Tag: Martyn Ware (Page 2 of 8)

Vintage Synth Trumps with MARTYN WARE

12 July 2022 /

You’ve heard the music, listened to the podcast, now you can read the book…

‘Electronically Yours Vol 1’ is the autobiography of Martyn Ware. From his synth innovation with THE HUMAN LEAGUE and HEAVEN 17 to productions for Tina Turner and Terence Trent D’Arby to ambient collaborations with Vince Clarke, it is the story of his humble working class origins in Sheffield, rise to acclaim and million selling records.

In between, there was his teenage friendship with former-bandmate Phil Oakey that led to the formation of THE HUMAN LEAGUE who were subsequently declared “the future of music” by David Bowie. After a Coup d’état that led to Ware leaving THE HUMAN LEAGUE, he formed BEF, a production company from which an umbrella project named HEAVEN 17 with singer Glenn Gregory and fellow League refugee Ian Craig Marsh became an international success, most notably with the huge hit single ‘Temptation’.

Ware achieved two No1 albums as the producer of ‘Introducing The Hardline According To Terence Trent D’Arby’ in 1987 and after HEAVEN 17 went into hiatus, the sixth ERASURE album ‘I Say I Say I Say’ in 1994. The latter link up with Andy Bell and Vince Clarke eventually led to HEAVEN 17 returning to the fold as the opening act on 1997’s ‘Cowboy’ tour and becoming a favourite on the live circuit to this very day.

‘Electronically Yours Vol 1’ also allows Ware to articulate his views as a proud socialist, something he considers to be a soulful, personal and moral duty. Anyone who considers politics and music should not mix have perhaps missed the point of his music; the themes of HEAVEN 17’s first two albums ‘Penthouse & Pavement’ and ‘The Luxury Gap’ highlighted the class divide that got only wider under the government led by Margaret Thatcher.

Martyn Ware chatted candidly with ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.CO.UK over a game of Vintage Synth Trumps about the history of technology, how the music industry has changed over his multi-decade career and his fruitful working relationship with Vince Clarke.

The first card is the EMS Polysynthi…

I’ve never played one of those but I’m a big fan of EMS design in general, my first band THE FUTURE featured Adi Newton who owned an EMS Synthi AKS suitcase synth. I couldn’t get any sense out of it at all but it made a fantastic racket that you couldn’t predict.

The number of people I have talked to on the ‘Electronically Yours’ podcast who have talked about EMS in fond terms, it’s the one that I covet…

The EMS Polysynthi was at our college studio and it sounded horrible… I thought it was just me but then a few years ago, Vince Clarke declared it as “the worst sounding synth ever made” *laughs*

It looks nice and colourful which is generally a good sign but how weird is that? I never saw it in his studio, maybe he didn’t have it out because he didn’t like it.

Next card is a Roland SH3a…

I had one of those! This was around 1979-80, it was a very nice synth, I liked it a lot but it wasn’t as good as the modular synths that I was more familiar with. Roland were starting to move into more mass production stuff at that point and appealing to a bigger market. They were using a lot of the same components but somehow, the filter was not as extreme so the sounds were less electro-punky like I preferred at that time. They redeemed themselves with the Jupiter 4 but it was too effete, too soft.

So did it get used on ‘Reproduction’ or ‘Travelogue’?

No, it was sort of the unloved runt of the litter. I just couldn’t get it to go far enough for my taste, it was a bit safe. I think Roland toned down the extremities of the filters to make it more usable for the average Joe.

I’m always fascinated by synths that artists don’t like, I remember Billy Currie of ULTRAVOX saying his was the Prophet T8 because it cost a fortune and was nothing like the Yamaha CS80 which he’d sold it for…

Haha! We’ve all done that! We regularly sold our old synths for whatever the latest thing was, that proved to be a massive mistake as soon as we approached the FM synthesis period which I never really got on with.

So with your book, you mentioned you started it 3 years ago, is it basically a product of lockdown? 

I’d been thinking about it for a while and then lockdown happened, I thought if I don’t do it now, I’m not going to do it. I’m one of those people that HAS to be doing something. If I’d had been locked inside during lockdown like in some countries, I would have gone insane. During lockdown, there were two things that I quickly determined; one was to start this autobiography.

My daughter was living with us then so I employed her with the research as I can’t remember a lot of it as I never kept diaries. I’ve got a sketchy knowledge of stuff and remember individual incidents. So over three months, we did solid research using a spreadsheet with a timeline but after a month, this spreadsheet took up a whole wall!

It’s like getting your ducks in a row, you’ve got to have a cogent understanding of what was connected to what happened in what time order. It can become like David Niven’s ‘The Moon’s A Balloon’ which is a series of reminiscences but I didn’t want it to feel like some old bloke’s book! Although I’m an old bloke, I wanted it to feel dynamic.

So once you’ve established the timeline correctly, you can start messing about with it or approach it from the point of view of themes. What I ended up doing was a combination of themes, chronological stuff and to break it up a bit, there are contributions from people who have been important to me throughout my career ranging from the producers I’ve worked with like Pete Walsh, Greg Walsh and Richard Manwaring to various musicians.

The final bit of the jigsaw is essentially me going through EVERY track I’ve ever recorded with BEF and HEAVEN 17 and explaining the process behind it. So for people like yourself and those who are interested in the technical and creative aspects, this will be great. I’ve never really seen that in other musical autobiographies, I was partly inspired by Peter Hook’s ‘Substance’ book so kudos to him, I’ve nicked that idea, thank you.

Your next card is the Sequential Pro-One…

Now then, this one’s interesting. I’ve never used one but I’ve played with one… when you were in the studio in the 80s, you had a budget to rent equipment and try out stuff. We were fairly happy with the synths we’d got, but from time to time, something wouldn’t be available from the hire company so they would suggest “X”, so the Pro-One was one of the things we tired. I like Sequential Circuits as manufacturers and I know Vince Clarke has one of these so I messed around with it then. The basic oscillators and filters are quite pokey so I like it from that point of view. I think it was more of a performance synth.

You’ve mentioned in the past that you favoured the Japanese manufacturers over the American ones…

I always thought with the American synths, I liked the roundness in their tone, I would have killed for a Moog Modular like Wendy Carlos or Giorgio Moroder had but I couldn’t afford it. But they were more performance oriented…

I’ve never been a very good keyboard player, so it wasn’t my desire to find something that would enable me to perform in a musicianly way or to imitate a sax or oboe or whatever. I was never interested in that.

I was more into textures and from that point of view, Korg and Roland were much more on that kind of odd Japanese trip. The approach that they took to the user interface for synthesis was more theoretical. But a lot of the American manufacturers, for me, were aimed at a traditional musician, so when somebody was going into a synthesizer shop to try something out, they could easily get a sound that they were familiar with out of it. I was never keen on that, I wanted something that sounded unfamiliar, so there was a philosophical difference actually.

One time you did go down the American route was for ‘Pleasure One’ with the Emulator II…

Yes, but I’m not really counting this in with that American synth ethos because we had a Fairlight which was frankly a disappointment. We used it on ‘How Men Are’ but it was quickly superseded for me by the Emulator II. Ian Craig Marsh spent £40,000 on something that rapidly became a doorstop *laughs*

Ian was gutted when I bought the Emulator II for about £3,500 plus a magneto-optical drive with the latest CD-ROM. This was state-of-the-art, not even computers had these things apart from mainframes. So for domestic use, this was almost unheard of. We had access to this gigantic library of sounds, which today, nobody thinks twice about. Back then, it gave you an advantage and the sound out of the Emulator II was miles superior, as well as its samples. It became my workhorse for a good 4 or 5 years in productions.

Stephen Hague said the Emulator II was his bread and butter for about 5 years…

It was very elegantly designed, the people who did the sound libraries for them knew what they were doing. It was very warm sounding compared to other things.

Here’s another card, the Korg Mono/Poly…

I did fall for the whole M1 thing but after the early Korgs, between 1981-85, I didn’t buy any Korg equipment because everything Roland was coming out with was so brilliant and I didn’t see any advantage in spending a lot of money on what was essentially, not that different. I’ve played with a Korg Mono/Poly more recently and it’s fine…

You’re often thought of as a Roland man, is there an unconsciously loyalty with particular manufacturers…

I think the development process and timeline of Roland felt more cutting edge than any other manufacturer. Because we were self-identified as needing to be “cutting edge”, there didn’t seem any reason to stray from that. The Jupiter 4 was incredible, I still think it’s the best sounding traditional keyboard synth, rather than modular. The Jupiter 8 was good and ahead of its time but it didn’t sound as good as the Jupiter 4 and so on and so forth. If Roland had started falling behind in the late 80s, then I might have switched. I had a Roland S-700 series sampler which because of the converters sounded better than the Akai ones.

So with your book, was there a story you had completely forgotten about that came up in research?

Yeah, quite a few. They were amazing days in the first half of the 80s, I didn’t have a holiday for 3 years! It was that time when Virgin were making so much money from the birth of CDs that it was flooding in, so we felt we had to take advantage of this good fortune… but, while we didn’t think this money was coming out of thin air, we weren’t really fully concentrated on the fact that we’d have to pay all the recording costs back for instance. We didn’t fully recoup on HEAVEN 17 until the late 90s on the recording side.

