nightporter and Ghosts; Ultravox's Vienna And bringing up the rear were the pioneers, the chaps who'd coined the whole mittel Europa/Mensch-Maschine shtick in the first place: Kraftwerk, No 1 in February 1982 with their 1978 tune The Model. But synthesizers in popular music actually go back much further than the mandroid melancholy of Gary Numan. All the way back to the psychedelic 60s, when American groups like Silver Apples and The United States Of America ditched guitars for oscillators. In 1969, George Harrison put out a whole album of Moog doodles called Electronic Sound. German cosmic rockers Tangerine Dream gradually streamlined their Pink Floyd-wannabe grandeur into a minimal, darkly pulsing, all-electronic sound. Floyd themselves forayed into full-blown synth-rock with Dark Side Of The Moon's On The Run, whose brain-searing wibbles anticipated acid house. Other proggers like ELP's Keith Emerson and Yes' Rick Wakeman performed behind massive banks of electronic keyboards, but tended to use their synths as glorified organs, hamming it up with Bach-style variations and arpeggiated folderol. Far more unearthly electro tones could be heard on the telly via science-fiction series like Doctor Who and The Tomorrow People or at the cinema, courtesy of dystopian movies like A Clockwork Orange, The Andromeda Strain and Logan's Run. Black music also had its share of visionaries besotted with the synth's cornucopia of otherworldly tone colours, from fusioneers Weather Report and Herbie Hancock to funkateers Stevie Wonder and Funkadelic.

snip

With the future-shock aspect depleted, what comes through now is the pop in synth-pop: OMD's pretty tunes, the aching plaintiveness of Numan and the Human League. Oddly, what's made this music last are the same things that made the Beatles and Motown immortal: melody and emotion.

read the whole thing at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/10/synth-pop-80s-reynolds

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1. I thought George's album was called Wonderwall Music...but I will enjoy this article

I'm a huge fan of lots of different electronic music, from the Moog-era to Kraftwerk, to the synth pop of the 80s to Ulrich Schnauss and Royksopp today.

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2. I love kraftwerk !

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3. kick

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4. 2nd kick