“It seems that over the last year or two especially there has been a rise in anti-immigration sloganeering and propaganda. For several reasons this seems rather stupid, and what is more disappointing is the way that so many people in politics and the media who should know better have largely not challenged this view. Obviously times are hard and the economy is not going well, and it seems the old story of ‘blame the last ones in’ rather than looking towards real solutions has become popular. It’s a kind of superstitious nonsense akin to witch burning. Instead of hearing about the NHS being staffed and kept going by conscientious hard workers from other parts of the world, we’re told that it’s groaning under the strain of newcomers. It seems obvious that immigration is being used as a scapegoat for all the problems caused by greed, ignorance, bad luck and a lack of planning.
“It would be easy to get angry at all the fools and the sanitised racism, but i would prefer myself to stick to the attitude of ‘Waving Flags’. This is a positive song of pro-immigration, an embracing of different cultures and a welcoming of tolerance, a quality lacking these days and one which we could do with a lot more of in the UK.
“One of the good things about being in a band is the amount of travelling we do and the chance to meet all sorts of people from different backgrounds and countries. it was this adventuring through Europe that inspired ‘Waving Flags’, a wanting to be a part of it and not hiding in the corner separate to it all. The sentiment of the song is a genuine one, literally welcoming people in to help improve the standards of this island and wanting this feeling to be reciprocated back to us when we travel to other places, whether temporarily or permanently.
“I myself have a lot of faith that the majority of people are intelligent and open-minded. It seems a shame that the idiots are being given too much air time and that many mainstream politicians are so worried about losing a vote that they’ll fall for any old kind of peer pressure rather than stand up for sensible values and gain votes such as my own.
“I’m not really a political ranter but I do agree with the sentiment behind this ‘Waving Flags’ movement, although it seems an unlikely to succeed. It’s a pleasant thing, much like the three legged horses with beautiful names we sometimes go on about. I think I’ll have a pint of Guinness and toast the whole thing good luck.”
- Scott ‘Yan’ Wilkinson, British Sea Power (quoted in The Quietus)
“From the Bronx to the Lower East Side to Brooklyn, there had been a systematic ghetto-isation of these areas,” says Lydia Lunch, because ultimately, the bankers and real estate agents knew that if they broke it down to rubble, they could come back five or six years later with rents that were four or five or six times as high. Mike Davis wrote this incredible book, Dead Cities, about what they did to New York and the Bronx to make it what it was, so it could become what it is now, which is Disneyland.”
In clearing away all the vagrants and selling off all the public spaces, in disinfecting its neighbourhoods of the vibrant artistic communities that gathered in its murky corners, Giuliani was killing the soul of the city, reducing it to lucrative office space.
- Stevie Chick, Psychic Confusion: The Sonic Youth Story
“Margaret Thatcher was the most divisive and destructive Prime Minister of modern times.
Mass Unemployment, factory closures, communities destroyed – this is her legacy. She was a fighter and her enemy was the British working class. Her victories were aided by the politically corrupt leaders of the Labour Party and of many Trades Unions. It is because of policies begun by her that we are in this mess today.
Other prime ministers have followed her path, notably Tony Blair. She was the organ grinder, he was the monkey.
Remember she called Mandela a terrorist and took tea with the torturer and murderer Pinochet.
How should we honour her? Let’s privatise her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It’s what she would have wanted.”
“Today the old delusions of grandeur are being replaced by a more sober sense of what individual contries can achieve alone. As small states integrate themselves in a wider world, and even the largest learn how much they need their neighbours’ help to tackle the problems that face them all, the stringently patrolled and narrow-minded conception of history which they once nurtured and which gave them a kind of justification starts to look less plausible and less necessary. Other futures may require other pasts.”
Still divided between East and West, socialism and democracy, Berlin retained great fascination throughout the late seventies and early eighties. In pop music terms the city was frequently name-dropped by groups as disparate as London’s Japan, Montreal’s Rational Youth, Műnster’s Alphaville and Glasgow’s Simple Minds.
