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| 'Trying to connect you, caller.' An early Moog synthesiser, or telephone exchange... |
Sometime
in the summer of 1972, an unsual record appeared in the UK pop
charts. Weirdly electronic, with an insistent, pulsing rhythm, it
didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard before, certainly
not in the form of a pop single. To the best of my knowledge, it was
the first example of synthesiser-driven electronic pop to chart in
the UK, and it was the forerunner of things to come.
Popcorn
had, in fact, been around since 1969, when it first appeared on an
album entitled Music to Moog By, recorded by one Gershon
Kingsley. The better-known chart single version was recorded in 1972
by Stan Free, a member of Kingsley’s band, with his own outfit, Hot
Butter. Thanks in no small part to its new sound, the single became a
significant worldwide hit that same year. Although it sounded like a
novelty record and was, in fact, a one-hit wonder, I had a sneaking
suspicion that this might turn out to be the sound of the future.
Synthesisers
had been making very slow inroads into the pop music field since the
late ’60s, the revolutionary Moog (pronounced ‘mogue’ by those
in the know) leading the field since its demonstration at the
Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Even the Beatles had used one,
although its presence on Abbey Road was as texture rather than
a prominent lead instrument. They weren’t the first either, having been pipped to the post by the Monkees (on their Pisces,
Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones album), the Byrds, and Simon and
Garfunkel. It has to be said that the Monkees’ use of the
instrument was fairly chaotic and random, providing a kind of
electronic aural scribble across their songs Daily Nightly and
Star Collector; and Roger McGuinn had managed to lend it a
doom-laden quality in his frankly fairly horrible offering Space
Odyssey, a kind of science fiction sea-shanty, which had wisely
been omitted from the original release of the Notorious Byrd
Brothers album (finally making its appearance on a CD reissue).
At
the time of Popcorn’s release, none of these efforts was
known to me. As far as I was concerned, electronic pop began in 1972.
But I had already heard electronic music elsewhere. Pre-dating the
invention of the synth, Dr. Who’s distinctive theme was
probably the best-known example of electronic music, owing its origin
to the Heath-Robinsonesque aural experimentation of Delia Derbyshire
and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Contrasting this innovative piece,
Dr. Who’s early incidental music was pretty dreadful, as
well as inconsistent, with some items sounding like the results of a
troop of chimpanzees let loose with a load of kitchen utensils. By
the 1970s, a more consistent approach had emerged, with Dudley
Simpson’s synth cues becoming a recognisable part of the programme.
The instrument may have been innovative, but Simpson’s incidental
cues were for the most part quite conventional (the best item was
probably the heavily vibrato’d three-note sting that usually
accompanied each revelation of The Master).
Another
early example of an electronic score accompanied Roberta Leigh’s
Space Patrol, whose composer FC Judd was a maverick
experimenter, pursuing similar lines to pop producer Joe Meek. In the
case of Space Patrol’s soundtrack, it was hard to draw the
line between which of the blips and warbles were intended as sound
effects, and which were meant as music. In an effort to avoid music
copyright issues, the series’ credits referred to this aural
collage as ‘electronics’, and made no mention at all of music.
Elsewhere
on television, Tomorrow’s World offered occasional
demonstrations of synthesisers, and by the time of Popcorn’s
appearance in the charts it was clear that, in the future, pop groups
would move away from the guitar-heavy lineup that had dominated the
scene for over a decade. But when the expected rush of Popcorn
clones failed to materialise, I began to think it might all have been
a nine-day wonder. Guitars remained the instrument of choice for the
glam bands of the early ‘70s, and it took until the middle of the
decade for another synth-driven hit to make a chart breakthrough.
That single was Kraftwerk’s Autobahn.
Around
the time of its release, Kraftwerk formed the subject of another
piece on Tomorrow’s World, in which they spoke of such
innovations as being able to play music using the lapels of their
suits. I may have found favour with the band’s ascetic appearance,
but I can’t say I was a fan of the sounds they were making. Nor,
indeed, of any electronic music. Since my first exposure to the
phenomenon, via the aforementioned TV series, I’d found the sound
of synthesised music faintly repelling, for reasons I still can’t
quite explain.
Both
Dr. Who and Space Patrol were programmes that posessed
a scary, other-worldly atmosphere, of which a significant component
was the music: and this reaction may go some way to explain my later
aversion to synth-pop; but it was Dudley Simpson’s efforts on Dr.
Who that really turned me off. For some reason, I really disliked
the reedy, resonant tones that Simpson coaxed out of his equipment,
and part of me felt that, in a fundamental way, he was cheating. His
music wasn’t a patch on that of Barry Gray, over in the Anderson
camp, who not only wrote better themes, but scored them for a full
orchestra, while Simpson was, seemingly, doing the whole lot himself
on a single keyboard. By the age of eight or nine, I knew that I
liked the sound of a full orchestra, with its wide palette of tone
and colour, and had already discovered items like Holst’s The
Planets suite (a clear influence on the work of Barry Gray).
