Richard Barbieri is best known from his work with JAPAN and PORCUPINE TREE but despite having been a recording artist since 1978, his new studio album ‘Hauntings’ is only the fifth long playing solo release of his long career.
After 5 albums with JAPAN, Richard Barbieri worked with all his former bandmates David Sylvian, Mick Karn and Steve Jansen with a close creative partnership being developed with the later, both as an experimental instrumental duo and in a more song-oriented project called THE DOLPHIN BROTHERS.
There was a brief JAPAN reunion as RAIN TREE CROW in 1991 but when that ended amid acrimony, Jansen, Barbieri and Karn formed JBK, issuing a number of albums on their own Medium Productions label between 1993 and 2001. During that time, the trio were invited to be live musicians to back NO-MAN, the art pop duo comprising of Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson in 1992. Significantly, Barbieri would continue to work with both and joined Wilson’s progressive rock band PORCUPINE TREE in 1993.
Deepening the dark immersion of its predecessor ‘Under A Spell’ from 2021, ‘Hauntings’ sees Barbieri present a diverse double collection influenced by a nostalgia for the past and future, and for things that didn’t happen, with questions as to what is real and what is simulation. Alongside the electronic sound sculptures of Barbieri are a renowned international cast of musicians including Morgan Ågren (drums and percussion), Percy Jones (bass guitar) and Luca Calabrese (trumpet).
Richard Barbieri sat down with ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK for a round of Vintage Synth Trumps to talk about the ideas behind ‘Hauntings’ and his close encounters of the synthesizer kind…
The first card is the ARP 2600, does that trigger any thoughts?
I did have a go at one in the studio when we were making JAPAN’s second album ‘Obscure Alternatives’. That was probably just before I got my own modular, the Roland System 700 Lab series. The ARP 2600 had a similar kind of layout, semi-modular… I used it on a track called ‘Deviation’, some kind of noise and sequency thing! I was well fascinated by it but it always looked quite ugly to me and still does… I don’t know why but I’m still not drawn to the look of it. It’s not clear, you’ve got all these faders and things, but it doesn’t tell you exactly what’s going on. I don’t warm to it. I think Steven Wilson of PORCUPINE TREE got a reproduction one…
Of course, the ARP 2600 has got an amazing history to it, it’s on so many records but those metal sliders and the way it was laid out didn’t draw me in…
Deviating slightly, you mentioned when we last spoke in 2017 that your Oberheim OB-X disappeared back in the day… did you ever think about replacing your OB-X with something like the XPander or newer editions of like the OB-X-8 or copies such as the UB-Xa by Behringer?
The OB-X was too much in the ball park of the Prophet 5 to be honest… to me, they are fairly similar. Yes, the OB-X has that slightly thicker sound, it’s a bit warmer but in terms of having a polyphonic synth, I’m happy enough with the Prophet.
Artistically, did losing the OB-X end up being a positive in that you had to investigate a new instrument and using different techniques?
Yeah, it breaks my heart now losing stuff, especially my Wurlitzer electric piano, I don’t know what happened to that! But in those days, there wasn’t this emotional attachment to the instruments, they were tools, there to do a job. You would give away a synth to someone or let them borrow it. So it was very much wanting the technology of the times and it was more about what it could do for you than actually fetishising over it! But now, it’s all nostalgic, it’s all about the feelings and emotions.
Next card and it’s an EDP Wasp Deluxe… did you ever consider this as a possible purchase before you acquired the MicroMoog?
No, it never was… I know people who speak lovingly about the Wasp… are they the ones with the touch sensitive keyboard?
The Deluxe had a proper keyboard but the standard one had this touch sensitive strip…
I was more drawn to the Moog name and the MicroMoog was the cheapest one. In hindsight, I’m glad I got that and not a Minimoog because it’s got a lot more programming possibilities and more routing. I love it! *laughs*
Your new record is called ‘Hauntings’ and your previous one was called ‘Under A Spell’, what has brought you musically into the supernatural world?
Lockdown started that whole thing of introspection and thinking a lot about things. It meant we couldn’t go out and do much, so everything became internalised. Also my age, it’s the age when you start thinking about your life, where you are and how you’ve got to this point. It brought all these new feelings into my mind which were haunting me. I’ve called them ‘Hauntings’ but they are feelings of nostalgia, things from the past and things that didn’t happen. When you have very vivid dreams, you have recurring dreams, you go to places you’ve never really been to in real life and there’s people you’ve never really met but they’re very real to you in that moment.
So it was playing around with that reality and how much can you bend the two realities… are we part of some simulation where it’s possible that other realities exist in a parallel dimension? I was getting all kind of heavy with that and there was also this nostalgia for the future, for a future that might not happen. So it was quite intense feelings that were influencing this music.
How did the opening ‘Hauntings’ track ‘Snakes & Ladders’ develop?
Funnily enough, that track is not built on any particular concept or feeling or nostalgia, it has a definite musical theme to it. I gave it the title because to me, when you listen to it, it’s a lot of crescendos and falls. Trying to visualise the track, it looked to me like a ‘Snakes & Ladders’ board where you’re getting these musical ascending parts and then suddenly there’s this drop and you fall down the ladder or slide down the snake. So that was a very vivid thing of rise and fall. There’s a slight time travelling concept in there as well, so you could look at it falling into different time lapses.
