MARS BY 1980: THE STORY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC

David Stubbs FABER & FABER Future Days author extrapolates from electronica.

Rare is the book that incorporates articulate discussion of The SOS Band,

Cabaret Voltaire, the Futurist Manifesto and Umberto Boccioni’s paintings States Of Mind. Mars By 1980 is such a book, bursting with links – what Baudelaire called “correspondences” – between acts of creativity historic and modern, which in some way contributed to the evolution of electronic music. The author clarifies that it’s a personal, subjective impression, not an encyclopaedia. This seems appropriate for a genre which, now dominant after decades of wresting control from guitars, has served up the sublime

(Scritti Politti, Eno, Soft Cell, Moroder) and belched out the banal (the current pop chart). As Stubbs notes, it’s about what humans do with the technology rather than the machines themselves. In the past, the future – 1980, imagine! – seemed thrilling. It’s still “retrievable”. There’s an astute perception, too, that growing up in the north in the 70s was not monochrome – it was “hideous oranges and browns. Monochrome felt like an escape”. An insightful, droll work, bouncing brightly between themes like the film criticism of David Thomson. Open your mind. CR