There was one major story that I’d forgotten about, I was reminded about it by Glenn. We were recording ‘How Men Are’ at Air Studios in Oxford Circus and we were getting cabin fever. The news was full of Thatcher’s government committing a huge amount of public expenditure on cruise missiles. We were absolutely terrified like the majority of people were that we were going to be blown off the face of the planet! *laughs*

There was this idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as discussed on ‘Let’s All Make A Bomb’ from ‘Penthouse & Pavement’ and it just seemed like the whole world was going to sh*t… now that sounds familiar! Back then, we were heavily involved in the anti-nuclear movement and we’ve always been activists. One day, we just said “we’ve got to do something positive” as people we’re looking up to us as a politically motivated band…

Photo by Gered Mankowitz

So what happened?

I can’t remember whose idea it was. I think it was Ian’s and he said “why don’t we do a banner and put it on the top floor above Topshop on Oxford Circus as a protest?”. We thought in our demented minds that this was a great idea so we got some canvas and painted it to say “HEAVEN 17 SAY NO CRUISE IS GOOD NEWS” with the CND logo on a 20 foot by 4 foot banner.

We wanted it on the corner to get the maximum viewing on Oxford Circus but we had not really thought this through because how do you get this thing up? There was this ledge outside the window a metre wide and I’m not that great with heights! But Glenn said “I’ll do it” while Ian was completely mad and said he WOULD do it.

Meanwhile our engineer Jeremy Allom, a crackers Australian dude, said not only would he do it but would take his bike onto that metre long ledge and rode it around the outside of the building, overlooking the street with a hundred foot drop! I was like “I AM OUT!” and went home!

So Glenn, Ian and Jeremy put it up on a summer’s evening and Glenn took a polaroid… he came round my house and said “Martyn, take a look at this, it’s f*cking amazing!”… this photo is in the book by the way. I was thinking “this is great, it’s going to be in the newspapers”. But next thing in the morning, I get this phone call from Gemma Caufield, A&R co-ordinator at Virgin Records saying “YOU’VE GOT TO TAKE THE BANNER DOWN! THE POLICE ARE THREATENING TO ARREST YOU!” The owners of the building were threatening to sue us and we were given an hour to take it down… I didn’t even put it up there! *laughs*

Here’s another card, this is a fluke, a Korg 700s!!

Now you’re talking, you fixed this! So the Korg 700s, it’s the one I’m most fond of as it was the first synth I ever owned, apart from the dual stylus Stylophone I had. I’ve started taking the 700s out on tour again to play ‘Being Boiled’, the audience can’t believe what it sounds like.

It’s a totally different experience to any digital synth. The solidity of the bottom end is incredible and the filters are amazing. It had two oscillators that you could tune against each other or make them interfere using the ring modulator function, plus it’s monophonic of course, which suits me cos I’m sh*t!

The filters are called “travellers” and it’s got really weird colourful switches saying things like “expand”, WTF does that mean? I know what these things do now because I know how synths work but back then, it was mysterious. It had a white noise oscillator, there’s delay and vibrato. That was used in THE FUTURE before THE HUMAN LEAGUE and I’m really fond of it, if it ever got destroyed, I would be heartbroken.

When THE HUMAN LEAGUE played at the original Marquee on Wardour Street in 1978, it was rammed and they couldn’t get any more people in, we thought we were hardcore electro-punk! I found out 6 months ago that some people got turned away because it was full… two of them were David Bowie and Iggy Pop! Fortunately Bowie came to see us later at The Nashville. We opened for Iggy later on the ‘Soldier’ tour when Glen Matlock was in his band.

When THE HUMAN LEAGUE opened for punk bands like SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES, THE STRANGLERS and PERE UBU, the audiences were initially confused but they soon came round and turned into our core support in the end. It was different time and people now seem to be more segmented in marketing terms whereas then, it was much more open.

Your ‘Electronically Yours’ With Martyn Ware podcast has gone very well, you’ve done a lot of episodes, has it got bigger than you expected?

Absolutely 100%, I did it really as a distraction over lockdown… I had about 20 or 30 people who would probably do it. I like the podcast medium and listening to audio books while walking around London. I thought “I could do that”; there was nobody really doing anything in this sector of music. The thing I like about podcasts is they are truly international, there were colleagues and friends in American who knew people who might be interested, so one thing leads to another. A friend of mine from Sheffield who was the singer in a band called SOUNDS OF BLACKNESS introduced me to Maurice Hayes who was musical director for Prince, I would never have thought about approaching these people. It’s got a life of its own now.

Are there any artists that you haven’t interviewed yet who you would like on ‘Electronically Yours’?

There’s some I’ve been chasing since the start who have said they’ll do it, but for a number of reasons, it hasn’t happened yet. The main one is Brian Eno who I know, I don’t think my career would have happened without him on every level from Roxy to his ambient stuff to his work with Bowie and Fripp etc. He’s agreed to do it but he’s so busy.

Kate Bush has turned me down for the podcast and BEF but has always been sweet, she said it’s not something she’d do, I think she’s a very delicate flower. There’s another woman Annette Peacock whose 1972 album ‘I’m The One’ I loved, I got into a long dialogue with her and she’s still doing amazing stuff in her late 70s but she wants to combine appearing on the podcast with her next release. I’d like to chat to Cosey Fanni Tutti, she said she’s happy to do it but only when she’s ready.

There’s a few who have turned me down like Kevin Rowland who’s a friend of mine but didn’t fancy doing it… some people aren’t comfortable with autobiographical long form… the other main one is Green Gartside who I’ve worked with and known for 30 years but he’s not responded.

Time for another card, and it is an ARP Axxe…

I’ve not used a lot of ARP stuff in recording terms. Vince Clarke has nearly every ARP synth on earth and duplicates of a lot of them, so I got the chance to play with them… I just think a lot of those synths sound quite similar, what would you say the characteristics of the ARP Axxe were?

The ARP Axxe is a smaller version of the ARP Odyssey, I remember when Billy Currie spoke to me, the thing he loved about the Odyssey over the Minimoog was it had sliders rather than knobs so he could almost play heavy metal on a synthesizer, it was about player controllability…

I was curious to find out what the weapon of choice was for synth-funk bands in the 70s but one day, I stumbled across a video of THE GAP BAND and they had an ARP Pro-DGX. So I started looking into it and the reason why it was the weapon of choice was it had control features like polyphonic aftertouch which other synths didn’t have. A lot of synth basslines from the period had slurs between notes using ribbon controllers, that became the funky bass synth so that’s my ARP story.

Another card and it’s the EDP Wasp…

I love the Wasp but it’s completely unusable… it’s one of the most beautifully graphic designed synths, but it sounded irritating to me, a bit like its name! It was a bit like a toy, but not in a good way.

Two more cards, this is one you wanted, an EMS Synthi AKS…

Now you’re talking, I really want one of those. If anyone wants to distort my cultural development and sell me one at a reasonable price, I am definitely up for it. I want it as a piece of design but I can’t justify it for the price it’s going for these days. It’s a thing of immense beauty, what do you think?

There was one of these at the college studio which had the EMS Polysynthi and the Roland System 100 which was the synth I took to out of all of them… I never got on with the Synthi AKS because I couldn’t get my head around it, I just wanted to make sounds straight away which you could do with the System 100…

Yes, you’ve got to know what you’re doing, the Synthi can be difficult to get it into registration with a keyboard, it’s not a simple matter of plug and play at all, what with that matrix patch bay…

With the System 100, you could almost make something out of nothing, it was like no matter what you did with it, something happened and you could make it sound like what you wanted…

As it says in the manual, “there are no illegal connections…”

So how did you discover the Roland System 100 and make it your next purchase after the Korg 700s?

That’s not true actually, I bought the 700s and Ian bought the System 100 and sequencer at the same time. So those two and a tape machine became our tools to create demos in the early days. I learnt to use it and the System 100 is fantastic as a teaching tool, it’s so clearly laid out and easy to show what happens. When I teach my students on the MA Songwriting and Production about analogue synthesis, I’ve got a digital oscilloscope that I put on the end of the output and it shows the shape of the waveform, the tones are so pure.

But the story behind my System 100 is when I produced ‘I Say I Say I Say’ for ERASURE in 1993, I had been waxing lyrical about the System 100 as Ian had sold his. Vince had one of course and two days before Christmas, there was a knock on the door and there was a bunch of boxes outside. I was thinking “what’s this?” and Vince had bought me a complete System 100 with speakers and everything! I couldn’t believe my eyes, he had been saying to me that I needed to get back to pure electronic music. Apart from being an incredibly generous gesture, it was his way of changing my cultural development back again. It’s a beautiful story.

So what was the production dynamic like between you and Vince for ‘I Say I Say I Say’?

Here’s the story, I’d never met Vince or Andy before but I was a fan and I was contacted one day out of the blue from Mute Records saying Daniel Miller would like to speak with me. I was a big fan of THE NORMAL and SILICON TEENS so next thing I know, Daniel who I had never spoken to before asked if I would produce the next ERASURE record.

It turned out he didn’t realise I did productions and I said “I’ve done Tina Turner and Terence Trent D’Arby!”; Vince said the same thing after I met him in Amsterdam later. I laid out a methodology that I thought would work which was fundamentally old school. Vince just wanted someone to bounce off.

As I read it, him and Andy work remotely, that was certainly the case for ‘I Say I Say I Say’. It’s only when we laid toplines and backing vocals that Andy would come into the studio, most of the time, Vince was on his own. I think he got bored with being on his own and that’s why he wanted different producers. Now Vince KNOWS what he’s doing, production-wise and arrangement-wise but he needed someone as a means of randomising things a bit and to confirm that he’s moving in a different direction.