You mentioned this sort of “imagined nostalgia” and “imagined future” but also real nostalgia and haunting stuff, it made me think of when you did the telephone ring on ‘The Tenant’… it’s imitating a telephone ring but it’s not what a telephone ring sounds like… is this part of the subconscious nostalgia creeping in?
It’s a sound design thing, this album has more sound design than any other album that I’ve made. The specific thing you’re talking about on ‘The Tenant’ was my interpretation, in fact a very good copy, of the Tannoy signal that they used to have at Charles De Gaulle Airport… so every time there was an announcement, you would have this little rise and fall of these electronic digital notes. I did it with a Polymoog where you have a slider to slide through an octave thing. I just did that to recreate this sound that fascinated me.
But on this new album, there’s a lot of sound design, like on ‘Victorian Wraith’ and ‘1890’, they are based in the Victorian era. ‘Victorian Wraith’ is a recollection of a child I used to see, I used to see apparitions in my room, maybe many children do… and suddenly you stop seeing them. Your parents say you’ve had a fever but I could see these ghosts walking around my room although I wasn’t scared. They were wearing this Victorian attire, it was a very vivid image so that influenced ‘Victorian Wraith’.
The other track ‘1890’ is a sound design piece around that time, that’s one of my recurring dreams which I go back to, it’s obviously from that Victorian era in London and there’s lot of fog and mist, it’s got a dark grainy atmosphere and it’s all connected around the river near Big Ben and the Houses Of Westminster. I got a sample of the very first chimes of Big Ben from 1890, it was made on a wax cylinder or something and I’ve got an announcement on the radio of those first chimes, I put that in as well as a lot of old radio broadcasts that I had coming and going. That, mixed with a storm recording I had of really heavy rain and thunderstorms, really worked perfectly together. It just created this whole thing that I go though in my dreams. I managed to provide a sound version of what I visualise.
Another card and it’s the ARP Axxe… you used to use an ARP Solina didn’t you?
Yes I did, and an ARP Omni… David and I used the ARP Omni, it had a lovely sound, there’s a voicey choir sound that worked really well. The ARP Axxe? No, that would have been a choice at the time, did you go ARP or did you go Moog? So there was the choice between the ARP Odyssey or the Minimoog. Because I went the Moog route, that was my monosynth and it wasn’t a time where you could just easily afford to go through all the stuff.
Photo by Steve Jansen
You’re known for “mixing your own colours”, how did you become more interested in sound design as opposed to just being a “keyboard player”?
Well! It was not being able to play keyboards very well! *laughs*
I think you do yourself down, you can play a lot better than you make out… *laughs*
I think there’s been periods where I wasn’t too bad for a while but I think now I’m on the decline! *laughs*
Was getting into sound design like an Eno-inspired thing?
Yeah, Brian Eno showed the way that you could use abstract sound and put that in the context of pop music…
There’s a track on the album called ‘Reveille’ which is very ‘Another Green World’, was that a conscious intent?
I’ll take that as a compliment, that particular track is just 2 channels, a stereo live recording of this new synth I’ve been playing with of late, the Solar 42f. It’s a drone synth…well, it’s more than that but it’s quite incredible really. I can’t compare it to much, it’s just something all out there on its own. But you can get a lot of things going on at the same time. I just got this little thing going and it created this sound world, it reminded me of the sun coming up. Sometimes, the real simple minimal things are the best.
Photo by Debbie Zornes
The ‘Hauntings’ album is not just minimal things, there is some quite boisterous and uptempo stuff like ‘Anemoia’ which is playing with drum ‘n’ bass rhythms?
Yes, it is and it did have an original drum ‘n’ bass programmed pattern throughout but I really wanted a drummer to be playing it. There was a Swedish drummer who I was looking at for a long time, Morgan Ågren who although he’s a very technically gifted rock jazz player, he also has a sensibility towards electronic music. I could tell with his videos and all these little things he was doing to create his percussive sound worlds, it was really interesting to me.
So I thought it would be great to have a drummer playing a drum ‘n’ bass pattern, to give it that feeling and when it goes into that second section of the track, that’s a combination of the drummer then reverting to percussion and the electronic drum ‘n’ bass programme kit coming through more strongly. I think that worked well.
How did you become interested in drum ‘n’ bass?
I liked SQUAREPUSHER and APHEX TWIN, I also liked that quite extreme Jungle drum ‘n’ bass but I also played a lot with a band called THE BAYS, an improvisational band led by Andy Gangadeen, he’s the drummer with CHASE & STATUS. He’s very into drum ‘n’ bass and electronic rhythms, he has an electronic kit and vibes off all kinds of loops and stuff. So I did a lot of live shows with them, it’s was all improvised dance music, Jungle drum ‘n’ bass with a little bit of techno.
