Author Richard Evans delves deeply into “a true golden age of British pop” in his just-published book “Listening to the Music the Machines Make: Inventing Electronic Pop, 1979-1983,” which tells the story of the revolution spurred by the adoption of the synthesizer as a primary musical instrument.
The 528-page book, published late last month by Omnibus Press, features a forward by synth visionary Vince Clarke, the co-founder of Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure.
Clarke writes:
“Everyone brought their own thing into their music then. Punk, glam rock, disco… you can hear all of those things in the sound of lots of the bands in this book. We all started influencing each other, we all got better at what we were doing, and the technology kept developing. These were transformational times and what made it exciting was that a lot of artists, like myself, were just making it all up as we went along.”
In the book, Evans spotlights the impact of early innovators such as The Normal, Cabaret Voltaire, Gary Numan, OMD, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode and more, and includes input from Clarke, Mute Records founder Daniel Miller, and Martyn Ware of The Human League, B.E.F. and Heaven 17.
Evans has worked for Erasure, Factory Records, MTV Records and more in a music career that has spanned more than 30 years, and is the founder of the This Is Not Retro website.
For more on the book, visit its official site.
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Just ordered my copy the other day!
So many great books of late on new wave, post punk , etc have been released on band bios and the genre itself