The latter’s second album Real to Real Cacaphony (1979) heralded a shift from the Roxy Music-style band of debut Life in a Day (1979) to one with a broader musical palette, clearly influenced by NEU! and Kraftwerk; propulsive tracks like Changeling and Factory especially showcase Simple Minds’ fusing of rock and electronic sound. During a period in which they promoted themselves as a ‘European band’, the group made three more synth-heavy albums, starting with 1980′s Empires and Dance.
“In Central Europe men are marching…” proclaimed Jim Kerr on Empire and Dance‘s lead single I Travel, having just been inspired by touring said region. Hitherto, frontman Kerr had under-estimated the allure and power of the West-East divide, suspecting a visit to Berlin at this time would prove no more than a tacky letdown. Instead the ensuing tour into lost Mitteleuropa, embarked upon with some reluctance, was a watershed, shaping Simple Minds’ approach and output for several years.
“We were driving through East Germany, it was like going from a colour picture into black and white, no neon lights for 60 miles,” Kerr recounted to the NME in 1980. “Just before you go into the western sector of Berlin, there are these Russian tanks, troops and missiles everywhere. Now, how can you not be affected by something like that?”
How, indeed? But then Kerr’s hesitation and subsequent surprise serves to highlight the ignorance and confusion surrounding Central and Eastern Europe in the late seventies; this despite the by-then established cultural transfer between the West and West Berlin which Kerr and his band partook in.
Simple Minds baffled UK journalists who didn’t know what to make of the group’s overt, stated European-ness. Was immersion in all things continental a clichéd gimmick, naive fantasy or symptomatic of a superiority complex? For its part, the group, led by the eminently quotable Kerr, seemingly spent much of their time outside the studio justifying their lyrics to the media. In 1980 an ’81 alone, readers of the music press were treated to a succession of illuminating interviews discussing the rights and wrongs of the Cold War as influence.
However, the Record Mirror‘s Mark Cooper suggested, “The Minds are in danger of becoming travelling name-droppers who rely on a mystique borrowed from ‘abroad’ to manufacture a sense of mystery and power that has no depth.”
In the same article, Kerr defended such accusations with gusto:
“When you’re in a foreign country you have a lot of freedom because you can’t really understand how that country works from the inside. As a result you feel free enough to say and be what and whom you want; and because people don’t know who you are or where you’re coming from, they’ll believe you are who you say you are. Your cultural baggage is left behind, it’s almost as if you’ve been born again.”
Kerr also set out his case to Melody Maker:
“Last year we spent a full year in Europe and when we came back, we’d got a totally different picture of Britain; found the attitudes, in Glasgow especially, really kinda frightening. All these new-Nazi movements and things, not really with depth but people getting involved from some romantic point of view.”
Arguably, by focusing so sharply on Europe, Simple Minds had (and belying their name) were seeking something deeper, more universal, than mere futurism. In a Sounds‘ interview, Kerr admitted that “singing songs about Europe can be so crass unless you do it right” but also that the group could’ve made their work a lot more direct by adopting a straight-out futurist approach.
“Look, with the electronic thing you can switch the synthesizer on and get really appealing tunes, to which you could sing typical science fiction lyrics and things like that,” Kerr said. “The record company would have loved it if we chose something so direct…”
Thus Kerr picked up a similar theme to that Simple Minds’ guitarist Charlie Burchill alluded to when speaking to the NME: “We could have all worn the same futuristic clothes, splashed wires and capacitors across the album cover and all that…”
Meanwhile, Sounds‘ writer John Gill seemed to be tuning into the group’s wavelength: “They saw Ulrike Meinhof getting a cop bullet in the back of the head while the rest could only see transvestite clubs and the too thrilling decadence of Berlin.”
*****
In early 1981 Ultravox reached number two in the UK singles chart with Vienna, title track to the group’s first post-John Foxx album. New frontman Midge Ure, still riding high on the success of Visage’s equally Euro-paean Fade to Grey, brought to Ultravox an overtly commercial sensibility to its existing thematic fascinations.
Two years previous with Systems of Romance, Ultravox had released an amalgam of rock and electronic sound which would be furthered by Gary Numan and Simple Minds. Significantly, as noted by Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again, the group was looking squarely and romantically towards Europe even prior to the release of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, as epitomised by tracks like The Wild, The Beautiful and the Damned: “What made Ultravox crucial precursors of 1980’s synthpop explosion was their European aura and singer/lyricist John Foxx’s frigid imagery of dehumanisation and decadence.”