You mentioned you worked with a Swedish drummer, you’ve worked with a Swedish saxophonist Lisen Rylander Löve and your first album production was a Swedish band LUSTANS LAKEJER on their 1982 album ‘En Plats I Solen’. You did a tour in 2017 with them performing that album…
It was the 35th anniversary of ‘En Plats I Solen’, we’d always been in touch anyway, I’d seen some of the LUSTANS LAKEJER guys over the years and it seemed like a great idea to go out and play that album, they thought “let’s go and invite the producer”…
Although you didn’t produce the pre-album single ‘Diamanter’, it was the track that won you over to take the producer role and you got to perform that buzzy solo live…
Yes, it was a different one each night, basically it was noise solo and some nights, I would just lean on the keyboard with my elbow, twist a few knobs and just have a drink! *laughs*
That was fun, I love those guys… what I love about them is that they SO 80s, they haven’t tried to update or reimagine themselves at all, they’re strictly 80s! They slap on all the make up before they go on stage, all the synths playing the right sounds from that era and it’s great!
I actually got to see LUSTANS LAKEJER in Malmö near the end of 2019 and they’ve got this new late teen fanbase who go to gigs dressed like front man Johan Kinde from that era…
Yeah! *laughs*
The next card is a Yamaha CS-60… have you flirted with Yamaha equipment before?
Yes, I played a CS-80 and a CS-60, , I’d put them in the Top 5 of synths of all time, so lovely. It was in a studio in Sweden, a guy who collects a lot of vintage stuff and they couldn’t get me away from them! So beautiful and very expressive, just different… they’re a world of their own. I’ve never owned either one unfortunately, I wish I did. If I could, I would love to get one of those. But the Yamaha I do own is a CS-01… and that sounds amazing! *laughs*
So Steven Wilson’s never hired a CS-80 for you to use in PORCUPINE TREE?
Actually, that’s not a bad idea! Of course, there is good emulation available!
John Foxx has done this Vintage Synth Trumps interview format before and he did the photo on the cover of the PORCUPINE TREE album ‘Lightbulb Sun’, do you know how he got involved?
It must have been somebody who knew someone else! It was a case of the photo John Foxx took was actually of his son, and it was exactly right for the title… I wish I knew, you’re gonna have to ask Steven Wilson because I can’t really tie that all together, it’s quite weird.
But as a coincidence, I’ve been working with Steve D’Agostino, he’s just mixed the surround sound for ‘Hauntings’ and I’ve known him a while… so he’s now worked with every member of JAPAN! I was the last one to complete the set! *laughs*
He worked with Mick Karn on DALI’S CAR, he remixed David Sylvian’s ‘Manafon’ in surround and he worked with Steve Jansen and John Foxx on the album ‘A Secret Life’.
It’s all very incestuous isn’t it? *laughs*
Yeah! Amazing! *laughs*
Photo by Steve Jansen
I don’t know if you have been misquoted but you once remarked that the YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA sounding parts on ‘Tin Drum’ were all David Sylvian while you did the weird interesting stuff, is there any truth in that?
Well, it’s not to say that David’s parts were interesting! *laughs*
A lot of his parts on ‘Tin Drum’, I can hear similarities to the YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA album ‘Technodelic’; what’s weird about that is that both albums were released at the same time so it’s almost by osmosis, this exchange of ideas and influence that went on at that time. I would say my sounds were probably a bit more off-the-wall and possibly a bit stranger…
Haunting? *laughs*
Haunting, there you go! Yeah! *laughs*
The next card is the Roland Juno 106?
I’m very associated with Roland, but I didn’t have any of the early Jupiter or Juno series, anything like that. I’ve got the big Roland System 700 and I used the Space Echos, all that kind of stuff. But it wasn’t until later with the V-Synth that I really got involved with Roland again. Before that, there was the D-50, David Sylvian and I used D-50s for the ‘In Praise Of Shamans’ tour in 1988. He did some great D-50 stuff on a track called ‘Pop Song’, all that weird scale-straight micro tuning stuff going on in the background. I used the D-50 until quite recently, but the V-Synth all the time.
Photo by Sheila Rock
On ‘Pushing The River’ by THE DOLPHIN BROTHERS, there were those synthetic brass bursts, was that sound design or sampling?
It was a pattern that I came up with on a Casio SK-1!! It sounded like an EARTH WIND & FIRE or Phil Collins type of brass section and we decided to go with that. I think we might have used a bit of the original sound as well. Sometimes, these sorts of things, you just sample something and it’s just got a melody that’s gonna work. These Casio lo-fi samplers are very collectable now! *laughs*
Ah, next card is a Polymoog which I know you’ve used a few times…
Yeah! I used it in that interim period between ‘Obscure Alternatives’ and ‘Quite Life’ where I didn’t really have an established set-up as such. At the beginning, I had the Wurlitzer piano, the MicroMoog and the Solina string synth as well. Then I got the System 700 which did all the abstract and sequencer-driven stuff. I didn’t have a set-up until we came to ‘Quiet Life’ so at the time, when you walked into studios, there was always stuff around, they had all kinds of kit there or you could hire stuff in.