I remember with Vince when we were taking about this process and he agreed. He said “you know what Martyn, I am my own biggest fan, I just think everything I do is brilliant”… it was so disarmingly honest and it wasn’t anything to do with arrogance at all, he just knew he was the master of his craft because he had all the tools at his disposal to do exactly what he wanted, to create any sound he wanted, impersonate the effect or function of anything from guitars to bass guitars, woodwind to percussion to those aleatoric weird sounds, he could do it all at the drop of a hat. So all he needs is someone to help him organise it.

I contributed some arrangement ideas and record the vocals which he didn’t really want to get involved in, so I was the vocal specialist; I learnt about vocal stacking techniques from Greg Walsh who did ‘The Luxury Gap’, he worked with HEATWAVE and Geoff Emerick who worked with THE BEATLES. These are the dark arts that transform things from average into multi-national hits.

ERASURE had not really had that kind of producer before, in the past it was perhaps kind of more vibey electronics with Flood. There were all great producers, but it was a different approach. On one side I know all about electronics while on the other, I’m more like an old school traditional auteur producer if you like with a 70s vibe… that worked brilliantly with them I thought. Andy has since told me that as far as he’s concerned, the vocals and arrangements on ‘I Say I Say I Say’ are the best that ERASURE have ever done.

What’s your favourite track on ‘I Say I Say I Say’?

I do really like ‘Always’, we worked so hard on that. Right from the outset from the sketch before we fleshed it out and made it really something unique, it sounded like a hit. I was really thrilled when the album went to No1. They are such amazing people to work with, so creative and innovative, they are so self-effacing and open to suggestions, but they also know when the to stop; I know a lot of artists who constantly doubt themselves and aren’t happy even when it’s all done.

The story that sticks with me with Vince is when I went in the studio one day and he asked me what I thought of a track he did overnight. It sounded really good and I suggested 3 or 4 amendments in terms of sound to open out the spectral thing to make it sound bigger. I went to have a cup of tea and when I came back 20 minutes later, he had changed every single element and it was much better. It was everything! Can you imagine, the command that any person has of… he’s got like 50 synths that are all CV or gate connected in his studio, a series on MC4s that he programmes in with numbers and BBC Micro UMI which at that point he used to use as well plus Logic… this is a man who has complete command of his craft.

What are your thoughts on songwriting and production in modern synth music? This site has been criticised for not supporting enough new electronic music… I thought I was just being an old git thinking that songwriting is not as good as it used to be. But over lockdown, I listened to a lot of old stuff to lift me up and it seems to generally be true. Also with production and I don’t know if it’s because of software and DAWs, many artists are not crafting their sound anymore…

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, I can’t really add very much to that. There are many reasons for it, the workflow is entirely different now, it’s so quick to get something up to a reasonable standard… the temptation is to fall in love with that “reasonable standard”, the old thing would have been falling in love with a cassette demo. But you can take that reasonable standard and just put a topline on it and then its “OK, that’s done”. I think a lot of the time is because they don’t know…

When I teach songwriting at MA standard, there are some super talented individuals in traditional music terms but the vast majority of them who are in their 20s and don’t have the thematic or cultural context that our generation grew up with.

I love contemporary dance music and avant garde, but I’m against mediocrity. My general theory is if it doesn’t evoke any emotion in me, then I’m not that interested. If it’s exciting or people have a unique take on contemporary songwriting or instrumentals or whatever, I’m down with that. My worry is that everything is becoming more homogenised. I think a lot of it is due to following an economic model and that is a self-defeating mechanism ultimately because people chase the tail.

Honestly, some students of mine have told me “Well, I’ve watched lots of YouTube videos and I’ve done what it says and made a song with four chords and rotated it…” – they’re not doing it to be clever or lazy, they just DON’T KNOW! They’ve not studied great songwriting, they’re not paying attention to the stuff that we grew up with by default. We grew up through the main periods of some innovative artists like Kate Bush, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel etc who were always pushing the boundaries.

I’d like to think people like HEAVEN 17 and DEPECHE MODE were doing the same, but the whole landscape shifted in the late 80s towards marketing and then the whole music scene got steamrollered by the dance fraternity. I love dance music but a lot of it is a bit facile I find, it’s just too easy!

In my opinion, dance music ruined everything…

Here’s a story, when I first met Vince in 1992, he was living in a flat in Amsterdam above a small recording studio. There were these friends of his who we said hello to and what they did every day was do incremental variations on house music. At the end of the week, they would do some vinyl white labels and distribute them among the clubs in the city and see what ones were popular. Literally, they would change 10% of it and I was thinking, if this is the future of dance music, then I’m not interested.

Fortunately there are great artists at all points but what I’m saying is that economically, a lot of that oxygen was sucked up by the dance fraternity up to the 2000s, then it was given to the singer / songwriter cohorts who frankly, unless they are very good, are immensely dull. So we are here now, there is some innovative stuff going on, particularly in the hip-hop scene internationally, but it’s a problem.

I do honestly believe there is no shortage of exceptional interesting stuff as much as there ever was, it’s just harder to find, that’s all. Now there is 50 times more stuff out there than there was in the early 80s.

Recently I got a new iPad so as a test case, I thought I’d see if any idiot could knock up a reasonable sounding dance track on GarageBand… I managed it in about an hour!

I’ll tell you a funny story about GarageBand. When my son was 12 and in the Scouts, he thought he’d do some badges and one was “Creativity”. So I asked him what he was going to do and he said he was going to do something on GarageBand. He did it in 2 hours and it sounded as good as a lot of stuff that comes out now. But he was literally just doing “drag and drop” and I was thinking, this is not good. So I explained to him that if you have an easy way of doing something, the likelihood is that you’ll do that. The stuff that makes things special and engagement is the final 10%. But if you are not encouraged to get there, you don’t know what you don’t know. So that’s why we’re at where we’re at.

The final card Martyn, and it is a Multimoog, this came after the Minimoog when they were trying to be more mass market and cheaper…

Yeah, normally when that happens, the components they use aren’t as good so they don’t so sound as good and so on and so forth. Moogs generally sound great with a round bottom end, I’ve often used the virtual Moog Modular and I’ve got used to adjusting things on the screen… I’ve got f*cking hundreds of sounds…

Yes, this was something you talked to William Orbit and Richard X about in your podcast, there’s just far too many options these days… so when you make music now, how much of it is software versus hardware?

It’s mainly software. I do lots of stuff that’s not straightforward pop music like installations, effects and sound design so that isn’t really about performance in the sense of playing a keyboard, it’s more about assembling things that one finds interesting and engaging.

I’ve got a totally different perspective on all this stuff now since I’ve been doing Illustrious with Vince since 2000, I am much less precious about the ingredients, I am more interested in the content.

So what are your hopes and fears for the book, will there be a Volume2?

There will only be a Volume 2 if Volume1 sells *laughs*

It’s 130,000 words, that’s a lot. I’ve never written that much in my life, I never went to university so I didn’t do a dissertation or anything. It’s been really hard work but I can honestly say that I am happy with the book so that’s a tick. I’m happy with the design. I’m happy with the support I’m getting from the publishers Little Brown. I’ve recently had to read the audio book version that will bring it to life even more.

I hope to do a series of signing events and talks associated with the book. I never thought I’d ever had a physical book, it’s quite something to be an author. And I wrote every word apart from the other people’s contributions. There’s no ghost writing, if anybody doesn’t like it, that’s fine. Someone actually said to me “well, I can’t wait for this but I don’t know if I can deal with your lefty views”… err, that’s who I am mate! I’m not telling you what to think, so don’t buy it then, I don’t care! *laughs*

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its electronic thanks to Martyn Ware

‘Electronically Yours Vol 1’ by Martyn Ware is published by Little Brown as a hardback book, e-book and audio book, available from 25th August 2022 via the usual retailers, signed copies can be pre-ordered from https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/martyn-ware/electronically-yours-vol-1-my-autobiography/hardback-plus

The ‘Electronically Yours With Martyn Ware’ podcast can be listened to at https://anchor.fm/martyn-ware

https://www.heaven17.com/

https://martynwareofficial.co.uk/

https://twitter.com/martynware

https://www.instagram.com/waremartyn/

Vintage Synth Trumps is a card game by GForce that features 52 classic synthesizers

https://www.juno.co.uk/products/gforce-software-vintage-synth-trumps-2-playing/637937-01/

Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
12th July 2022, updated 20th November 2022

Vintage Synth Trumps with CIRCUIT3

18 June 2022 /

With every new album comes an adventure and for Dublin-based CIRCUIT3, his next one is in outer space.

The rocket-propelled vehicle of Peter Fitzpatrick, the Irishman delighted electronic music fans with a series of intimate live streamed shows from his home studio of cover versions and original works during lockdown. The performances were also an opportunity to road test new material and those songs now formally appear on the new CIRCUIT3 opus ‘Technology For The Youth’.

An ambitious work that presents a chronology of the space race and pirate radio in relation to the socio-political environment of today, the album has been launched with a single ‘Future Radio’ co-produced by Sean Barron, best known for his Wolfgang Flür collaboration ‘The Activity Of Sound’ as iEUROPEAN.