By the time Vienna came around Foxx’s unbridled artiness had been swapped for a more direct approach but still in keeping with the influences of the time. As such Ure’s economical vocals for Vienna mention the Austrian capital just once but memorably in the climactic proclamation, “This means nothing to me / Oh, Vienna”. In England is Mine, Michael Bracewell dismisses this attempt to sonically capture Weimar-era decadence as the epitome of mood over content, marking a nadir when “English popular culture… synthesised itself into a moodily lit corner”.
Meanwhile Simple Minds’ Kerr was unsurprisingly not backward in coming forward to both dismiss the melodrama of Ultravox and emphasise the integrity of his own group.
“We’ve always been very open in our use of images in songs so we do run a giant risk of getting labelled as pretentious, being Glasgow boys and singing about Europe and things like that,” Kerr explained to the NME. “But you can’t just blind yourself and pretend that nothing exists outside your home town… At least we did spend most of the last year in Europe ourselves, so we do feel it is legal to sing about it.
“But that whole European thing has been used very wrongly just lately by people like Ultravox in ‘Vienna’, the new Europeans and all that. Sometimes you can sit down and write about something like that and it just looks really tacky. It seems pointless just using the names of foreign people to impress people, coming up with something like ‘Vienna’. You just have to know where to draw the line.”
Vienna’s sentiment as fetish is more or less confirmed by Ure himself in the BBC’s Synth Brittania: “The movies we were watching and the music we were listening at the time, all coming out of Europe, and the history that Europe has; Vienna being this awfully romantic city, this beautiful place; you put all that together and you’ve got this fantastic image… I’d never been to Vienna when we wrote the song; I didn’t know anything about Vienna… You try putting that down on a piece of paper – that you’re going to write a song that’s a four-and-a-half minute-long electronic ballad that speeds up in the middle with a viola solo thrown in; it doesn’t equate, it doesn’t work but at the time when you’re young and naive, naivety’s a wonderful thing.”
Vienna is joined on the (again Conny Plank-guided album) by such archetypal synthpop tracks as New Europeans, Western Promise and Mr X but especially stands out for its high-reaching sense of grandeur, such that Reynolds describes it as “that total fetishism of mittel Europa”. “Wreathed in the sonic equivalent of dry ice,” Reynolds says, “this ludicrously portentous ballad, [is] inspired by a vague notion of a past-its-prime Hapsburg Empire sliding into decadence…”
Although the fetish exemplified here is on the surface purely a longing for a romanticised pre-war Europe, it can also be seen as the culmination of a broader desire for a contemporary alternative to the rabid neoliberalism of Thatcher’s Britain. The fetish of restoring the lost world of Mitteleuropa bought into an imagined future way of life as much as a notion of something lost, destroyed.
*****
In highlighting Bowie and Eno’s role in heightening interest in all things Germanic, Bracewell categorises synth-driven acts as ‘New Romantics’ whom he suggests “were empathizing with the New Right and honing an agenda of elitism and exclusivity; or, equally, the movement was a direct reaction against the consequences of Thatcherism – a kind of Tory-baiting by way of autistic obsession with unadulterated style.”
Regardless, before long a range of nascent British acts were adopting an increasingly modernist, systematic approach to their work, hiding themselves away to feverishly explore the untapped potential of tape loops, sequencers and drum machines. Inspired especially by Kraftwerk’s immersion in the aesthetics of the 1920s, urban musicians lifted the modernist template from mainland Europe and repurposed it as a projection of, or informed by, the fantasies and ideals of Mitteleuropa and the Eastern Bloc. In effect a perceived pre- and post-World War II Central and Eastern Europe was transposed onto cities and towns in Britain where electronic music had started to proliferate.
Certainly, in searching for a sense of meaning beyond their own depressed circumstances, post-punk musicians increasingly looked and thought ‘international’. This essentially meant a choice of gazing either over the Atlantic towards bold, glossy, America (the home of rock’n'roll) or across to the continent where the cold, mysterious Eastern Bloc loomed large.