There was a Polymoog and I started to use it a lot during that period. It was very user friendly, it was quite inspirational, you could get interesting things going quite quickly. I do like the Moog stuff a lot, it’s not accurate, it’s not forensic. The Prophet is forensic in that the filter is so musical and you can make such tiny incremental moves on it to obtain real interesting tones. The Moog is just a big thick thing, the filter just opens and closes, you lose all the bass in it when you open it. But it’s this huge textural sound which I’ve always quite liked. I’m thinking of getting this new Moog called the Muse, it’s a new 8 voice polysynth, it’s like the be-all-and-end-all of Moog products, I think it’s amazing.
You did the JAPAN track ‘Life Without Buildings’ as JBK with Steven Wilson live in 1997, what made you pick that one?
Well, mainly because it was instrumental! There’s only a little bit of vocals in the middle which we knew the audience would sing! *laughs*
It just made sense, it would have been odd to do a JAPAN song with somebody else singing, especially if me, Steve and Mick were up there. It’s such a great track and went down so well live, it was epic and immense. We had Theo Travis on flute and saxophones, Steven Wilson was doing the melodic parts, it was great! I wish we’d done more of those shows really, it was a good band.
What’s next, are you playing live with this new album or going onto your next recorded work?
I think I’m going to promote it with listening events, that I think is a nice way to get people involved, do some informal gatherings, we can do some nice studio surrounds for playback as it’s in Dolby Atmos or some intimate vinyl lounge playbacks, maybe get someone to interview me and do a Q&A with the audience. People like to come to that as much as a gig sometimes.
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its sincerest thanks to Richard Barbieri
Having ended 2024 opening for popular American indie band VAMPIRE WEEKEND at London’s Brixton Academy plus their usual seasonal appearances at The Cavern in Liverpool, 2025 sees CHINA CRISIS busier than ever on the live circuit.
Gary Daly and Eddie Lundon started CHINA CRISIS in 1981; signing to Inevitable Records who launched the careers of WAH! And DEAD OR ALIVE, their debut single ‘African & White’ was championed by John Peel. CHINA CRISIS were picked up by Virgin Records and on the release their first album ‘Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms, Some People Think It’s Fun To Entertain’ in 1982, the pair were opening for SIMPLE MINDS with the profile helping to achieve their Top20 breakthrough ‘Christian’.
The second CHINA CRISIS album ‘Working With Fire & Steel – Possible Pop Songs Volume 2’ produced by Mike Howlett spawned their biggest hit single ‘Wishful Thinking’ in 1984. But a fresh approach the following year saw their third album ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’ produced by Walter Becker of STEELY DAN fame. With the subsequent tour featuring what is often considered the classic Chinas line-up of Daly and Lundon with Gazza Johnson on bass, the late Kevin Wilkinson on drums and Brian McNeill on keyboards, this most successful of the CHINA CRISIS long players celebrates its 40th Anniversary in 2025.
With show formats ranging from synthpop quartet to full 9 piece band, today the live nucleus includes keyboard player Jack Hymers and saxophonist Eric Animan; the pair were involved in the recent reworks collection ‘China Greatness’ issued on independent label Last Night From Glasgow. It took CHINA CRISIS back into the Top10 of the UK album chart for the first time since 1985.
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK had a long entertaining chat with Gary Daly over a game of Vintage Synth Trumps about the workings of CHINA CRISIS through the years and much more…
The first card is a Roland SH-3a…
Oh gosh, I know nothing about that AT ALL! I didn’t know it existed!
It is a rare one, but I saw a synth that you used from the Roland family on your solo album ‘Gone From Here’, the RS-202 String Machine…
That belongs to my friend Chris Barlow from Manchester, he would have brought that to the session and known his way around it. It was great, we had David Berger who was the engineer and also the drummer in a band called OUTFIT, he’s Swiss-French and lives in Liverpool.
What we were trying to do was recreate the Bowie / Fripp / Eno thing. So David would be engineering and sort of messing the sound as we went along, then Chris who knew the equipment inside out and there was me trying to come up with the lines and melodies to the song. It was a lovely way of working, it was very productive because we knew what headspace we were in, so it was “let him get on with this, you get on with that and I get on with this”, it really does free you up if you work as a team with synthesizers.
You said a few years ago that one of the early influences on CHINA CRISIS was MAGAZINE and their keyboardist Dave Formula had a Roland RS-505 which superseded theRS-202…
I would have seen Dave playing it! I would have seen them a lot… I originally saw them at the De Montford Hall, then The Empire. It was always with John McGeoch on guitar, Barry Adamson on bass, I thought they were amazing, there was something about them. I’ve just got the MAGAZINE boxed set for Christmas.
I’d listened to a lot of prog rock and my favourite ones were the keyboard-based bands like YES… although they are not considered “a keyboard band”, I consider them a keyboard band because of Rick Wakeman. I liked ELP and even HAWKWIND as they were a bit sonically synthesized. So when I moved to new wave, that’s what helped because there was the likes of MAGAZINE who were a bit rocky and a bit proggy, but it was new enough for me to go “oh, that’s not what I’ve been listening to, it’s almost punk”.