Heavily influenced by the classic era of synth before digital as well as its modern analogue variant, as on KRAFTWERK’s ‘Radio-Activity’ and OMD’s ‘Dazzle Ships’, ‘Technology For The Youth’ features conceptual instrumentals alongside more precise pop structures. That progression of movement toward the stars continues on the new single ‘Overview Effect’ featuring the vocals of Italian singer Alessia Turcato. It was inspired by the life imitating art scenario of William Shatner who played James T Kirk on ‘Star Trek’ to became oldest person in space at 90 onboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard sub-orbital space rocket.

With that in mind, ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK challenged CIRCUIT3 to a game of Vintage Synth Trumps while chatting about his latest musical journey into the galactic frontier…

Alright, the first card is a Korg Mono/Poly. Are you an owner of a Mono/Poly?

No. I’m curious about the Mono/Poly because it’s really a paraphonic synth rather than polyphonic, but that trick where you can cycle through each of the VCOs with the arpeggiator on is interesting. Each VCO can be set to a different waveform. My friend Brian O’Malley. better known to you as POLYDROID. has one and likes it. So yes I’m curious but not enough to get one and I’m unsure about the quality of the Behringer clone

Are you a fan of Korg gear anyway?

Yeah, I think they’re interesting but I just haven’t had the same relationship with them like I have with Roland and Sequential. I tried an MS10 in 1979 and it was absolutely bewildering to me. I couldn’t get a sound out of it. It was only the second synth I touched – the first was that Tandy RadioShack synth that Moog made for them. I have an MS20 on loan (from POLYDROID) which has these interesting harmonics coming off the filter and not the raw sound that I was expecting. I associate the MS20 with a more synthpunk filter. Maybe I need lessons.

I have a Poly 61M which is the factory MIDI version of the Poly 61 but have no room for it so that’s in storage until someone offers me a trade for it. It was released about the time of the Roland Junos coming out and I just found it difficult to get wild sounds out of it. I think that the filtering on it is just too polite and it needs a lot of treatment when you’re recording it, it didn’t really have any character and I was hoping for more. No wait… I had a Poly 800… yeah it’s coming back to me now! I had a Poly 800 which was rubbish. Just not good at all. Sounds like a plastic bag with bees in it.

I remember KID KASIO aka Nathan Cooper told me he found a Poly 800 in a skip, which he retrieved and put in his Fiction Studios…

He really should have left it there. I remember that at the time, I had a decision to make between the Poly 800 and the Juno 106.

The Juno 106 had a much larger 61 note key bed but the Poly 800 had a little sequencer in and that mattered at the time because I was thinking value for money. They were polysynths, of course I could only buy one of them. I’m so glad I went with the 106 in the end.

OK, here’s the next card and it is the Korg 700s which of course, your friend Martyn Ware had as his first synth and Daniel Miller…

There was a recent reissue of that, you turn it on and it’s instant Daniel Ware or Martyn Miller whichever way you want to describe it! It’s impossible not to sound like “THE HUMAN NORMAL”! *laughs*

I am tempted by it, but I really have to think carefully because there’s just it’s a space consideration now. And it has those funny buttons on it. I don’t know if I could get used to that. They look weird.

What you mean underneath the keyboard?

Yeah, that’s just to me having played lots of gigs that screams “they’re going to get broken!”. They’d get in the way where they are. Just like the old ARPs where the keys would protrude over the edge of the chassis and you’re thinking, no, something’s going to smack against that. So yeah, I have to try one. I’ve seen lots of really cool demos.

It looks really interesting. And I know Martyn got a copy of the reissue and he loves it. Martyn was using it at the ‘Reproduction / Travelogue’ shows, so look, if it’s still good enough for him, then it’s good enough for the rest of us.

Daniel Miller showed me his Korg 700s recently at the Robert Rental & Thomas Leer exhibition and he told me it still works… OK, the next card is a Roland Jupiter 6. But you have a Jupiter 4?

I do, I can’t afford a Jupiter 8 and I missed a Jupiter 6 two years ago. One came up for sale locally at a really low price and I missed it by 30 seconds. The seller said, “oh, there’s a small fault with it, but I can’t be bothered fixing it”. I’m like “you idiot, you absolute idiot!” and the person who bought it then sold it on for a nice profit.

It’s a good pad machine. I think there’s a lot of confusion about the concept of the Jupiter name on Roland synths and what it actually means. They are only related in the fact that the name Jupiter was used. In Roland’s world, Jupiter meant their then current flagship synth. It’s completely different beast to the Jupiter 4 and 8.

There is a there’s a module version of it, which apparently isn’t exactly like the keyboard version. The filter is different I think. I don’t think I would pay the current asking price for a Jupiter 6 because I don’t think it has enough character not in the same way that the 4 has, or just the majesty of the 8. I’ve got the likes of a Prophet 10, OB6 and a Juno 106 which covers a lot of that Jupiter 6 space in my opinion. I think it’s an interesting synth. I would have paid the asking price though… €1200 was a bit of a bargain.

So your Jupiter 4, how long have you had that now?

Hmm… it feels it feels like Martyn had it longer than I did because of the pandemic.

I think I got about 4 years ago, drove to the West of Ireland to a small little place called Athenry that people will know from a very famous folk song, ‘The Fields Of Athenry’. And quite appropriately, I drove in my electric car to pick up a Jupiter 4. How more Numan can you get?

When we arrived, the seller had cold feet at the last minute. And he was thinking of keeping it. I’m like “No ! Please don’t do this to me. I really want this instrument”. Later I tracked it down online. It had history. It had appeared on the Matrixsynth site.

When it had made its way from Japan to the UK, it said in an eBay listing that had a little bit of work done to it. It’s not entirely clear what had been done to it, because when I had it checked out here by our local synth tech, everything was original, nothing inside had been replaced and no servicing was required except replacing the memory back-up battery.

But it came with the original case, which is cool. It came with the music stand. And it came with the metal legs. Picture yourself around ‘78-‘79 and what Roland were trying to do with these instruments, they were targeting jobbing musicians playing cabaret clubs. So it would be used with say a CR78 which has a similar sort of fake wood finish on it, it would fit just nicely to one the side of the top panel of the Jupiter 4.

You could lock the arpeggiator synced to a CR78 so you’ll get both going together. Of course you could see it being used for the occasional solo, but the selling point is as a programmable polysynth with patch memory, because there’s an awful lot of monosynth type sounds possible with this. I was the first thing Martyn tried when he powered on my Jupiter: no chords!

Anyway what seems to have happened is that a bunch of people realised “oh we can do other things with these”, so that seemed to be that the origin of it being used in more interesting ways just like what happened with the Roland TB303 and TR808. Of course first thing I did when I got at home was open it up. I had to have a look inside. Had to date it. Had to see what was going on. There were hairs inside! This was very clearly a Roland technician’s hair, sitting still on the board! You know, half a century later. It’s brilliant. And I fell in love with it.

I have done a very simple MIDI enablement on it where I haven’t drilled into the chassis, there’s no way I’m drilling holes in this thing and I’ve managed to do it in such a way that the MIDI interface doesn’t interrupt anything and it just arpeggios for hours. It’s just gorgeous.

On your new album ‘Technology For The Youth’, there’s a track called ‘Jupiter City’?

The Jupiter features on a few tracks and is the only synth on ‘Jupiter City’. So Martyn Ware borrowed the Jupiter 4… for those who don’t know even though, I keep bragging about this cause it’s the coolest thing that could possibly have happened.

It was following an interview he did with you where you asked him about using the old synths for the ‘Travelogue’ and ‘Reproduction’ shows that they were planning pre-pandemic.

The question you put to Martyn was, well, aren’t you going to use the all since the original synths? And he answered something like “If we can find them and the challenge being they’re pretty expensive, we might have to hire something”. Martyn doesn’t have the original, even the System 100 he has was a gift from Vince Clarke in the 90s. I emailed him and said ”I’ve just read the interview with Chi, do you want to borrow my Jupiter 4?” And his first response was, well, absolutely. Thank you. Are you sure? And I said, yeah, I want to see these shows happen too. So I brought it over to London and we had lunch.

Then the bloody pandemic hit and it was sitting in his studio for a couple of years until they could reschedule the shows. Not that I minded because he’s been very kind with mentioning my music in interviews. He programmed the preset sounds for the shows and I heard it being used in some of the little instrumental pieces he was doing in his Electronically Yours podcast. The sound of it is instantly recognisable as soon as you hear it, you know when he’s using a System 100, and you know when he’s using a Jupiter 4.

At soundcheck for the Roundhouse gig when I was chatting with him and Glenn, they said one of the voices went out of tune. I reckon it was just the journey from Sheffield to London after the previous gig and you know the Roundhouse being a bit colder. Typical analogue synths right? But once I got it home, it was simply just a calibration that was needed.

Of course, he used it live and he saved a bunch of presets for the shows. Some of them are obvious. You’ll know, like ‘Dreams Of Leaving’. I said to them jokingly in the after show at the Roundhouse “I’m going to use those presets and do a track and call it ‘Jupiter City’”. So the sounds are Martyn’s with a few effects and my playing. All coming from the Jupiter 4.

The new CIRCUIT3 album is quite different from the previous two and it’s very ambitious in a conceptual kind of way. And I was just wondering why you headed that down this road? Were you influenced by similarly conceptual albums like ‘Radio-Activity’ by KRAFTWERK or ‘Dazzle Ships’ by OMD?