Arguably what began as a Germanic fetish was naturally extended south and east of Berlin to regions in Central and Eastern Europe, along and behind the Iron Curtain to evoke a Europe lost or distant. In this way by the onset of the 1980s socialism drew empathy from UK artists despite the well-entrenched distrust for all things red in right-dominated domestic politics. Such comparisons, flattering communism or otherwise, paved the way for musical artists to focus on the East through the dual lens of sci-fi and electronic music.
By 1980 electronic artists had sprung up in various pockets of Britain, dreaming of the sound of the future against the backdrop of bleak, high-rise existence.
By the late 1960s the drain of profitable industries away from the Cold War frontline had left West Berlin’s ageing population feeling the economic pinch and the city’s future prospects bleak. Though nominally part of the Federal Republic, West Berlin was hampered by its proximity to the German Democratic Republic; the financial sector, along with the likes of automotive and electronics producers had migrated westwards where the grass seemed greener, and many young West Berliners were following suit.
Stymied by the continued existence of ‘the Wall’ and struggling to compete economically with the technology-advanced Ruhr region, war-damaged West Berlin was in need of rejuvenation. And so to encourage enterprises and younger folk to relocate to the city, the FRG government implemented proactive new laws, including the scrapping of conscription for Berlin’s young and tax breaks for new businesses. Thus the authorities actively courted and promoted creativity and diversity which, in turn, sparked energy and tension borne out of subcultural activity involving artistic expression and hedonism. By the mid seventies foreigners such as David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Brian Eno were able to broaden their horizons as people and artists away from domestic concerns on either side of the Atlantic through immersing themselves in the vibrant arts and nightlife scene.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Wall, the capital of a totalitarian state was characterised by entrenched, systemic austerity. East Berliners, many herded together in plattenbauten – high-rise residences constructed from pre-fabricated concrete slabs – faced daily economic hardship and travel restrictions, their lot compounded by unrelenting state interference in private affairs. Moreover, since occupation the Soviet military had maintained a garrison a short trip from Berlin in Wűnsdorf which during the eighties accounted for five-sixths of the town’s overall population of sixty thousand. Shut off from the rest of Germany, this self-sufficient utopia nevertheless boasted a daily rail link with Moscow.
Soviet-style tower blocks were erected all throughout Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Red Army’s victorious march of 1945. Norman Davies explains the elitist approach of Poland’s Soviet puppet regime to its reconstruction of that country’s desolated capital: “The priorities in Warsaw’s reconstruction said much about the new ruling elite. The restoration of the Old City, which was undertaken in loving detail at a time of great austerity, was shrewdly designed to establish the patriotic credentials of the post-war order. And the provision of high-quality, stone-built, and spacious living quarters for official families was a standard feature of Soviet-style capitals from Moscow to Bucharest or East Berlin. But it contrasted sharply with the cramped and shoddy accommodation provided with much greater delay for the working class in low-grade multi-storey concrete blocks.”
In the West, a lack of credible information coming out of the Eastern Bloc and the resultant paucity of understanding of life under communism, prompted a range of responses including bemusement, indifference and stand-offishness. Even once Bowie, Pop and Eno had inspired all manner of foreign post-punk and new wave groups to choose Berlin as a base to reflect, write, record and play, communism, while looming large, remained frustrating distanced intellectually.
The Eastern Bloc was however well within range to admire and/or fetishise, and just as Marx is often narrowly read as inherently pragmatic, so too the politics and culture of the communist East were more complex (particularly when fetishised) than the pervading stereotype of grey, cold, modern functionality. Rather, the region was able to inspire creativity in the West to accompany mere aesthetic Cold War fetishism as foreign themes were easily bent back onto Western democracy and, in particular, Thatcherite Britain.
Eastern Bloc high-rises were largely constructed along traditionalist (anti-modern) lines, but in some areas these structures were, from the fifties onwards, also supplemented with Western-influenced modernism. A case in point is Nowa Huta which was established early that decade as a socialist utopia to contrast with nearby Krakow where the regime had met with Catholic middle class resistance.