Around that time, everyone was using synths differently. There was SIMPLE MINDS’ Mick MacNeil, Vini Reilly in THE DURUTTI COLUMN along his guitars, OMD, THE HUMAN LEAGUE, HEAVEN 17, all these people I suspect had no formal training and were all self-taught, inspired by KRAFTWERK and all of that. It became that we could do it as well.
It’s interesting to look back now that all these groups were lumped in together as “synthesizer bands” but who all sounded so different, which perhaps isn’t so much the case now… so you’ve mentioned John McGeoch, Dave Formula and Barry Adamson, so did you like VISAGE?
I did, I bought the records when they came out and I was so excited about it. But I was originally put off for a little bit by the New Romantic thing, I didn’t really like seeing members of MAGAZINE in there, I wanted them to be completely MAGAZINE…
So you wanted them to do another ‘Sweetheart Contact’! *laughs*
Oh my god, absolutely!
What about Midge Ure and Steve Strange’s involvement in VISAGE?
I wasn’t too keen on Midge Ure at the time, only because he seemed a gun for hire, I knew of SLIK and RICH KIDS so I was like “What the hell?”; Midge was a bit of a “Mexican flea”, jumping from one act to another… obviously Midge is amazing and the sound of VISAGE.
D’ya know what? We actually met Steve Strange about 12 years ago, we did this gig with him at the O2 and he had to share a dressing room with us! We had a few people in the band then who were quite badly behaved with various stimulants and what not! And that poor guy Steve is trying to recover from all manner of addictions and our band are bouncing off the walls before even going on stage! *laughs*
Steve seemed really lovely, I wish I’d met him before and it would have been nice to chat, we did a tribute gig to him in Port Talbot with all these friends of his after he’d passed. He was like one of those little figures, there he was in the video to ‘Ashes To Ashes’, that was an amazing song and put Bowie totally in the ball park of new wave. But the fact that Steve was there walking on the beach with him in that weird video effect, it made you think “oh, he’s not just a Blitz Kid”!
The thing is, in the North, we had a very negative view of that whole New Romantic thing, we thought “why would you do that in front of your music?” without realising you could do anything. We weren’t brought up in families like that where you were encouraged to be as individual as possible or to express yourself as much as you want, with synthesizers or without. Ours was big working class families, Eddie was one of 10, I was one of 8! EVERYONE went to work, the fact that me and Ed ditched our jobs at 17 was AN OUTRAGE because everyone went to work, but we stayed at home and tried to come up with these songs all that time.
Another card, this one is the Roland Jupiter 6…
Oh, that I don’t know! I’ve had two Jupiter 8s, one I owned twice in that I sold it and then bought it back and sold it!
The Korg Polysix was your first polyphonic synth but was it a bit of a revelation once you upgraded to a Jupiter 8?
The Jupiter 8 is my favourite synth, I would kill to have one of those again. Mark Phythian who mixed the last couple of CHINA CRISIS albums and my solo album, he was our tea boy during ‘Working With Fire & Steel’ and then goes on to win 3 Grammys! These are in his studio room at his terrace house in Liverpool where he’s got a Jupiter 8 but his isn’t working, it’s faulty… that instrument, the big thing about it was we could sequence it with the drum machine. So we could trigger it. You could imagine, all of a sudden, I was arpeggiating all the basslines in different kind of ways, it sounded very convincing, that we knew what we were doing but really, we weren’t! *laughs*
So was the sequencing at the start of the ‘Working With Fire & Steel’ song, was that done by triggering the Jupiter?
Possibly, it sounds like it would have… I think that wasn’t me sequencing that, the producer Mike Howlett did that later, triggering it via the gate through the desk, I think he might have done it like that.
You’d mentioned Mark Phythian and his Grammys, but you’ve had a habit of working with young producers who go onto big things, like Gil Norton who did half of your first album?
He was our original engineer who would have introduced us to the 8 track at Amazon Studios in Kirkby and then to the 16 track. Working with Gil was so enlightening and fantastic. For all our inexperience, Gil would set the desk up and he knew we’d been working with the Portastudio for a few years, so we knew about slowing tape down, speeding it up, turning it over, reversing it, what you could do with delays, how you could stereo them… so Gil would be more than happy to have us go in with the bare pickings of a tune like the 4 tracks of our Portastudio and spend the whole day coming up with stuff. That doesn’t happen like that, so he was happy to set it up and let us get on with it while he went to have a cup of tea. Then he’s come back in, see what we’d been doing and get it to tape.
With the Portastudio, because you only had 4 tracks, you had to make decisions about what to keep and what to lose and what to bounce. So when we got onto the 8 track and then the 16 track, we knew how to do that with Gil. The great thing with Gil was that he taught us; so if he said we should bounce this with that, then it freed up another 4 tracks. So that meant you had to commit to the sound you were making, because it was going to be there at the finished mix. So by the time you go to the end of your recording, there was very little that you had to do because you had been doing it as you went along.
