’80s: a giant leap into digital

MIGHTY KEYBOARD: SYNTHESIZERS SLID INTO MUSIC THAT DECADE AND STAKED ITS CLAIM Dark lyrics married to sometimes haunting effect of an electronic keyboard.

There was a time when a keyboard or synthesizer was a legitimate instrument, played by a legitimate band member. The ’80s gave us synth pop, the New Romantics whose pomp and sometimes outrageous postpunk look and feel became a layer cake of music and sound that marked every lamppost of an era with its scent.

And that became the calling card of a generation where big hair music and slight of hand on plastic ivories were as comfortable with one another as free love and Woodstock were to the generation prior.

They mighty keyboard slid into music in the 80s and staked its claim. Imagine Van Halen’s Jump sans the melodic intro; Depeche Mode with only a drum machine or Europe’s The Final Countdown with just a riff and some bass.

Synthesizers were mankind’s giant leap into digital, even though we may not have known it at the time.

U2’s Popmart tour in 1998 opened with once of the most iconic New Wave one hit wonders in history. That moment, when the stadium lights dimmed, the band appeared on the big screen and speakers started blaring out a dramatic intro to two hours of Irish rock.

The song: Pop Muzik. The artist: M. Any other hits: Nada. But at the time writer Robin Scott said his sole intention was to create a track that condensed a quarter of a century of popular music – from rock through to disco into synth.

And he had a point when he said rock created a generation gap, disco brought people together.

His statement was simply that music was pop music, and that is what it was. U2’s Pop Mark tour took the whimsy of the track and turned it into a sardonic visual showcase of popular culture.

But it was not just ’80s rock that indulged in synth.

You did not need an electric guitar and right pants to be a rebel. Big hair behind black and whites, slamming the ivories, became just as sexy, added moody to music’s lexicon and got laid and trashed hotel rooms all the same.

Some extraordinary music was created by artists that married the sometimes-haunting effect of an electronic keyboard to dark lyrics, social commentary and the undertones of post-punk rebellion during the heyday of Reagan and

Big hair behind black and whites became just as sexy

Thatcher’s libertarian 80s.

Aha’s The Sun Always Shines on TV set some of the tone for the genre, Big In Japan and Sounds Like A Melody made Alphaville a Eurosynth institution. Kraftwerk and Ultravox gave us GPS-like precision pop.

And then, there were the bands like Duran Duran whose pomp and self-indulgence took social commentary and the caviar life, married it with the first signs of pretty-boy pop and delivered a sound none of us had heard before then.

Rio, Hungry Like The Wolf, Wild Boys and Notorious became anthems of a generation with floppy fringes and a point to drive home.

And they did it. And we could not get enough.

Vince Clarke shows us this. Yazoo and Alison Moyet’s emotionally guided missile voice made us sit up and listen – over and over again.

When Upstairs’ At Eric’s and Don’t Go dropped, so did our breath, and later, when Clarke discovered Andy Bell’s Moyetlike vocals, he developed Erasure.

Oh ‘Lamour, Sometimes and Abba-esque showed his hand, and we loved it. Bell’s vocals took Clarke’s music beyond where Moyet left off, and it felt as if it were a natural musical progression in pop. But it was quality pop.

Clarke also created Depeche Mode, a project that outlasted Erasure and Yazoo by decades. It is darkness irresistibly attractive. Dave Gahan’s vocals and the blunt narrative of its tracks were the fire starters for Goth, the synthesizer and later, the drum machine, the nail in coffin music’s birth.

Whether OMD’s Enola Gay became the anthem of cheese-pop or Spandau Ballet’s Through The Barricades the greatest love song of all time, and where Amelia made us listen and Joy Division numbed our realities, there is no doubt that any of these brilliant artists would have been able to move so freely between light and dark, and solicit emotions that we may have never considered music to have the power to, without the keyboard or synth.