Experiments in social manipulation like Nowa Huta took hold in 1949 when a centralised Soviet planning model was adopted in Poland. Home to country’s largest steel mill and never actually completed Nowa Huta is a city dominated by huge blocks of flats built in Soviet renaissance style overlooking green space. The architecture may not all be modernist but it’s working class inhabitants place the city squarely in streets-in-the-sky territory.
Steel production in Nowa Huta reached an annual seven million tonnes by the seventies, however by the eighties economic pressures had hit production hard, while pollution had also become a major issue in the city. Andrzej Wajda’s mid-seventies, Solidarity-themed film Man of Marblewas set in Nowa Huta with a bricklayer as its protagonist. The communists’ working class flagship was to become a stronghold of the Solidarity movement such that when martial law was imposed in December 1981, the steelworks were placed under military control. (These days, visitors to Krakow can take an Ostalgic vodka and gherkin-fuelled guided tour of Nowa Huta aboard one of those four-wheeled symbols of communism, the East German Trabant.)
“The first signs of Ostalgia were visible even before the whole affair ended, in pop music, punk and post punk.” the Polish writer Agata Pyzik notes. “Think of the Human League recording The Dignity of Labour (1979), an album about the Soviet space programme, and then putting Yuri Gagarin on the sleeve; Subway Sect’s Vic Goddard painting his clothes in grey after a school trip to Russia; Scritti Politti’s debut single ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ (1978); Joy Division (who of course were originally called Warsaw); or David Bowie’s countless references to Cold War Europe in “Heroes” and Low, most obviously ‘Warszawa’ (1977).”
Bowie’s attention was drawn to Warsaw after he passed through the city en route to Berlin via train in 1973. He, fellow erstwhile Berlin resident Eno and the esteemed producer Conny Plank served as both influences and collaborators for various disparate German groups whose experimental approach to sound was subsequently taken on and furthered by British industrial and synthpop/rock musicians. Across his two 1977 albums, Low and Heroes, Bowie shed light on the alien, island world of divided Berlin and in turn the Eastern frontier; Low‘s cold, mostly instrumental track Warsawa especially evoking the Eastern Bloc to eerie effect.
With its legacy of wartime atrocity and status as a city lost behind the Iron Curtain, Warsaw attained an increasing mythic meaning in the West during the Cold War years. Simon Reynolds describes a mysterious city which during the Cold War added to its World War II connotations “spartan tower-blocks, government ministries straight out of Orwell’s 1984, and disquietingly wide streets designed to allow Soviet tanks to roll down them should the need arise”.
Bowie’s Warsawa can be interpreted both as a requiem to the Warsaw’s dual uprisings of the mid forties and as a sonic representation of a world indefinitely bound by 1955′s Warsaw Pact of socialist unity signed by Soviet satellite states. What stands out is the track’s dependence on synths, and as such the track contributed heavily to the momentum behind synth-driven music that swept it to a broader audience.
Knowing little of the city as a living, breathing entity, Bowie produced his own mythical, wintery version of Warsaw and the Soviet-dominated ‘Second World’ region. Quoted in Reynolds, Bowie himself describes Warsawa as a response to “seeing the Eastern Bloc, how East Berlin survives in the midst of it, which was something that I couldn’t express in words. Rather it required textures.”
*****
It was apparently during the recording of the 1977 debut record of Ultravox! that producer Brian Eno received his first call to collaborate with Bowie, having been on hand as said group first experimented with synths on their track My Sex.
When in November 1977 they performed and recorded a session for John Peel in the BBC’s Maida Vale studio, Ultravox! were already tiring of the glam and punk sound which had brought their music to the attention of the influential DJ. That year the group released two records: the self-titled debut and its follow-up Ha!-Ha!-Ha!. With a few exceptions, both albums still drew on the English punk rock of the musicians’ roots but a hint towards more cerebral ambitions could be found in the band name: the exclamation mark (later shed) was a direct reference to Cologne’s NEU!. Equally informative are the titles of the four BBC session tracks; alongside the distinctly punk-sounding Young Savage sat the more ambiguous My Sex, The Man Who Dies Every Day and Artificial Life.