No, actually it was Hannah Peel, somebody I just admire so much. I’ve had a couple of chats with her and met her after gigs. I really admire Hannah Peel as an artist, and it was basically one of her albums ‘Mary Casio: Journey To Cassiopeia’ that got me thinking. I thought wow, that’s really interesting. And then you know the story where she referenced her grandmother’s dementia, and so on. All of the references in the album under this overarching concept really struck me.

Around about the time when I was just writing these songs I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I knew that on my next album, I wanted to stretch myself a little bit and thought to myself “I could try to do what Hannah has done” because I’ve never done anything like that before. All the Apollo anniversaries were happening and I had been fascinated as a kid about space travel. I started using working titles of different satellites and things like that just for a name on a recording session and the next thing I know, I realised oh wow, this is actually beginning to feel space-like and a concept was forming simply because of the subject matter

I was listening to TANGERINE DREAM type stuff which some people would call space rock, a lazy term, but all of that was just really influencing me at the time. I hadn’t thought about the OMD or KRAFTWERK thing, but yeah, I’ll happily sit alongside those.

There is one particular track ‘Valentina Fly’ about Valentina Tereshkova track that sort of evokes OMD?

Lots of people have said that. It’s hard to deny your influences; they come out, don’t they? And so I took that as a huge compliment when during the live stream shows I was doing during the pandemic a couple of people said “that’s real OMD”. Like I said, I didn’t hear it myself at first. I had to step back a bit to listen and now I can see what they’re saying.

It’s because of the string machine thing I suppose. I tried to strip it down, strip all of the arrangements on the album down as much as possible. I thought I was being clever with the song title. I originally called the song ‘Maiden Russia’ as in “maiden… made in” and then I realised, no, you’re going to have to explain that ridiculous wordplay to everybody. So I just retitled it ‘Valentina Fly’. Yes it’s about Valentina Tereshkova, who was the first woman in space. Rather unfortunate about her politics these days, but I’ll have to separate that from what she did.

When I wrote that song, it got me thinking about, well, what are you going to do with this collection of songs and what direction are you going with them? You can’t just write about the first man on the moon. Everybody’s done that. So I thought about these untold or lesser told stories. Everything from, Valentina Tereshkova, who some people will know about, but she’s not a celebrated as Yuri Gagarin and in some respects, what she achieved was much greater.

Even today, for a woman to do something that is taken for granted for a man, the bullsh*t they have to go through to get there is completely and conveniently forgotten, the barriers that are put in their way. And of course, the story of the first black African American in space… Ed Dwight who was supposed to be first but was screwed over by the government and NASA. While reading about this, I thought, “that’s what I’ll write about”.

That joint US Soviet Apollo Soyuz mission in 1975 which was particularly interesting because the astronauts and cosmonauts learnt to speak each other’s language for the mission…

Yeah, you look back and see when that happened and you think, “wow” because there was still that Cold War politic going on. But remember the scientists were working on this for a long time through the 1960s until that mission in 1975. All of the scientists who are working on it, all of the engineers are working on it while the politicians flipped and flopped on whatever arguments they were having. It showed so much promise for us all.

As a child looking at it, I was fascinated by the idea of a Soviet and American joint mission, I thought “Oh cool, they’re finally realising it’s so much better when you when you collaborate together and you’ve got joint ambition rather than it being a competition”. They just stopped which was hugely puzzling and as such a shame. You think about what we could be doing…

The Ed Dwight story covered on ‘Spacewalking’ is interesting because I only actually first heard of him during the 60th anniversary Apollo 11 celebrations. I was quite keen on following the space race when I was younger, but he’s literally been wiped from the history books. It’s was enlightening to see the context of how he was marginalised within NASA. And then other people that saw him as just symbolism and not a genuine candidate. It’s the kind of racist nonsense that we’re still having to deal with, in light of Black Lives Matter and everything else around that…

Yeah, I wrote the song around about the start of the Black Lives Matter movement becoming front and centre in our news. It was in our daily experience and news feed but it didn’t just happen then of course. This situation has been going on for forever and it just was brought to wider attention. During that time, I was reading a little bit more around Ed Dwight and I saw a clip of an interview that he did and it was incredibly moving because you realised the guy got screwed over. It was for such nonsense reasons, and it’s just heart-breaking. And then you think, well, hang on, you know, you’re seeing this and then you ask yourself “what other hidden history do you not know about?”

And that’s where representation matters, because those stories should be uncovered. I started seeing more and more around Black African Americans scientists who became involved in the shuttle missions etc, and the Black African American women who went to space and then the good things they did with their lives after that in the foundations they started and so on. I thought, well, these are much more interesting stories. Not to put down anything that Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin or any of the crews did. It doesn’t take away from what they did when you shine a light on what other people did.

I think it would be helpful for people like me, the middle age white guys, to understand what others had to overcome to do what they did, because it was not a level playing field and still isn’t a level playing field.

OK, I’m going to pull out another card, a Roland SH 101…

Ooh, I have one. I have an SH101 right over there behind me and it’s glorious in grey. I was so pleased when I got it because of a buddy of mine had one back in the 80s and we used it with a Juno 106, it has a little sequencer in it and I couldn’t figure out “why can’t I sequence the Juno 106?”… I was such an idiot because obviously the SH101 had a CV Gate and no MIDI.

Behringer have done a clone of it and Roland have done their own boutique version of it. I’ve tried both, sold both! What they are missing? Well, the Roland comes close, the Behringer is almost, but not quite. What really annoyed me about both of them was the interface. And there is a huge difference in the physical interface. On the SH101, the slider travel distance from top to bottom is much larger. It gives you a much more detailed level of control, especially when you do stuff with the filter and a millimetre can make all the difference and that was the big learning I got when I got my hands on the SH101 and realised “ah, OK I was right size does matter”.

This is why the other two, the Behringer clone and the Roland boutique didn’t satisfy me either because it didn’t quite sound right in case of the Behringer while the Roland boutique just felt too restricted those tiny little sliders. I sequence the 101 with CV and gate, I have a little MIDI interface for it. But to be honest, CV and gate is just so much more easy and straightforward to use. I’ve found it an absolute beast for just doing simple basslines and it’s great for that. And it’s also fun where if you’re running something like an ostinato step sequence going over and over, you can do little things to make it interesting for you like applying external modulation to the filter.

There’s a little modification I did to it where suddenly you just pull out the sub-oscillator or something and you can make the sound interesting without doing anything too radical. And it’s fun also for live work with an echo effect unit. I’ve used it on a couple of live stream shows while patching the sounds in real time and flying, it’s on the by the seat of my pants. Look Ma, no presets!!

OK, here’s another card and it’s a Yamaha CS-80, I don’t suppose you have had one of those?

No, I don’t nor anyone who I know. Someone in Dublin was several, apparently. It’s a mythical synth, isn’t it? It really is and the obvious point of reference is Vangelis. I don’t know enough about it because I’ve never ever touched one, much less seen one in the flesh. Obviously I’ve got some of the software versions. If I found one in a skip and I pulled it out, I would probably put my back out.

I think you would need your family to help you get that one out! *laughs*

Behringer said they’re going to try and do a reissue of it. And then of course, there’s the Deckard’s Dream clone which is a modern day interpretation of it which sounds quite glorious, but it’s pricey enough at $4000-5000. I’d want to be certain I really want it because you can achieve that ‘Blade Runner’ stuff with other synths. You’ll get pretty close.

You’ve launched this album with a single called ‘Future Radio’. So is there a future for radio?

It depends who’s running it, I think…

Let’s rephrase the question. You’re an independent artist who is selling enough to be able to fund another album and buy more synths, which is ultimately an achievement…

Yeah, that would be fair, CIRCUIT3 is self-funding…

So does radio play in a wider sense, matter for an artist like you anymore? Or is there other ways of selling your product now?

Yeah, I think for I think for any artist it my position or even an artist who maybe is having a little bit more success than me, by success, I mean just reaching a bigger audience, you have to use multiple tools. There’s no one answer. So that’s where radio still absolutely has a part to play. And when I talk about radio, I mean actual traditional radio as in FM radio as much as online because the internet is just another means of transmission.

I have found that where I’ve been able to get radio play, it has definitely benefited me because the better shows focus on the music they’re playing and it’s not about the presenter, it’s not about the station, it’s about the music they’re playing and they properly announce tracks to let people know this is who the artist is. They might even read out a link that will enable the listeners to go find out more info. That brings more fans into the relationship.

I found have stuff through traditional radio like BBC 6 Music that was being released by an Italo disco label. It played in the middle of the morning and I was like, “oh you don’t expect to hear this on 6 Music in the middle of the day” and I went straight to Bandcamp and snagged a couple of LPs.

Radio definitely has a part to play. But I think if an artist thinks that by just guaranteeing radio play on an online station that it’s going to somehow help them, I’ve got news for them, IT’S NOT! You really have to do ALL the PR and networking stuff, you have to play live whether that’s live stream or in physical venues or both. You also have to do things like go online, make little videos. You’ve got to create a much broader presence than you probably realise and that’s some of the stuff I’ve learned over the last few years.

So specifically the ‘Future Radio’ song, what’s it about?

The song… it’s a boy’s adventure tale.

Ah, like A-HA?

Yeah, it’s a little bit like that. It’s about me aged 9 or 10 years and my fascination with my space travel, I mean ‘Space 1999’ and science-fiction “this is going to be my future”. Plus, I was obsessed with pirate radio. If you think about the late 70s, all that great stuff that was in broadcast that you would only hear on pirate radio.