It was funny how Gil became so successful, working with bands like THE PIXIES and FOO FIGHTERS, I was like, that’s not the Gil I knew, the Gil I knew was very unassuming and I don’t remember him wanting an amazing career, it was like he was happy just to be in Kirkby and doing what we were doing. The clientele that came in ranged from SAD CAFÉ to Ken Dodd to ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN, that was the centre of our universe really. We only went away because we were in a band and working with other producers, but I always thought Gil would stay there and become the chief guy.
So Gil co-produced the second “Entertainment” side of ‘Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms’, had that been the intention to keep it 8 track, because the impression I get from reading between the lines was that the more sophisticated “Difficult” first side and particularly the sessions produced by Steve Levine weren’t that smooth?
No, it wasn’t great at all… it was great working with Steve, he’s lovely guy but we felt like he was… what we heard coming out of the speakers, we weren’t entirely happy with really. He was sort of getting a bit too involved, he was playing us too many of his ideas and committing them to tape… we were like “What are you doing? That’s not your job! This is OUR track and this is OUR job!”
He was committed to recording the rest of the album, so me and Ed walked out a bit unawares that he’d been booked to the whole album and a contract had been signed, that’s money and people’s wages and everything! And we’re just going “Oh, we’ve tried a couple of weekends with him, we don’t like him, we’ll do it ourselves! See ya!”, Virgin must have thought “WHO THE F*CK ARE THESE KIDS? WALKING ON STEVE LEVINE, WALKING OUT ON PETE WALSH?” *laughs*
What happened was, we OK’ed him to mix what we’d done with him, so three tracks, one was a version of ‘No Ordinary Lover’ which we went “no, that’s not happening”! The other two ‘Seven Sports For All’ and ‘Feel To Be Driven Away’, we thought “oh they are quite good actually, he’s done a great job there”; and I think had he done it all, it most probably would have been a very successful record actually! *laughs*
Having said that, my experience of working with Pete Walsh and the three tracks he did (he did four but one didn’t make it), I thought he was the best on that record, he could have done it all, it would have been an incredible record. Oh, you want to see the track sheets for ‘Christian’, there’s nothing on it, there’s literally NOTHING on it, and that’s him! Pete, he knew! He was so great!
They’re all great these producers, honest to god, every one of them know their job… ok Steve overstepped it a little bit but only a little bit, they all of them kept exactly what we’d done of the demos and then elaborated on them or supplemented or replaced, but they all did it in such a way where they were like “whatever these guys played to the record company, they must have liked it, we’ve got to keep that ingredient”.
Even when Walter Becker was like “Gary, you can’t play… not the kind of playing I know”, he still made sure that he got every single thing I’d done on the demo onto the tracks before we worked with anybody else. They were all like that. With Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, even though by then we had Brian McNeill on keyboards, he wouldn’t have played on my demos for ‘Arizona Sky’ or the tracks off ‘What Price Paradise’. So when we went in, I would have done mine little bits and Brian would have recreated them. It’s a great thing that method of production, holding onto the essential thing. I suspect they didn’t do that with FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD*laughs*
The next card is a Roland SH-101…
Ah yes! I would have worked with that, I can’t quite remember on what, but we would have had one, although not for long. Gazza most probably would have had something to do with that. I didn’t like it when they started doing like faders and quality of the plastic casing felt a bit… it wasn’t as robust as the SH-09 or the Yamaha CS-10 which were solid little things that had a weightiness to them. The SH-101, that could almost be “oh, we did this on a 3D printer!” *laughs*
I remember in your second Smash Hits interview that you’d said you felt sort of obliged to keep up with the technology and were buying lots of equipment but then regretted it, did you ever feel the pressure as a band to keep up technologically?
No, because by the time Brian McNeill had taken over on keys, it was him who was in charge of whatever we needed and I just had what I had at home to do my demos on. Brian had a rack mount of DX-7s, about 9 or 10 of them, he would have used them on CHINA CRISIS for brass and this and that, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near that. Sequencers, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near them, anything that was digitally programmed, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it.
If I worked on the DX-7 which I had and the DX-7 II, say I went into the algorithm, I didn’t know what I was doing so then I would say to Gazza to teach me how to save stuff, he understood it a bit more. I was one of those guys who when I got something out of the box, I discarded the manual whereas Gazza and Brian didn’t, they would sit and get their heads around it. I was always intuitive, as in I liked to get involved and hear it and feel it, as opposed to read how to do it. I’ve never read how to do anything, I left school and I wasn’t entered for any exams at all because my thing was not to open the book.
Another card, it’s the MicroMoog… did you ever own a Moog?
No, but Brian did, he’s got the proper Minimoogs. This was when they started making them more plastic. We did have a Moog in Amazon, it was the one Gary Numan used…
Oh, the Polymoog?
Yes, it was beautiful. It was in the studio and it wasn’t ours but when we went in, we always used that, it was fantastic. It was warm and rich, I saw Gary Numan with it and I was like “YEAH! THIS IS IT!”
What have you been listening to lately?