Futurist tracks like these and the memorable I Want to Be a Machine were initially deployed sparingly, but by 1978 and third album Systems of Romance (recorded with the help of Conny Plank) the nature of Ultravox had shifted; guitarist Stevie Shears had been replaced by Robin Simon, synths had come more to the fore and a strong interest in all things European had also taken hold. Sound-wise, tracks like Slow Motion, Quiet Men, Just For A Moment and Dislocation showcased the merging of modernist influences with guitar rock. Frontman Foxx later recalled, “I felt total affinity with punk, but I was disappointed that it got so conservative so quickly – it really strangled itself. An old man before it was a youth. Born 1975 died 1977.”
Born as Dennis Leigh to a working class Lancashire family Foxx first formed a band whilst attending art school in Preston, but it was upon 1973′s relocation to London where he spent time at the at the Royal College of Art that he first experimented with electronic instruments. Within a year he formed Tiger Lily with guitarist Shears, bassist Chris Allen (aka Chris Cross), drummer Warren Cann and keyboardist/violinist Billy Currie, a line-up which soon evolved into Ultravox!.
“London was cold, hard, grey and dismal,” Foxx recalled to Computer Music magazine. “We decided to make music that reflected that… Meanwhile, we wanted out of England at the time. Punk had become senile and Europe was the promised land, as far as we were concerned. We were very interested in the scene around Conny Plank – especially NEU! and Michael Rother and Kraftwerk.”
Foxx describes Germany as having “a living scene with a real mission”. “German youth had to reinvent itself after that horrific war,” he says. “There was a renaissance in panting, filmmaking, music and all the arts. We benefited immensely from all the energy.”
For Ultravox and fellow synthpop/rock acts like Simple Minds and Japan, as well as dedicated synthesiser acts like Depeche Mode, OMD and Soft Cell, Germany appealed not only for its Cold War connotations but also its musical blossoming during the seventies.
According to Michael Bracewell, “Kraftwerk suggested a science fiction fable of survival through transcendental dehumanization in an apocalyptic culture; like Bowie being the ghost of a dead future, haunting a dying present, Kraftwerk were emotionless machines for whom the desire, fragmentation and paranoia of an insane consumer culture were just blips to be programmed out. It was a hugely romantic premise, and young, fashionable people all over England began to look like depressed Europeans…”
Much of the music that appealed to Anglo-American sensibilities was borne out of strong internal dissatisfaction with German society; national identity merely being a nineteenth-century phenomenon promoted to serve the cause of nation-building. The Federal German Republic and its allies had sought to draw a line at 1945 and replace Nazi-era nationhood with a new West German federation. However, by the late 1960s much of the nation’s younger generation were railing against the post-war capitalist state presenting itself as shiny and untainted rather than attempting to confront the past.
“Germany thinks it is like a safe castle of the Western world,” lamented Gabi Delgado-Lopez, frontman of the Dűsseldorf synth-punk act DAF, in 1980. “Germany is a bunker, but this bunker, this façade, there is a lot going on that has nothing to do with the image Germany wants of itself.” (Gabi in Biba Kopf, The Wire, 1998.)
Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flur describes the early seventies in Germany as “the tail-end of a global revolution for young people, a generation conflict that could only begin to grow after the Second World War, a nightmare which brought incomprehensible suffering to the nations around us and to our own, provoked by the dreadful mass stupidity and repulsive military fanaticism of a generation submissive to orders”. He wonders: “What did we young people have to be glad about when we thought about our country and about our parents, who had caused it all, participated in it or had at least looked away as cowards?”
Music writing and eighties critiques tend to attribute that decade’s electronic music the status of mere bubblegum, a genre of little artistic value in which evocations of robots and outer-space exploration are shoehorned into lyrics and imagery as a gimmick to service cynical capitalism.
Ask a group of today’s thirty and forty-somethings to list the characteristics of new wave music and they’ll probably speak of cringeworthy dance moves, pretentious posturing, ludicrous fashion and futurist fantasies; indeed the mere mention of bands such as Culture Club, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet usually elicits snorts of derision.