The first time I heard say, NEW MUSIK, it was a pirate radio station. The first time I heard any of the Giorgio Moroder material with Donna Summer was on a pirate radio station. You just didn’t hear it on the boring old grown up radio. And so that was key for me and stations kept popping up everywhere in Dublin. I fascinated by all of that.

So all of those memories went into a chat I was having with Brian McCloskey. On every album, Brian and I have co-written a song. Brian does really clever lyrics. So he sent them over and it was irresistible. I thought “oh, this is going to be a BUGGLES song”. And then, of course, I made the mistake of trying to record it like THE BUGGLES. And you can’t! I’m not Geoff Downes.

And you’ve not got a Yamaha CS80! *laughs*

No, no! But it was a starting point. I tell you one thing that did assist with what I was trying to do: create as many Trevor Horn whizzbang moments as possible. He talks about the ear candy that you have to have on a single. So there’s little bits and pieces popping in and out. I sent the track over to Sean Barron who people will know as iEUROPEAN who’s done stuff with Wolfgang Flür and was in EMPIRE STATE HUMAN. He’s a really clever producer and I explained to him what I’m trying to do with the track. So he did a bit of production and added a lot of these random little sounds. One off sounds that were a little bit of ear candy.

‘Future Radio’ is the most upbeat thing on the album and I put it out first because when people hear the album, they’ll see I’ve gone in a bit of a different direction. I didn’t want to lead with a radically different track from everything I’ve ever done. So this track is like a bridge between the last couple of albums and this one. It’s a fun song and I had great fun making the video for it going for a retro Space TV vibe in it.

You mentioned you heard NEW MUSIK on pirate radio, and their leader Tony Mansfield is a bit of an underrated guy, despite producing A-HA, NAKED EYES and obviously NEW MUSIK themselves. Isn’t it quite interesting that his aesthetic has ended up in the mainstream again under the guise of THE WEEKND?

I’ve heard some good stuff by THE WEEKND and I think it’s great. I’m not gonna complain if anybody is bringing that gorgeous sound to the mainstream. I do have to resist the temptation to not to be a grumpy old man and say “look kids you didn’t invent this”. It’s fine. I have reconciled myself with the fact that many people think they’ve discovered something that’s brand new and that’s part of the joy of being young and getting into music. I just hope that they’ll go back and rediscover the origins of all of this.

Imagine, hearing NEW MUSIK for the first time? I’m envious of anybody who gets to do that for the first time. I would love to see what they what they else they find when they discover who Tony Mansfield and all the stuff he’s done without the prejudice of the music press snobbery at the time. Just look at the stuff he did for CAPTAIN SENSIBLE like ‘Glad It’s All Over’, what a track. You listen to and just think, wow. I’m really hoping people rediscover this stuff, that would make me happy.

OK, another card Sir. And it is a Sequential Pro-One…

Oh I have a Pro-one and I’m so happy with it. It is of course the Vince Clarke sound. The Pro-One is hard to make a bad sound on. I defy anybody to get a Pro-One and just make it sound, you know, like a dying toothbrush. Not possible.

It’s great for bass…

It’s also great for atmospheric stuff, so there is one track that’s actually the digital B side to the ‘Future Radio’ single called ‘Kosmos 954’. It’s named after a satellite and that track features the Pro-One. I was doing the Vince Clarke trick when each note plays on the sequence, he will change the filter on various notes by using 2 sequences running in parallel so the second sequence is opening and closing the filter to different degrees changing the sound.

So I did it on a very slow track and I was doing some pretty extreme things with the filter where it was almost feeding back then pushing the Pro-One through a Strymon Big Sky reverb, which of course, then brings out all those gorgeous harmonics. It meant that on the track, I really only needed two synths because you’re getting such a rich soundscape. People overlook the Pro-One for ambient. The envelopes are so snappy and fast for bass. It’s the perfect instrument.

This album is 17 tracks of instrumentals and some pop songs, but also more obscure art pop. What are your hopes and fears for ‘Technology For The Youth’?

The biggest fear is that nobody will listen to it. My biggest hope is that when people have listened to it and it gets them to check out some of these stories, then I think I’ve really achieved something. I really hope though that people look into some of the back stories, whether it’s about the lost cosmonauts, whether it’s about Ed Dwight, whether it’s about Valentina Tereshkova, whether it’s about the Apollo Soyuz joint mission. I’m hoping people go and read about these things and enjoy it.

Go look up some of the names on the titles of the instrumental tracks, whether its animals that went to space or satellites that crashed into Canada or whatever – You will start finding out about all of the hidden history. Yeah, I’d love to sell lots of copies of it, I really hope it breaks even but I mostly hope lots of people hear it.

Talking about the animals that went into space, Laika the space dog was the first animal in space. I first heard about her at school but when you got older, you realise she didn’t come back, they didn’t tell us that at school did they?

No, they didn’t! They didn’t tell us a lot of things about what happened to the animals. In some places I know the French have a statue to one of their dogs. See, this is what happens, you start reading these stories and there’s a little bit of sadness, but now they have their own statue somewhere which is cool.

We were really cruel to these creatures and there’s always an argument to be made with any form of scientific research, do you think an animal is expendable? That’s an argument for another day. But it was a different time and we probably would not take that approach now.

OK, the final card is an EMS VCS3, introduced in 1969, the same year as Apollo 11…

Looking at it, without ever having had the opportunity to try one, you think that’s impenetrable. I’m curious to see if somebody’s going to clone or reissue it, isn’t the story of EMS really interesting as well?

Yeah, there’s several documentaries on EMS and they are absolutely fascinating. My first memory of seeing the VCS3 for the first time was Brian Eno, they showed a clip on a on a BBC2 synth special. I’d imagined him pulling this giant lever, but it wasn’t. It was a tiny little joystick sort of thing, him operating it looked amazing.

With ROXY MUSIC?

Yeah, I didn’t know what on earth he’s doing, it was sounding weird but you look back now, on the Old Grey Whistle Test clip of ‘Ladytron’ and there’s that spacey treatment at the end…

Yeah, it’s a very British synthesizer. It has that bakelite vibe off that doesn’t it?

It’s a Doctor Who type of synthesizer, isn’t it?

It definitely wouldn’t be out of place on the TARDIS. And you know, you can play battleships with it!

Yeah. Actually talking of music technology ending up on spaceships, you know the controls of an Oberheim DX ended up on the Starship Enterprise?

And an Eventide Harmonizer was on ‘Alien’…

‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’, it was an ARP 2500 that spoke to the aliens…

And the sound of R2-D2 was an ARP 2600… shall we stop there?

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its grateful thanks to Peter Fitzpatrick

‘Technology For The Youth’ is released by AnalogueTrash on 15th July 2022 on CD, digital and various coloured vinyl LP formats, pre-order from https://circuit3.bandcamp.com/

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Vintage Synth Trumps is a card game by GForce that features 52 classic synthesizers

https://www.juno.co.uk/products/gforce-software-vintage-synth-trumps-2-playing/637937-01/

Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
18th June 2022

HEAVEN 17 Reproduction + Travelogue Live at The Roundhouse

6 September 2021 /

Photo by Simon Helm

Having been mooted for several years and postponed twice, HEAVEN 17 finally delivered their 40th anniversary celebration of THE HUMAN LEAGUE albums ‘Reproduction’ and ‘Travelogue’.

“We’re not pretending we were reforming THE HUMAN LEAGUE, all the publicity states this is HEAVEN 17’s interpretation of those two albums” said Martyn Ware, “As you well know, I was the major writer on most of those tracks. I always felt they deserved a wider audience, hence why we’ve played a lot of those songs live with HEAVEN 17 anyway.” Although it was Fast Product that released the first version of ‘Being Boiled’ in June 1978,  Virgin Records, under the A&R directorship of Simon Draper, had the foresight to see the wider potential of THE HUMAN LEAGUE’s sound containing synthesizers and vocals only.

But how important are these two records in the development of pop music using synthesizers? Using the Roland System 100, Korg 700s, Roland Jupiter 4 and Korg 770, ‘Reproduction’ and ‘Travelogue’ are certainly up there with landmark British albums such as ‘Replicas’, ‘The Pleasure Principle’, ‘Metamatic’ and ‘Vienna’, while a case can definitely be made that they are on a par with international works such as ‘No1 In Heaven’ and ‘Die Mensch-Maschine’.

Former member of both THE HUMAN LEAGUE and HEAVEN 17 Ian Craig Marsh once imitated the deep voice of Seiko watches on an early demo and declared “THE HUMAN LEAGUE, one day all music will be made like this…” and it all turned out to be rather prophetic. Deputising tonight at The Roundhouse for the long absent Marsh, alongside Ware and HEAVEN 17 front man Glenn Gregory, was keyboardist Flo Sabeva, while acting as Director Of Visuals in place of Adrian Wright was Assorted iMaGes design director Malcolm Garrett.

Using a four screen ‘Reproduction’ of the album’s inner bag as the stage set, synths-wise, Ware had his Roland trusty V-Synth GT at his disposal alongside a vintage Roland System 100, mini-Korg 700s and a Jupiter 4 on loan from Irish synth artist CIRCUIT3. Meanwhile, Sabeva kept the tech up-to-date with her Fantom 6 and System 8 arsenal from Roland.

