Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (55 page)

So, Po-Mo proved to be a short-lived phenomenon, instantly identifiable as the veneer of Thatcherism. Similarly, the neoclassicists, while continuing to find a niche in the twenty years that
followed, failed to realize their critics’ foreboding that they would succeed in turning back Britain’s architectural clock. Poundbury, Prince Charles’s instantly traditional
village bordering Dorchester in Dorset, was admired by some, ridiculed by others, but closely imitated by none. It is therefore tempting to see the great architectural brouhaha of the eighties as
representing not so much the beginning of new aesthetic trends as a brief excursion down a cul-de-sac. In reality, the intellectual substance of the period survived better than the passing styles.
For the eighties bequeathed a renewed interest in urbanism. This was an approach to town planning that took into account setting and sought to achieve harmony between old and new by recreating,
instead of breaking up, traditional streetscapes and spaces. The emphasis was no longer on riding roughshod over the past with flyovers and massively insensitive stand-alone buildings that made no
attempt to respect their historic setting. ‘Concrete jungles’ ceased to be acceptable, the worst forms of prefabrication and system-building were rejected. In place of the
modernists’ comprehensive redevelopment, context was prized, old buildings adapted rather than demolished, vernacular touches encouraged in new designs and the scale and mixed-use variety of
the street restored. What the eighties taught urban planners was that the architect was not God: new structures did not exist just to be admired in isolation, lifted straight from the plan and
imposed upon their surroundings, but were rather a part of a greater whole whose development was organic and reflective of a sense of community. This counter-revolution may not have gone as far as
the Prince of Wales dreamt it might, yet in this quiet way the profession’s conservatives won a considerable victory over four decades of progressive theory and self-belief.

Are ‘Friends’ Electric?

Pop music in the eighties was shaped by three technological advances and by one economic shift within the music industry. The heavy reliance upon the synthesizer rather than
the electric guitar gave many of the decade’s biggest hits a signature sound that came to be intrinsically associated with the period. Two other technologies mastered were the pop video and
the compact disc, both of which changed modes of presentation and delivery. Meanwhile, those seeking an alternative to the mainstream performers and ethos marketed and promoted by the major music
companies benefited from a shift in distribution networks which transformed small independent labels servicing niche tastes through mail-order sales into a significant presence on the high
street.

Besides these innovations, the eighties marked an ending as much as a beginning in pop music. The effective swansong of vinyl records coincided with the last days in which singles were bought in
vast quantities. In 1981, for instance, Altered Images could sell almost four hundred thousand copies of their chirpy jump-around single ‘Happy Birthday’ and still not reach number one
in the charts. Twenty years later, a song that racked up thirty thousand sales could easily expect to top the charts in any one week – an achievement no longer guaranteed to bring in its wake
even modest fame, let alone fortune. By contrast, during the eighties, singles chart positions were still taken seriously by listeners and producers alike. Dedicated fans followed their favourite
bands’ progression through the charts with the same reverence that football supporters’ monitored their teams’ standing in the league, as if reaching number one was as significant
as lifting the cup. The same football-like tribalism extended to youth fashion, with record buyers aping the look of their chosen bands (or ‘movements’) to an extent that was no longer
publicly evident in the two succeeding decades.

Besides the charts, the other mighty – but vulnerable – eighties pop music institution was the BBC. As the broadcaster of Radio 1 and the television shows
Top of the Pops
and
(for chart non-obsessives)
The Old Grey Whistle Test
, the corporation exercised extraordinary influence over what music got
broadcast nationwide. Over ten million
viewers watched
Top of the Pops
every Thursday evening – an eighties family ritual that declined towards the decade’s end, then went into terminal collapse, ceasing altogether in
2006. The BBC’s only serious terrestrial competition arrived in 1982 with Channel 4’s edgier
The Tube
, and it was not until the American pop video channel MTV launched in Britain
in 1987 that the real shift in pop broadcasting took hold. Certainly, the proliferation of local commercial radio stations during the 1970s meant that competitive forces were more active in radio
throughout the eighties. But even on that medium, the BBC’s monopoly of nationwide channels lasted until 1990, when a broadcasting act finally made it possible for the first independent
stations – Virgin Radio, Talksport and Classic FM – to enter the market (and of those, only Virgin was pop-oriented). Thus the deregulating spirit of Thatcherism came late to the
airwaves and was initially controversial among those who equated choice with diminishing standards – the grounds upon which the Labour Party opposed the Broadcasting Act 1990.