However, whilst brushstroke accusations of intellectual vapidity are easily applied to this era of excess – and such a mythology, of course, has some validity in popular understanding – it was also a period of great sonic innovation thanks to new-found accessibility of drum machines and synthesisers. That the early eighties electro/synthpop movement, characterised by the likes of Depeche Mode, Tears For Fears and Ultravox, was multi-faceted and politically engaged has therefore often been lost amidst the myriad entertainments of the loads-a-money years that followed.
Synthesisers may have come to the fore in feature film soundtracks like those for A Clockwork Orange and Blade Runner, yet the contemporaneous electro/synthpop genre is often connoted with not only style-over-substance New Romanticism but so too a limited notion of science-fiction; that is, a distinctly kitsch, rather cumbersome, nonsense futurism a la the sixties television series Lost in Space or even Star Trek.
In part this is due to the overt sci-fi stylings of smash-hit singles – Buggles’ 1979 MTV-opening Video Killed the Radio Star, for instance – which have lingered in the mainstream as historical artefacts. However, this surface-level interpretation of sci-fi expressed through sound has also been applied to, in particular, Kraftwerk and Gary Numan, not to mention David Bowie. Such a perspective overlooks or even trivialises the adoption of the modernist aesthetic that lay at the heart of, initially, industrial music and synthpop/rock towards the end of the seventies, and then the fully-fledged synthpop which dominated the music charts in the early eighties. For although the golden era of synthpop fell between 1978 and 1982, its purest protagonists formed part of wider new wave scene incorporating both rock and pop, experimental and commercial artists that each absorbed similar cultural influences and where integration of electronic sound extended further than the dedicated synthpop groups who thus should not be analysed in isolation.
Much like modernist architectural planners, musicians of the post-punk era plotted imagined futures inspired by the past and of the present (Michael Perlman calls it “remembering the future”). As such, imagined synthetic soundscapes, as with dystopian sci-fi, evoke a near rather than space-age future. Therefore, despite electronic music and sci-fi being linked in our consciousness, retrospective appraisal of synthpop is often reductive. What tends to go unrecognised is the context in which the suggested escapism of sixties and seventies sci-fi and new technology possibilities appealed to young musicians seeking alternatives to the limitations of punk rock and to their domestic maladies at a time of political hysteria relating to the Cold War.
Modular synths, albeit sparingly and at great expense, found their way into progressive rock during the sixties but by the mid seventies, a disparate set of inventive groups in West Germany had established a sonic identity to differentiate them from counterparts in the UK and the US through a variety of innovative recording techniques. Throwing convention out of the window, acts such as Can, Cluster, Faust, Harmonia, Kraftwerk, La Dűsseldorf, NEU! and Tangerine Dream ploughed a wilfully unorthodox furrow, shaped by recent social and political upheavals in their homeland. These musicians who reached maturity in the late sixties and early seventies tended to make music at odds with the Anglo-American perception of German national identity but nevertheless their respective acts were lazily lumped together and labelled as ‘krautrock’ by the British music press.
Most significantly, the sounds coming out of particularly, Cologne and Dűsseldorf but also Berlin and Munich, were characterised not only by experimentation with traditional instruments and production techniques but also by the substantial use of electronic instrumentation and noise samples. Such experimentation resonated with emerging British musicians who whilst retaining the do-it-yourself attitude of the punk movement, were less enthusiastic about the limitations imposed by the punk-rock aesthetic.
This re-interpretation of electronic sound can partly be traced to the early seventies introduction of the compact Minimoog. In 1974, Kraftwerk used this machine on Autobahn which reached No.11 in the UK album charts, providing impetus and legitimacy to synths and other electronic instruments as a path of expression on a student-size budget.
Spawned from the Germany’s industrial Ruhr region, Kraftwerk’s output had evolved from minimalist beginnings to ally synthetic swathes of sound to mechanical, programmed drum beats and detached vocals, applying, says Michael Bracewell in England is Mine, “the musical mathematics of Bach to their machine-generated music, and played with clichés of Teutonic efficiency”.