The aggressive synth-punk of ‘Almost Medieval’, naturally opened proceedings while the harrowing ‘Circus Of Death’ followed, both displaying their percussive System 100 dynamics. A rallying call to rebel against conformity, ‘The Path Of Least Resistance’ was as relevant as ever while fun came on ‘Blind Youth’, summing up another sad observation that could be applied today, especially with its known anti-Covid vaccine elements.

The Schaffel nursery rhyme of ‘Empire State Human still came over as the mighty hit it never was, illustrated by world monuments and the achievements of the US and Soviet space programmes. Using the System 100 for its lonely sequence, ‘Morale’ segued seamlessly into the ring modulated tick-tock of ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ with Gregory and Ware doing their familiar Righton Brothers duet, to convey the eerie soundtrack’s desolate emptiness.

As the fierce acceleration of ‘Zero As A Limit’ climaxed the ‘Reproduction’ section of the show, the ‘Travelogue’ part was introduced by the harsh screeching frequencies of ‘The Black Hit Of Space’ as it all went up another gear with this still entertainingly humorous Sci-Fi story about an infinite chart topper. Meanwhile, the minimal synth rendition of Mick Ronson’s ‘Only After Dark’ prompted an audience chantalong while the under-rated ‘Life Kills’ proved to be something of an electronic pop evergreen.

But it was all hush for the poignant prog synth of ‘Dreams Of Leaving’; with a narrative about the traumatic escape of refugees who then try to settle into a new home, the alignment of sad, happy, fast, slow with its uplifting pipe-pitched climax was proof that 40 years on, emotional responses can still come from the machines of Roland and her sisters.

For the instrumentals ‘Toyota City’ and Jeff Wayne’s ‘Gordon’s Gin’, Gregory took his place on a Sequential Prophet 6 but as backing singers Rachel Meadows Hayley and Hayley Williams joined in and danced to the vicious backbone of ‘Crow & A Baby’, it wasn’t difficult to imagine this number as a prototype of ‘The Sound Of The Crowd’; squinting from the balcony, it could even have looked like “Phil, Joanne and Susan” were on stage!

An epic synth reimagination of PARLIAMENT and FUNKADELIC, the reworked ‘Being Boiled 2.0’ with Phil Oakey’s surreal lyrics about the extermination of silk worms never sounded so glorious and further memories of the mature audience were triggered by the incongruous but effective use of slides featuring characters from Gerry Anderson’s iconic Supermarionation shows ‘Fireball XL5’, ‘Stingray’, ‘Thunderbirds’, ‘Joe 90’ and ‘Captain Scarlet’.

A dystopian song about the mechanisation of radio stations which inadvertently predicted the Spotify playlist, ‘WXJL Tonight’ closed the ‘Travelogue’ section with Gregory adding the tones of Neil Diamond to his delivery.

But the evening was not over yet as tracks from the companion ‘Holiday 80’ EP were aired. The stupendous ‘Marianne’ with its three part vocal counterpoint and multiple harmonies over its crashing rhythmic barrage was worth the ticket price along while Iggy Pop and David Bowie’s ‘Nightclubbing’ somehow got an even more sinister funereal treatment.

But then things went disco as ‘I Don’t Depend On You’, the 1979 that was released prior to ‘Reproduction’ under the alias of THE MEN, took its place in the set but importantly, highlighting how THE HUMAN LEAGUE might have mutated into how HEAVEN 17 eventually sounded even if there hadn’t been a split.

Photo by Chi Ming Lai

Ever the raconteur, Gregory jokingly threatened a performance of ‘Dare’ but settled on stories about the formation of THE HUMAN LEAGUE and HEAVEN 17. But an unexpected HEAVEN 17 encore reminded the sold-out crowd that we don’t need Fascists, especially that nasty little race traitor Ugly Patel and her scruffy bumbling posh boy mate! But ultimately, all anyone in life really desires is ‘Temptation’ with dimes in that hot slot!

Prior to these shows, THE HUMAN LEAGUE faithful inevitably questioned the validating of HEAVEN 17 performing these albums without Phil Oakey, but is ‘Fade To Grey’ any less valid sung by its co-writer Midge Ure than it is by the late VISAGE front man Steve Strange? By using many of the original synth sounds, this celebration of these two seminal albums was both authentic and appealing.

Sometimes celebrations can actually be more entertaining than modern day incarnations of an original act, as proven with DEPECHE MODE and their various tribute bands showing more spirit and respect for their legacy. At the end of the day, the stars of this evening were the songs themselves, a collection of pioneering electronic adventures that have been forgotten by the mainstream who largely think THE HUMAN LEAGUE appeared by magic with ‘Don’t You Want Me?’.

Those who want to see THE HUMAN LEAGUE performing the ‘Dare’ album can do so at the end of 2021. But for those who preferred to recall the excitement prevalent at the start of the Synth Britannia era, tonight at The Roundhouse was the place to be… the way it was in the past, a long long time ago!

‘Reproduction’ + ‘Travelogue’ were released by Virgin Records and are still available in the usual formats

https://www.heaven17.com/

https://www.facebook.com/heaven17official/

https://twitter.com/heaven17bef

https://www.instagram.com/heaven17official/

Text by Chi Ming Lai
Photos by Richard Price except where credited
6th September 2020

HEAVEN 17 Clouds Or Mountains?

28 March 2020 /


So what did HEAVEN 17 do on their first day of isolation?

Inspired by real life events happening right now, Glenn Gregory and Martyn Ware have presented a video for a new song ‘Clouds Or Mountains?’. However, keen HEAVEN 17 fans may have noticed that it sounds familiar.

‘Clouds Or Mountains?’ was previewed alongside ‘Pray’, ‘Illumination’, ‘Unseen’ and ‘Captured’ as part of a work-in-progress sampler for the long awaited new HEAVEN 17 album ‘Not For Public Broadcast’, available only to subscribers of the now-discontinued Bowers & Wilkins ‘Society Of Sound’ in 2017.

Martyn Ware told ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK recently: “The origins of this song started about three years ago as an instrumental I’d done – I sent it to Glenn sometime later, and he felt inspired to put a ‘scratch’ vocal to it – we both loved the result, so Glenn created a video for it last week for fun – and this is the result”.

Clocking in at nearly six and a half minutes, Ware’s sparse electronic soundscape provides an eerie backdrop for Glenn Gregory’s impassioned baritone with a delivery that Martyn Ware says is “Very Scott Walker / David Bowie”, concurring with ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s assessment. And as the pace heightens, there are haunting echoes of ‘Boy Child’ by the man born Scott Engel and ‘Sunday’ from the former David Jones’ ‘Heathen’ album.

No stranger to the art of the crooner, Glenn Gregory had said previously in 2014: “The way I sing anyway, people always used to say I sounded a bit like a crooner, that baritone type thing… it’s good to have that sensibility. It’s pop, not rock. I was never into The Stones, I don’t really get them. I’d much rather listen to Scott Walker or Anthony Newley.”

In the meantime, a new boxed ‘Another Big Idea: 1996-2015’ has just been released with the lavish CD edition compiling HEAVEN 17’s two reunion albums to date ‘Bigger Than America’ and Before/After’ with an unreleased instrumental album ‘Space Age Space Music’ plus assorted remixes, re-recordings and live material.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to HEAVEN 17

‘Another Big Idea: 1996-2015’ is released as a 9CD or 4LP boxed set by Edsel/Demon Records

https://www.heaven17.com/

https://www.facebook.com/heaven17official/

https://twitter.com/heaven17bef

https://www.instagram.com/heaven17official/

Text by Chi Ming Lai
28th March 2020

10 Years of ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK – STILL PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

16 March 2020 /

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK celebrates its tenth birthday and it really has been synthly the best.

At the HEAVEN 17 aftershow party for their triumphant gig at The Magna Science Park on 6th March 2010, following chats with Glenn Gregory, Martyn Ware, Paul Humphreys and Claudia Brücken, interview opportunities opened up. It was obvious there was gap waiting to be filled for a quality web publication that featured the best in new and classic electronic pop without having to lower itself to using the dreaded “80s” label.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK was it and became reality on 15th March 2010. Electronic pop music didn’t start in that Thatcher decade and certainly didn’t end there either. So there was even an editorial diktat which banned ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s writers from using the lazy”80s” term as a reference. Tellingly, several PR representatives said that one of the site’s main appeals was that it avoided the whole nostalgia bent that had been presented by both virtual and physical media.

At the time, kooky female fronted keyboard based pop like LA ROUX, LITTLE BOOTS, LADYHAWKE, LADY GAGA and MARINA & THE DIAMONDS were among those touted as being the future at the time. But it proved to be something of a red herring, as those acts evolved back into what they actually were, conventional pop acts. ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK preferred the sort of innovative synthpop as outlined in BBC4’s Synth Britannia documentary.

With the next generation of artists like MARSHEAUX, VILE ELECTRODES, VILLA NAH and MIRRORS more than fitting the bill, that ethos of featuring pop music using synthesizers stuck too.

Meanwhile, ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s portfolio expanded swiftly with key personalities such as Rusty Egan, Sarah Blackwood, Richard James Burgess, Warren Cann, Chris Payne, Thomas Dolby, John Foxx, Andy McCluskey, Neil Arthur, Alan Wilder, Mark Reeder, Gary Langan, Jori Hulkkonen, Howard Jones, Mira Aroyo, Sarah Nixey and Hannah Peel among those giving interviews to the site during its first two years.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK has always prided itself in asking the questions that have never usually been asked, but which fans want to know the answers to. And it was with this reputation for intelligent and well researched interviewing that in March 2011, the site was granted its biggest coup yet.