Synth-pop, the most distinctive sound of the eighties, had its origins in the previous decade’s musical experimentation. In the months before its withdrawal in 1972, Stanley
Kubrick’s film version of
A Clockwork Orange
had provided a fleeting image of a future dystopia with its distinctive synthesizer music soundtrack accompanying a concrete-jungle setting
– an oppressive estate built on the Le Corbusian principle of ‘machines for living’. The estate was actually Thamesmead, though it might easily have been mistaken for the
brutalist housing schemes of Sheffield, where Phil Oakey and Martyn Ware formed an experimental group called The Future which subsequently became The Human League. The debt to
A Clockwork
Orange
(both the film and Anthony Burgess’s book) was obvious, providing the title ‘The Dignity of Labour’ for the group’s second twelve-inch single and also the name
Heaven 17 for the breakaway band that Ware was to form following his break with Oakey. But the musically progressive attitude of the original line-up was, if anything, even more aptly conveyed by
their first choice of name, The Future. For the tone of the new movement was established by futurism’s obsession with technological advance as a means of driving changes that disregarded
previous forms of instrumentation and composition. The resulting sound represented not a revival, or reworking, of something that had gone before in pop, but rather a genuine effort to craft
something new. And it was timely, for just at the moment that a generation of British teenagers was being introduced to the computer age, either through the BBC Micro in the classroom or their own
personal Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the bedroom, a new wave of British groups came up with a computerized futuristic sound for pop music as well.

Synthesizers allowed for processed sounds to be struck from a keyboard. In the seventies they had been large modular blocks whose switches and wires protruded like a 1920s
telephone exchange. Unwieldy and expensive, they were used by prog-rock bands to provide typically over-elaborate keyboard breaks in between equally overwrought electric guitar riffs. British
composers who mastered the equipment, like Rick Wakeman and Mike Oldfield, used them to create soundscapes that celebrated the Knights of the Round Table or English folk melodies. More significant
for those who would make the sound their own in the eighties was the influence from Europe – where the Italian Giorgio Moroder deployed synths to create disco rhythms and the German group
Kraftwerk, whose 1977 album
Trans-Europe Express
used only electronic instruments, fashioned a modern, future-oriented look of sharp-cut suits in contrast to the long-haired rocker aesthetic
dominating the seventies in Britain. Critically, by the end of that decade innovation and economics had brought the price of the equipment within the grasp of aspiring bands. By 1980, a quality
synth – far smaller and more portable than the early contraptions – could be bought for £200, making electronic keyboards no more expensive than some electric guitars. In
consequence, the ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude that had animated the untrained, unschooled, working-class punk bands could now be adopted by those who, while equally making it up as they
went along, did not share the Sex Pistols’ nihilistic denial of a fulfilling future.

It was a pasty-faced, cold, unsmiling loner with Asperger’s syndrome who took the synth sound to the top of the charts in May 1979. The front man for the Tubeway Army was Gary Numan, who
had changed his surname from Webb better to convey his sense of being a futurist being. His blood-drained, asexual appearance suited the tone of his hit single ‘Are “Friends”
Electric?’ which was about the cyborgs of a Philip K. Dick-influenced science-fiction novel he had once contemplated writing. His lyrics were those of the isolated outsider, remote from human
interaction, a sentiment reinforced by the follow-up hit ‘Cars’. Influenced by the novels of J. G. Ballard, this was futurism spoken – for Numan did not do anything as
conventional as sing. Rather, he delivered his lyrics in a robotic monotone, unsmiling and, by avoiding gesticulation, consciously conjuring up all the stage presence of a semi-automated
mannequin.

With his album
The Pleasure Principle
, Numan created pop music without any of its traditional instruments. Drums were replaced by pre-programmed drum machines, with the orchestral
accompaniment created by Moog synthesizers. Gone was the emblem of rock and roll, the electric guitar. In total, Numan’s sales exceeded ten million. Yet while his minimalist compositional
approach was ultimately stultifying, other acts quickly demonstrated the new genre’s adaptability. At exactly the moment that ‘Are “Friends”
Electric?’ was topping the charts, a Liverpudlian ‘new-wave’ duo, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, released their first (appropriately titled) single
‘Electricity’. Guitar-free synth music you could dance to had arrived, and during 1981 it transformed pop. Depeche Mode, formed only the previous year in Basildon, had their
breakthrough single ‘New Life’, while the Christmas number one (ultimately selling nearly 1.4 million copies) was the Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’. A
ballad about a relationship splitting up that could nonetheless be played on the dance floor and supported by a memorable video whose conceit was to be a video of the group shooting the video.
Dare
, the accompanying album, sold five million records.

