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

Product Information

My book has the sub-title ‘Inventing Electronic Pop’ and I’ve chosen to define ‘pop’ as ‘popular’ so in my telling of the story there’s no career without an audience. I think they feel so much of what they have to say is already available and they don’t necessarily want to talk about the things that aren’t, because they are the personal things.

It also discusses the techno genre of Detroit, USA, which was directly borne out of the electronic music produced by bands in the era covered here and its importance on contemporary popular culture. Mind you, most of the reviews now read as such drivel, condescending and pretentious, for the critics re-reading them now , it must be like reading your teenage diaries or undergraduate essays. Listening to the music the machines make’ is actually a line from an Ultravox song, ‘Just For A Moment’, which appeared on their Systems Of Romance album. The author provides a straightforward narrative history of synth with a brief potted history of the relevant musical antecedents.But I think it was the events outside the music itself that were the most interesting, like the Musicians’ Union’s attempts to ban synthesisers for fear they were putting ‘proper’ musicians out of work. It then goes on to look in detail at each year and the careers of the bands who emerged, plus occasional context such as the Musicians' Union being worried about synthesisers, the introduction of CDs and the 'home taping is killing music' campaign.

One of the things that irked Branson in particular was how OMD were the biggest selling act in the Virgin group in 1980 via the Dinsdisc subsidiary. In a way, that was really important because any music that I found was mine, it wasn’t handed down to me or curated for me. I am the oldest of my siblings so I didn’t have anyone playing stuff in their room that I could hear. This artist came to me and said “I’m thinking of doing some new material but I don’t know if I have an audience anymore.It blurs and like we talked about earlier, lots more things were interesting in different directions and also taking some of this electronic sensibility into it. exclamation mark included) with John Foxx at the helm before Midge Ure took his place when Foxx left the band to pursue his own journey in electronica. When I started senior school, some of those punks were in my school, they were actually kids… in my perception, they weren’t that and were completely ‘other’! There are a couple of people who I have come to recognise that they played much bigger roles in this story and in some other stories as well than they are given credit for.

It feels there’s been a period where everything and the kitchen sink has gone into electronic music and its gradually being pared away to a point where the instruments and sounds are getting a bit of space to breathe. That’s right, their Boys’ Brigade uniforms were probably still hanging in their wardrobes when they were off to do ‘Top Of The Pops’! But if you are looking for a deeper more analytical approach that seeks to place the music into its relevant political and cultural landscape, as Jon Savage did for Punk and Simon Reynolds did for Post-punk and Glam, then this work will leave you unsatisfied.Listening to the Music the Machines Make is the revolutionary story of electronic pop from 1978 to 1983, a true golden age of British music. The time period is broadened somewhat in the prologue and the conclusion so that Evans can contextualize the beginnings and the aftermath of that time in electronic pop, but otherwise, the focus is on those six significant and intense years.

This brave new world of music-making smashed through anything that had ever gone before, producing an innovative and creative genre of music. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.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. This definitive account explores how krautrock, disco, glam rock and punk inspired a new generation to rip up the rulebook and venture toward a new frontier of electronic music – one that laid the foundations for Hip-Hop, house, techno and beyond. A scroll of chronological, interwoven but often disparate stories featuring every purveyor of synthpop you can possibly think of.