Next to that, a single, monophonic synth sounded as dramatic as someone humming
through a comb-and-paper.
My
opinion wasn’t altered by any of the coming tide of synth-driven
pop music: in 1977, simultaneously on the chart, we had Space’s
Magic Fly – a song I dislike as much today as when I first
heard it – and Jean-Michel Jarre’s genre-defining Oxygene.
By this time, I knew exactly what it was about the sound of the
synthesiser that I didn’t like. It simply sounded too unreal. The
ghostly tones of Oxygene sounded like the aural equivalent of
an airbrush: nebulous and hard to define. Real music, even that of an
electric guitar, came from the sound of air being moved around, and
from the resonant properties of wood, metal and calfskin. Synth music
was the sound of circuits being engaged, and it didn’t engage me at
all. Prog-rock bands like ELP or Yes, who made heavy use of
synthesisers definitely didn’t interest me, and their music
seemed pompous, over-inflated, self-important.
Luckily,
all this nonsense was about to be brought to a grinding halt by the
intervention of punk. The back-to-basics ethos of punk saw a return
to the traditional band line-up of guitar/bass/drums, and if a
keyboard was employed anywhere, it would be in the form of some retro
item like a Vox Continental organ. But you can’t keep a bad thing
down, and by the end of the decade, the synth was starting to shake
off its dodgy prog associations as bands like The Human League began
to emerge.
Now
the tide turned completely. During the early to mid ’80s, you
couldn’t move for synth-pop, but I didn’t think much of any of
its prime exponents, and I still didn't warm to the sound of the instrument (which, in its most recognisable form – such as Van Halen's Jump – was typically buzzy, bright and shouty, like a fake brass section). I still managed to buy my fair share of synth-pop singles, but it was hard
to avoid doing so, with synths dominating the pop charts to such an
extent. Meanwhile, guitar pop had migrated to the fringes of the
music scene where it continued in semi-underground form as indie,
with only occasional breakthrough acts like the Smiths serving to
remind the wider pop-buying community that there were still guitar
heroes out there if you knew where to look for them.
For
me, the perfect marriage of synth and guitar pop came courtesy of the
short-lived combo New Muzik, whose singles Living by Numbers
and This World of Water managed to achieve an almost unique
balance of acoustic and synthetic sounds: Tony Mansfield’s strummed
12-string guitar is as vital a component in the mix as the wash of
synths adding colour and texture in the background; and the synth
sounds were innovative and well-chosen. Somewhat later, The Blue Nile
pulled off a similar feat, with their extensively synthetic
compositions like Tinseltown in the Rain and A Walk Across
the Rooftops managing to steer well clear of the usual synth-pop
clichés. Even so, it took me the best part of ten years to discover
them, such was my antipathy to anyone weilding a synth in anger.
By
the 1980s, I owned and played musical instruments myself, but I
wouldn’t give a synth house room. Neither would I contemplate using
the synth’s cheating bedfellow, the sequencer, which was
responsible for a lot of what passed for virtuoso playing on pop
singles. Over one Christmas, I had the loan of a Yamaha DX7
synthesiser, a keyboard which included dozens of pre-set tones (the
traditional synth required the user to create their own tones using a
patch bay resembling a telephone exchange, through which various tone
and waveform generators could be combined). It was certainly fun to
mess around with, and many of the tones were instantly recognisable
(virtually the entire backing track of Band Aid’s Do They Know
It’s Christmas was generated on a DX7). But for the time being,
I passed. In fact, it wasn’t until around ten years ago that I
finally got round to purchasing a synth, at which time I discovered
that the biggest problem with the devices is not how to use them, but
how not to use them…
The
average synth offers hundreds of tones and colours, ranging from the
conventional (an electric piano or organ) to the utterly insane. The
cheap Akai model I bought includes pre-sets that sound like they’ve
been flown in from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, alongside
others that are straight emulations of Rick Wakeman and other
well-known exponents. With so many sounds available, it’s easy to
go mad. It’s also very, very hard to find exactly the right sound
for a specific application, which is where the traditional, patch-bay
synth wins out, allowing the user to start from scratch. One can
easily spend hours ‘auditioning’ different sounds for a short
piece in a recording. After owning a synth for a few months, I could
more readily appreciate how a band like the Blue Nile were able to
spend over a year recording an album and still not deem it fit to
release…
I
also began to realise how many records include synthesisers without
them being in any way obvious. Sometimes, a low-level synth ‘bed’
forms a kind of aural glue that fills in the gaps in a recording in a
manner that the listener can be completely unaware of. Take it away,
and you’d notice. Synths are good at filling in missing mid-range
frequencies that aren’t present in the very ‘toppy’ sounds of
guitar and piano, and without them, many modern recordings would
sound hollow and echoey, not unlike recordings from the 1960s (when
the usual solution was to use compression and limiting to ‘push’
the sounds to their limits, reducing the amount of audible ‘space’
on a record).
It
took a long while, but I came round to synths in the end... just
don’t ever expect me to start a Kraftwerk tribute band.
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