At its most basic, synth-pop produced a tinny sound, as if someone had electronically tampered with a glockenspiel and added a drum machine to keep a constant, simple and unvarying beat. The
music critics generally hated the pretentious new arrival, not least because they saw it as a rejection of the honest, unapologetically working-class, drum- and guitar-playing acts of the sixties
and seventies. Programming synthesizers lacked the energetic physical activity, let alone dexterity, of former days when groups were more properly called bands. Some of the electronic pop upstarts
were even wearing suits and crisp, buttoned-up shirts, as if they aspired to be in the professional classes rather than staying true to the blue-collar spirit of denim and rock. Depeche
Mode’s infectiously poppy 1981 release ‘I Just Can’t Get Enough’ prompted the
Melody Maker
review: ‘I can, you will.’
¹
Nor was the hostility merely a matter of taste or prejudice. In 1982, with electronic pop dominating the charts, the Musicians’ Union took against Numan, Depeche Mode,
et al., fearing their synth sound would put ‘genuine’ instrument-playing musicians out of a job. With Canute-like effectuality, the union tried to issue guidelines insisting that the
use of synthesizers for recording sessions and public performance had to be restricted.

If the point of culture had been merely job creation, then the union’s concerns would have seemed well placed. Typically, a rock band had four, five or even six members. However, the
variety of sounds the synths produced cut down the number of performers needed to front a group. This made duos a common line-up for electro-pop, usually with the extrovert performer singing while
the more reticent partner loitered in the background like a computer technician, twiddling knobs and dispassionately hitting the occasional key. Exemplifying this division of labour were Annie
Lennox and Dave Stewart of The Eurythmics (commercially the most successful duo in British pop history), Soft Cell’s Marc Almond and Dave Ball, and the Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant and Chris
Lowe. Depeche Mode’s Vince Clarke proceeded to be one half of a couple of duos, teaming up first with the singer Alison Moyet to form Yazoo and then with Andy Bell in
Erasure. Meanwhile, synth-pop developed beyond its initial, amateurish efforts, which had appeared to place greater emphasis on the imperative to sound futuristic than to produce
catchy tunes. Assisted by ever improving technology, the sound became lusher and more varied. And the lyrics became more meaningful. Depeche Mode started writing songs about greed, racial prejudice
and teenage suicide. Soft Cell particularly dispelled the notion that electronic music was lightweight by introducing overtones of sleaze, darkness and despair. Their first hit, a cover version of
a half-forgotten sixties soul classic, ‘Tainted Love’, turned into the world’s best-selling song in 1981, going to number one in seventeen countries and lasting a (then)
record-breaking forty-three weeks in the US charts. Whatever might be happening to heavy industry’s order books, British synth-pop was exporting all over the world.

In fact, fewer band members performing on stage did not actually mean a reduced payroll creating the music. Complex electronic scores called upon considerable technical expertise, necessitating
especially long sessions in the recording studio and helping to ensure that the producer could be as important as the singer/songwriters to the sound of a finished album. By 1984, synth-pop’s
most sought-after producer was Trevor Horn. Fittingly, Horn had burst upon the scene as one half of The Buggles, whose 1979 hit ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ contained the prophetic
line about how the new technologies would change the medium. After this one-hit wonder (it was number one in sixteen countries), Horn moved from performing to producing. For ABC’s
Lexicon
of Love
album he assembled a team of programmers alongside the orchestral arranger, Anne Dudley. Produced by Horn, this team formed Art of Noise, a project – rather than a group, in the
conventional sense of the term – whose use of sampling and indifference to vocals as lyrics anticipated the dance genre that came to dominate the late eighties and nineties. Yet however ahead
of its time Art of Noise might have been, it was another early signing to Horn’s label, ZTT,
^EN23
that really caught the popular imagination.
This was a Liverpool band which, having sensibly ditched the name Hollycaust, opted instead to reference Sinatra with the title Frankie Goes to Hollywood.