Speaking to Stephen Morris of the then-on hiatus NEW ORDER, the drummer cryptically hinted during the ensuing chat that Manchester’s finest would return by saying “I never say never really”.

And that is exactly what happened in Autumn of that year and the band have been there since, as popular as ever and still making great music with the release of ‘Music Complete’ in 2015.

Monday 21st March 2011 was an interesting day that partied like it was 1981 when it saw the release of albums by DURAN DURAN, THE HUMAN LEAGUE and JOHN FOXX & THE MATHS. Also in 2011, Mute Records celebrated their influential legacy with a weekender also at London’s Roundhouse which culminated in ERASURE, YAZOO and THE ASSEMBLY performing in the same set.

Despite the ‘Brilliant’ return of ULTRAVOX, 2012 paled in comparison after such a fruitful year and several acts who were featured probably would not have gained as much coverage in more competitive periods. With pressure from outsiders as to what was hot and what was not, this was the only time ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK felt it was obliged to support a domestic scene.

But realising acts like HURTS and STRANGERS were actually just jumping on an apparent synth bandwagon and possessing more style than substance, ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK decided to change tact and only featured acts it felt truly passionate about, even if it meant upsetting the wider synth community. The reasoning being that just because a band uses a synthesizer doesn’t mean it is good.

During this time, MIRRORS sadly disbanded while VILLA NAH mutated into SIN COS TAN. But the year did see the launch of CHVRCHES who stood out from the crowd with their opening gambit ‘Lies’.

With their Taylor Swift gone electro template, Lauren Mayberry and Co managed to engage an audience who didn’t know or care what a Moog Voyager was, to listen to synthpop!

2013 turned out to be one of the best years for electronic pop since its Synth Britannia heyday. What ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK achieved during this year would take up a whole article in itself… there were high profile interviews with Alison Moyet, Gary Numan and Karl Bartos while OMD released the album of the decade in ‘English Electric’. PET SHOP BOYS made up for their ‘Elysium’ misstep with ‘Electric’ while there was finally a third volume in BEF’s ‘Music Of Quality & Distinction’ covers series.

Although 2014 started tremendously with ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK being invited to meet Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür in Cologne, the year suffered next to the quality of 2013. The interviews continued, particularly with key figures from the Synth Britannia era including Midge Ure and the often forgotten man of the period Jo Callis who was a key member of THE HUMAN LEAGUE during their imperial phase.

But the year saw grandeurs of delusion at their highest. There was the clueless Alt-Fest debacle which saw the organisers play Fantasy Festival with no cash to underwrite the infrastructure to enable it to actually happen!

Sadly today, there are still egotistic chancers organising events with zero budget and the money from ticket sales being fleeced to fund their holidays. But these artificial factors are rarely considered and so long as there are lower league artists desperate to play for nowt and a misguided enhancement in profile that is often on a platform that provides minimal exposure anyway, then the confidence tricks will continue.

2015 saw the local emergence of Rodney Cromwell and Gwenno, while the majestic Swedish duo KITE proved that they were the best synth act in Europe with the ‘VI’ EP and their impressive live show. It was also the year when ERASURE front man Andy Bell gave his first interview to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK to offer some revealing insights.

Making something of a comeback after a recorded absence of nearly eight years, Jean-Michel Jarre presented his ambitious two volume ‘Electronica’ project which saw collaborations with a varied pool of musicians including Pete Townsend, Lang Lang, John Carpenter, Vince Clarke, Hans Zimmer, Cyndi Lauper, Sebastien Tellier and Gary Numan.

VILLA NAH returned in 2016, as did YELLO with Fifi Rong as one of their guest vocalists while APOPTYGMA BERZERK went instrumental and entered the ‘Exit Popularity Contest’. Riding on the profile generated from their ‘A Broken Frame’ covers album, MARSHEAUX released their biggest-selling long player to date, a two city concept in ‘Ath.Lon’. This was also the year that ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK first became acquainted with the analogue synthesizer heaven of Johan Baeckström, a modern day Vince Clarke if ever there was one.

2017 saw a bumper crop of great albums from the likes of I SPEAK MACHINE, LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, SOULWAX, IAMX, GOLDFRAPP and DAILY PLANET, while veterans such as Alison Moyet and Gary Numan produced their best work of the 21st Century.

However DEPECHE MODE unleashed their most dire record yet in ‘Spirit’, a dreary exercise in faux activism bereft of tunes. Salt was rubbed into the wound when they merely plonked an underwhelming arena show into a stadium for their summer London show. The trend was to continue later in 2019 as DEPECHE MODE just plonked 14 albums into a boxed set, while OMD offered an album of quality unreleased material in their ‘Souvenir’ package.

And with DEPECHE MODE’s sad descent into a third rate pseudo-rock combo during the last 15 years to appease that ghastly mainstream American institution called The Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame with guitars and drums, Dave Gahan in particular with his ungrateful dismissal of the pioneering synth-based material with which he made his fortune with, now has what he has always coveted.

And don’t get ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK started on the 2019 Moog Innovation Award being given to Martin Gore, a real insult to true synth pioneers if ever there was one, including Daniel Miller, Vince Clarke and Alan Wilder, the three men who actually did the electronic donkey work on those imperial phase DEPECHE MODE albums! Gore may have been a very good songwriter during that time, but a synth innovator? Oh come on!?!

With regards Synth Britannia veterans, new albums in 2017 from Richard Barbieri and Steve Jansen saw a revived interest in JAPAN, the band with which they made their name. Despite releasing their final album ‘Tin Drum’ in 1981, as a later conversation with one-time guitarist Rob Dean proved, cumulatively from related article views, JAPAN became the most popular act on ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK.

The return of SOFT CELL dominated 2018 with a lavish boxed set that was not just comprised of previously released long players, new songs, new books, a BBC documentary and a spectacular farewell show at London’s O2 Arena.

Meanwhile, adopting a much lower profile were LADYTRON with their comeback and an eventual eponymous sixth album. A Non Stop Electronic Cabaret saw Canadian veterans RATIONAL YOUTH play their first ever UK gig alongside PAGE and PSYCHE, but coming out of Brooklyn to tour with ERASURE was REED & CAROLINE.

EMIKA was ‘Falling In Love With Sadness’ and Swedish songstress IONNALEE showcased one of the best value-for-money live presentations in town, with a show that surreal imagined Kate Bush at a rave!

But from China came STOLEN, one of the most exciting bands in years who were then later rewarded for their graft with a European tour opening for NEW ORDER.

2019 was the year when synthwave graduates Dana Jean Phoenix and Ollie Wride were coming into their own as live performers, while electronic disco maestro Giorgio Moroder embarked on a concert tour for the first time with his songs being the true stars of the show.

Gary Daly of CHINA CRISIS gave his first interview to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK to tie in with his solo album ‘Gone From Here’, while a pub lunch with Mark White and Stephen Singleton mutated into an extensive chat about their days in ABC. Lloyd Cole adopted a more synthesized template on ‘Guessworks’ and Britpop went synth as GENEVA’s Andrew Montgomery formed US with Leo Josefsson of Swedish trio LOWE.

If ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK does have a proudest achievement in its first ten years, then it is giving extensive early coverage to VILLA NAH, MIRRORS, VILE ELECTRODES, METROLAND, TINY MAGNETIC PETS and SOFTWAVE, six acts who were later invited to open on tour for OMD. Partly because of this success, some of those who were less talented felt aggrieved despite feeling an entitlement to be featured. If an act is good enough, the fact that ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK hasn’t featured them should not matter, especially as other electronic and synth blogs are available. After taking its eye of the ball once before in 2012, ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK maintained a trust of its own gut instinct.

Meanwhile, its stance has been tested by those shouting loudest who instantly champion what they perceive as the next big thing like sheep, without really looking ahead at a wider picture. However, TRAVIS on VSTs is just not ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s thing frankly…

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s participation in the annual ELECTRI_CITY_CONFERENCE in Düsseldorf for on-stage interviews with Rusty Egan, Chris Payne, Mark Reeder and Zeus B Held was another high profile engagement to be proud of. Then there were six live events and five rounds of hosting ‘An Audience with Rusty Egan’ in one of the most unenviable but highly entertaining refereeing assignments in music!

Other highlights over the last ten years have included ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s 2015 career retrospective on German trio CAMOUFLAGE being edited and used as booklet notes for the Universal Music sanctioned compilation CD ‘The Singles’.

As 2020 settles in, highly regarded artists within the electronic community continue to engage with ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK. Neil Arthur recently gave his seventh interview as BLANCMANGE and his tenth interview overall, taking into account his side projects FADER and NEAR FUTURE. Not far behind, Martyn Ware has also been a regular interviewee having spoken to the site on six occasions while Paul Humphreys has been interviewed no less than five times.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK is still pushing the envelope, continuing to reflect the interests of people who love the Synth Britannia era and have a desire to hear new music seeded from that ilk. With artists like ANI GLASS, IMI, KNIGHT$, NINA, MECHA MAIKO, GEISTE and PLASMIC among those on the cusp of a wider breakthrough, there is still more excellent music still to be created, discovered and savoured.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its sincerest thanks to everyone who has taken the time read any article on the site over the last ten years, it is greatly appreciated.

Text by Chi Ming Lai
Image Design by Volker Maass
16th March 2020, updated 29th January 2021

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