I’ve just been listening to some old live tapes, CHINA CRISIS live in the USA, OH MY GOD! F*CKING HELL! It’s such a rubbish recording, it even has all the tech credits at the end, y’know “A Star Systems production by Ray Skidberry, mix engineer Kevin Clark…”, but it sounds like dogsh*t! It hasn’t been mixed at all! But it’s always interesting hearing a little bit of them *laughs*
Something much better I’ve also been listening to is this ‘Shanghai’ 12 inch single by Albert Au released on EMI Hong Kong, the B-side of this is ‘Black Man Ray’ in Cantonese; it’s lovely y’know, in the middle he uses steel drums… we got it at the time, it’s so fun. Everywhere I go, if I come across a record shop, I always go in it… the other day at a gaff that had a café near where we were playing, I got the ‘Black Man Ray’ 12” for a fiver… ok, I HAVE obviously got it but you can never have too many copies of ‘Black Man Ray’ *laughs*
Next card is the Oberheim OB-Xa, was that a synth you worked with?
That’s the ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’ era, I really don’t know how we ended up with it. It might have been something to do with SIMPLE MINDS and Mick MacNeil. I remember for the life of us that we couldn’t get to grips with it, not like we did with the Poly 6, the Jupiter 8, the SH09 and the Yamaha CS10, they were magic really, I completely got engrossed with them.
The Oberheim’s sounds were incredibly rich but it wasn’t completely user friendly, it didn’t have that arpeggio thing which the Jupiter8 had, which was gold for me… I wasn’t a musician as such so even up to ‘Arizona Sky’ and stuff, I was still using drum machine to trigger the arpeggiator and then use the echo unit to get that wondering motoring kind of sequencer effects.
The Oberheim would have been the melody line on ‘Bigger The Punch I’m Feeling’, Walker Becker would get me and Eddie to all the parts we’d done on the demos with all the sounds we’d used, then that would be it and Nick Magnus would be involved to bring in chords and getting sounds quickly. We weren’t like that at all, our approach was a lot more organic and painstaking. And then… it fell out the back of a van outside The Ritz in Manchester!! *roars of laughter*
That was in 1989, ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE to get the f*cking insurance on it!!! We were touring ‘Diary Of A Hollow Horse’, things were tight and management had sort of hinted “do you really need that? We don’t need it, could it fall out of the lorry!”… Hahahahaha! I WASN’T personally involved in that deviation but what a mental thing to do! Smash a synth to get the money! It shows you where we were at, mentally with each other, with the record company, with management, everything was just going *******!!!
But that’s the kind of band we were! You’ve got to remember me and Eddie were from Kirkby, we’d grown up in big families and all our friends, nobody had anything and you wouldn’t be completely light fingered but you’d by hook or by crook, you’d make stuff happen, do you know what I mean? Amazon Studios, me and Eddie would bunk in through the window in the night with our Portastudio and mic to record the piano! Out of necessity, you would!
You recently got back into the album charts with ‘China Greatness’, what was it like revisiting the back catalogue to select inclusions, particular the “lost” jewel ‘It’s Never Too Late’?
Once we saw people doing that orchestrations thing like OMD at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, people were coming up to us and saying “your music could be amazing like that” but we were like “yeah, it would but it’s never gonna happen!”. So we were of a mind and what happened was a guy Steve Hammonds who was in charge of all the CHINA CRISIS deluxe editions, I said to him “if I wanted to get hold of our masters, could you get them for us to work on?” and he got back to me and said “yes, tell us what do you want”.
So me and Eddie chose 7 songs each, we wanted ones we really liked and we had to include some of the singles. It took 3 days to send the files because they were so big and hi-res. I went through these with Dave Berger who worked on my solo album and you’ve got to remember I’ve not heard these since we recorded them and it WAS a moment. Then we gave Jack carte blanche to do whatever he wanted. We tried to use the strings from our 40th Anniversary concert because we’d recorded them but had to replace them because they were out of tune which always happens when it’s a live thing. So Eric transcribed the new brass parts that Jack had done. ‘China Greatness’ is literally all Jack’s and Mark Phythian’s work. We might have made a couple of suggestions but not much at all.
So had ‘It’s Never Too Late’ always been preying on your mind, that it was shelved for ‘Working With Fire & Steel’ and then when it finally came out, it was tucked away on the bonus 12” of ‘Black Man Ray’ so wasn’t really heard by many people, even fans?
That was just bad management really… I wrote that song on guitar and possibly one of the first songs I ever wrote on guitar because I couldn’t play guitar. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, I thought it was a little bit wet but it’s quite lovely really, I think it is a bit special in a pop way, it’s got that thing of what CHINA CRISIS had. We had all these lovely melodies and lines that would introduce the song like on ‘Wishful Thinking’, every one of our songs (almost) has an introductory line that catches your attention doesn’t it? Same with ‘It’s Never Too Late’.
Yes, it was us who made the decision to drop it, but someone should have took us to one side and said “That song is very much like the song we think will be the big single off the album, we should really keep hold of that because you are going to want a follow-up”! But we f*cking followed it up with ‘Hanna Hanna’ that was NOTHING like ‘Wishful Thinking’ and people were listening going “we don’t even know what group that is, you don’t sound like that other song, different singer, different everything!”
