Switched-on punks
When ’70s kids discovered synthesis, now back on vinyl. By Jim Irvin.
As the ’70s ended, anyone with a hirepurchase agreement could make tomorrow’s music today, or at least take a crack at David Bowie’s Low, when comparatively cheap monophonic synthesizers and drum machines started appearing in music shops. Among the earliest adopters was a bunch from Sheffield, called The Future until they found one of the all-time great band names, The Human League. They cut their June ’78 debut single, Being Boiled, at home, in mono, for £2.50, the cost of a reel of blank tape. That record created enough waves to alert OMD and Vince Clarke of Depeche Mode to start making similar noises and, in December 1978, Bowie himself declared The Human League “the future of pop music”. True, as it turned out, but it took a while for everyone to catch up. Meanwhile, Ultravox, initially seen as slightly offmessage when they appeared in 1977 sounding like Roxy Music, were charting an idiosyncratic course through modern noise. By their third album, September 1978’s Systems Of Romance (Island/ UMC) they’d lost spiky guitarist Stevie Shears (and an exclamation mark) and taken on the wünderbar Conny Plank as producer for a chilly, synth-led meld of alienated rock and cold war atmospherics. John Foxx’s vocal delivery reached back to Bowie, Bryan Ferry and Kraftwerk and pointed forward to Gary Numan, who used this album as his cue for Tubeway Army’s shift into electro. The punky throb with synth hooks and cavernous reverbs, creating a strangely energising gloom, was the recipe for many bands to come. Now out again on coloured vinyl with the band’s underrated earlier, rockier albums, Ultravox! and Ha!Ha!-Ha!, Systems Of Romance sounds claustrophobic, itchy, desperate to get somewhere. Newcomers may not find the songs instantly appealing, but Quiet Men, Slow Motion and Maximum Acceleration get under the skin (the latter heralds Midge Ure’s iteration of the band, the synth line very close to Vienna’s piano part) and remind us exactly what late 1978 felt like. It was almost a year after Bowie’s shout-out, October ’79, when Human League’s debut album appeared. Reproduction (Virgin/UMC) was every bit as queasy as its cover – people discodancing over babies – the lyrics hilariously bleak: “Outside the office swings the man on the gibbet,” deadpans Phil Oakey on opener Almost Medieval. The closest to the poptastic League of Bowie’s prophecy is sprightly flop Empire State Human. By May 1980, and the equally bizarre Travelogue (Virgin/UMC) – including a busy revisit of Being Boiled and a cover of the music from a gin advert – the band was collapsing from lack of success. Chief musicians Martyn Ware and Ian Marsh bolted to start Heaven 17. Oakey served his revenge up hot, quickly reassembling the band and fronting a string of brilliant hits, leaving these curious dystopian snapshots to fade. Back on vinyl postBrexit they feel awfully timely.
“THE STRANGELY ENERGISING GLOOM WAS THE RECIPE FOR LOTS OF BANDS TO COME.”