Synth Britannia

I remember watching Tubeway Army on Top Of The Pops in 1979 and telling my friend that we were watching the future of music. He disagreed, being more in awe of Rush, Boston and Lynyrd Skynyrd, though quite how they related to growing up in Croydon I couldn't work out.

Meanwhile, up in Sheffield, the Human League and to a lesser extent Cabaret Voltaire, were wondering who this upstart Gary Numan was and how come he was selling loads more records than they were. The rock press hated him even more - it was all very well for Kraftwerk, as a bunch of Germans, to play like crisp, sterile machines, but it wasn't really music was it? After all, as Andy McCluskey from OMD was tired of being told, anyone could make music with machines couldn't they? They just played by themselves, didn't they?

If they did, nobody told Vince Clarke, who would gladly have spent 24 hrs a day working in the studio if he could have. "Like a kid in a sweetshop," he told us on last night's magnificent Synth Britannia on BBC Four, which took us from Kraftwerk and Daniel Miller, founder of Mute Records, who recorded "Warm Leatherette" as The Normal in 1978, up to New Order's "Blue Monday" (1983) and Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder's "Together in Electric Dreams" in 1984. Thankfully, we only got a few seconds of Howard Jones and The Thompson Twins, by which time the synth had gone well and truly mainstream and a bit naff.

Arguably, we'd have to wait for 808 State later in the decade, to reignite the electronic fire, although as a producer, Trevor Horn was responsible for setting a few benchmarks. Somewhere in the house, I've got a nice letter from Richard Norris, who with Dave Ball of Soft Cell, played together in The Grid and invited us - Earth Beat Synphonic - to play a gig with 808 State, which never happened.

That's quite enough name dropping.