Listening to the Music the Machines Make - Inventing Electronic Pop 1978 to 1983: Inventing Electronic Pop 1978-1983

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The British Library were brilliant in that they re-opened as soon as they could, and although their hours were very limited to start with, I was gradually able to catch-up. I started senior school in 1979 so it was really at that point where I became aware of music and its possibilities. Listening to the Music the Machines Make is commendable as an essential reference work and a thoughtful and affectionate in-depth examination of a vital musical genre.

Evans draws on articles from Melody Maker, the NME, Smash Hits, Record Mirror, and other UK publications and presents quotes from interviews with the artists and reviews and commentary.

I’d been working on the book for a few years and the whole time I thought “someone is going to do this, someone is going to do this before me! I also realised that lots of my original knowledge of the bands I wrote about came from their singles rather than from knowing their albums, so it was great to broaden my musical knowledge by listening to lots of albums which I should have heard years ago but only discovered now. If you were to ask me again in half an hour I would probably choose three completely different records! Of course there were exceptions, and Paul Morley and Jon Savage in particular come across now, as I found then, as both eager and erudite, and usually generous in their praise or constructive in their criticism. Vince Clarke and Andy Bell of course but also people like Martyn Ware, Neil Arthur, Rusty Egan and Daniel Miller.

The book kicks off with a chapter on INSPIRATION in 1977, namely the acts that hugely influenced the pioneers of the electronic music genre. A few weeks ago I saw Front 242’s concert in London which I think I was supposed to see in 2020 and which had been rescheduled four or maybe five times before it finally happened.

But Simon Reynolds said in ‘Synth Britannia’ that it was Howard Jones that made him feel that electronic pop was now no longer special and part into the mainstream… was there a moment when this music changed for you? But I started thinking “wouldn’t it be great if there was one place that people could go, people like me who remember the 80s (*laughs*) fondly and could find out what all these people are doing today? But the process of going through all the edits, the photos, getting the artwork and style right, it’s been quite intense. I grew up in Essex and was starting my journey as a music fan at the same time that they were starting out. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

This definitive book explores how krautrock, disco, glam rock, and punk inspired an electronic pop revolution and how that revolution went on to establish the foundations for hip-hop, house, and EDM. Evans starts at a place that few others have identified as the touchpoint: “the blue acoustic guitar that filled the screens of millions of television sets as Top of the Pops beamed across the nation on the night of July 6 th, 1972″, when David Bowie, in his Ziggy Stardust persona, performed “Starman”. Although punk was a driving force for this, the actual punk music wasn’t that interesting to any of them because it felt like music they already knew, whereas they felt these new sounds were something that were unknown to them at that point.Video recording technology unleashed the potential of music videos, and the arrival of cable television channels allowed music videos to reach worldwide audiences. Your book captures a period, I don’t know if you listen to much modern day pop, but do you think there is an electronic pop legacy today, whether direct or indirect from this 1978-1983 era?