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

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You talked about wanting to go back to original sources and that’s where most of your material comes from but you did have access to some of the artists you were writing about didn’t you?

Setting out to chart a unique chapter in the history of popular music, Listening To The Music The Machines Make tells the story of a single generation of post-punk musicians, mavericks, visionaries and opportunists tinkering with primitive synthesisers in bedrooms, bedsits and basements around Britain, who assembled a potent cocktail of ideas and influences, took them apart, mixed them up, and reassembled them in entirely new ways to create a genuine golden age of British pop, and along the way creating some of the most enduring, iconic and influential records in pop history. Its still fascinating especially if , like me, can remember actually reading some of the reviews and hearing the music for the first time. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. This Is Not Retro founder Richard Evans set himself a challenging task in writing yet another account of that very well-documented period, but Listening to the Music The Machines Make: Inventing Electronic Pop 1978-1983 deserves to be acknowledged as one of the definitive histories of the period and the genre.There were too many music reviews included, but I did learn that the British music press is absolutely ruthless. 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. The site was born of a conversation I had with an 80s artist; in my working life, I build fan bases and work for bands, I’ve done this for quite a long time.

I think I was already at least aware of all the bands and artists I cover in the book, but I didn’t know all their music. The final stage of the narrative outlines the worldwide popularity of more than a few of the acts that emerged from that era. It feels like the same sort of sounds that I started responding to on ‘Top Of The Pops’ when we first saw DEPECHE MODE and SOFT CELL.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 originally wanted to use Electric Dreams but David Buckley beat me to it for his book about The Human League which comes out next year. With a foreword by Vince Clarke and a focus on source material such as the music press and the charts, this is a detailed and thorough exploration of how a number of bands, mainly British, developed their sounds from 1978 - 1983. I really hope that people who already know a lot about this subject will find things in the book which they didn’t already know, and I hope that people who go into it not knowing so much will discover new music that they will enjoy, but my biggest hope is that I haven’t disappoined anyone by missing out anything crucial to them, or by interpreting or reporting any of the facts wrongly.

I went through all these things, page after page after page and every time I saw something that I attained to this story like a news item, review or interview, I took a photo of it on my phone.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. I sent Vince the manuscript so he would have an idea about what was in my book and I know that he has dipped into it, but I don’t know if he’s actually read it all… the book is 528 pages long so it takes a lot of reading and Vince is a busy man with a lot on his plate. It’s really quite strange to read through these original accounts of what was happening, but it’s not so strange in retrospect. I think that electronic pop in this period is so crucial in the development of music, and it was just time for someone to tell the story. I don’t know if I have an actual moment to be honest… I realised quite late that I’ve never particularly characterised myself as an electronic music fan, certainly not in the 80s.

Then the writing bit came in stringing these things all together and turning them into this story from all those different perspectives layered on top of each other.This definitive book explores how krautrock, disco, glam rock, and punk inspired an electronic pop revolution and how that revolution went on to establish the foundations for hip-hop, house, and EDM.