Kraftwerk biographer David Buckley writes that, ”Against the backdrop of technology advancement, US-Soviet space-race rivalry, and the liberation of popular culture by countercultural progressives, Kraftwerk began making music during a time when the future of mankind seemed to be being radically re-directed.”
In the UK observers were by equal measure intrigued and confounded by what they heard for although the creators of these unique sounds leaped beyond the established boundaries of rock music, they did so with apparently stereotypical German precision and without distinguishable human emotion.
“When I heard Autobahn, I thought ‘I want that sound’,” recalls Soft Cell’s Dave Ball, explaining that the Leeds electro-group’s aesthetic derived directly from punk rather than any notion of stocking the commercial pop charts with anodyne pop music. “Our initial songs, we were writing in them in this crummy little studio in art college about tupperware parties and just rubbish, and about shit biscuits, and just basically about the state of society… That was like electronic punk – I think that’s what we were doing. We weren’t trying to be pop stars. We weren’t trying to be Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran. We were punks basically. We were just punks with synths.”
Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark’s Andy McClusky describes the scene as “little cultural islands” and was later surprised to here “people in Sheffield and London had been going to import stores and listening to electronic and German music”.
Liverpool’s OMD (label-mates of Joy Division on Factory Records) initially appeared truest to Kraftwerk’s past-future manifesto which McClusky relates directly to the architecture of the Germans’ home city:
“We were in this dystopian dirty mess, and actually Kraftwerk were growing up in, of all places, Düsseldorf. You find me an original building in Düsseldorf of pre-1945! There aren’t many of them. I think that is where their music reflected that wonderful utopian vision of the future which is now of course a vision of modernity.” (in David Buckley, Kraftwerk: Publikation).
Kraftwerk followed up the breakout success of Autobahn by releasing the momentous, travel-themed Trans-Europe Express in 1977. By this time, electronic composers like Jean-Michel André Jarre and Vangelis were pushing the electronic boundaries and Berlin-based producer Giorgio Moroder had taken synthpop to the masses with Donna Summer’s influential disco hit I Feel Love while groups like New York’s Suicide, Parisian’s Space and Yellow Magic Orchestra from Japan had each found commercial success via synth-driven music. Most significant though was David Bowie’s release of Low and Heroes.
Rusty Egan was a DJ at London’s influential ‘New Romantic’ Blitz club and a member of new wavers The Rich Kids and synthpop act Visage. In the documentary Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution hedescribes the profound effect of hearing a missive from Berlin in the form of Bowie’s hit single Heroes.
“I think just for one day, I mean, in that song, that song became now for me exactly what we were. ie. We could be heroes for one night, could dress up, get out of our grey, horrible ‘No future’, Thatcherite Britain and we could be somebody… we could forget that really we gotta sign on tomorrow. We got no job, we got no future, Bowie’s gone, Roxy have split up, we got no heroes, the Sex Pistols have just said ‘pffft’ to everything – let’s do it ourselves, let’s make our own music.”
Once the music being produced in Germany demonstrated a path to follow the thirst to create something new out of electronic music drove the synthpop phenomenon. However, the shifting political and social landscape in Britain by the late seventies, namely the rise of the right, surveillance culture and growing inequality, betray broader cultural inspirations and influences on the genre’s development.
Disgruntled by society’s descent to Thatcherism, compounded by IRA bombings and the increased popularity of the National Front, musicians in late seventies and early eighties Britain fetishised and soundtracked a grey and isolated Eastern Europe through a sci-fi lens as they explored comparisons between the social and political environment at home and abroad. In connecting Thatcher-era, modernist music with the communist Eastern Bloc as a cultural influence, Western musicians identified with a fetishised, partly anti-capitalist alternative in creating their aesthetic.
With dreams of utopia wilting fast, I’d like to propose that a disparate cross-section of urban youth coming of age in the late seventies fetishised in the little-known metropolis’s of the East, the cities of the future they’d been expecting to blossom at home, and so presented Central Europe and the Eastern Bloc as sci-fi. Coupled with an embrace of sixties and seventies sci-fi grounded in real-world issues, this fetish provided an aesthetic and conceptual framework for the use of electronic sound which may otherwise have been delivered solely as a series of blips and bleeps, technology for technology’s sake.
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