I remember ‘It’s Never Too Late’ was never even on the sleeve tracklisting or the label of the ‘Black Man Ray’ bonus 12”, there was just this sticker. I remember when I heard it, I thought it was a great song but to be fair, I can understand why it wasn’t included on the ‘Working With Fire & Steel’ album…
Yeah, because some of the songs already on the album like ‘Here Come A Raincloud’ and ‘The Soul Awakening’ were more what we wanted to be… ‘The Soul Awakening’ to me was like ‘Julie With…’ from ‘Before & After Science’ by Brian Eno, we were trying to be bit like that. ‘Here Come A Raincloud’ was beautiful, it was a reaction what was going on, the strikes, the miners, a lot of unemployment and stuff that wasn’t great. We were going home to that from our lovely lives in the Roosevelt Hotel in LA with Iggy Pop in the swimming pool, then all of a sudden in Kirkby, all the factories are closing down, the police are battling with miners, oh my god! So ‘Here Come A Raincloud’ when you hear it on the John Peel session, I’d written it on bass guitar…
That ties in nicely with my next question as there’s ‘The Complete Sessions 1982-1983’ which features CHINA CRISIS recordings for the John Peel show and released by Last Night From Glasgow… this isn’t doing down the album version but I actually feel the John Peel session recording of ‘Here Come A Raincloud’ is better, the overdriven drum machine just gives it that extra eerie tension which fits the lyrics…
Yeah…
…the John Peel version of ‘This Occupation’ is particularly interesting because it’s full-on synthpop! What’s the drum machine you are using?
That’s a Roland TR808 triggering the bass synth, it was us trying to get a bit A CERTAIN RATIO and ABC, it was all getting a bit funky and we were quite keen on doing that because we loved Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ and that kind of thing… the fact were doing it all with synths was what we were involved with, that was just a natural thing to happen. But lots of people were making a racket then like CABARET VOLTAIRE and all these people, I can remember listening to all that thinking they were great with the solidity of what they were doing, it was forceful and solid with great sounds, but they lacked songs and melody.
We were so involved with melody and when we were out on the road, we would have mixtapes that would have everyone on it, songs like ‘Wichita Lineman’ to THE BEE GEES to Dusty Springfield, Dionne Warwick, all these great songs… we didn’t have any snobbery in our band, there’s so much music out there.
You sent me a photo of your Boss Doctor Rhythm drum machine, was that a bit of a revelation when you got that?
Yeah, ‘African & White’, we wrote that around that drum machine. We didn’t know how to programme it so we were just hitting stuff and pressing play. One morning we pressed play and it did this “tsk-tsk-tsk, tsk-tsk” and straight away I picked up the bass and did that “boom-boom-boom-boom, boom”, its f*cking Motown, all the music we’d grown up with! Then Eddie did that echoing guitar sound, although he never replicates that live and I don’t sing it the octave down with the high octave… I often think, we should be trying to do it to see if people will respond. It’s difficult because music mutates over time, especially live.
Talking of live, 2025 sees the 40th Anniversary of ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’…
What, Walter Becker’s debut solo album? *laughs*
What are you favourite memories of making this record?
I must admit, the actual making of it, I had such a lovely time and my roles had changed so much. What you have to remember is we’d done two albums, we’d had chart success, Top10, we’d lived and toured, stuff like that… so we were really not wanting to see each other again. Eddie and Gazza were working together, I was working on my own. That only lasted a few weeks but it would have felt like a long time. But we’d written ‘Black Man Ray’, ‘Bigger The Punch I’m Feeling’ and stuff, y’know…
Once Walter was involved, I was neither here nor there… I was resigned to the fact that I was in “a band” now, it’s not me and Eddie anymore with Gazza, Kevin and Walter being this incredible rhythm section, making what me and Ed had done really sound amazing. But at the same time, I was still “this isn’t how I’d have it” but I was happy to go along with it. That’s why it’s not my favourite CHINA CRISIS album, it’s like my third favourite but I’m not even sure it’s that! *laughs*
But it was such a happy time for us because Kevin rejoined the band, Walter so lovely and really enjoyed being with us… I think we reminded him of STEELY DAN when they had Skunk Baxter and all these people in, having success with ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ so he slotted right in.
I had such a great time singing for him, he thought my lyrics were genius and he’s actually in print saying that, he thought ‘Black Man Ray’ was like THE BEATLES… I was just stoned all the time and he was very happy for me to be like that. We’d sing in the evening and it was very meticulous, lots of tracking and lots of takes but I was just having a laugh. So when he was telling me to do things and repeatedly do it, I was like yeah, not a problem. And when they were comping and all that, I could have a smoke and then come back in *laughs*
It really was a great time for us, so I have very fond memories of the album even though I don’t think it’s the best album. I can see WHY people think it’s the best album because it’s got that sonic thing to it, a cohesion that makes it. But I’m of a mind that if you really want to hear CHINA CRISIS and US playing and US performing, then that’s ‘Working With Fire & Steel’. That’s because that is me and Ed, Gazza and Kev have just joined us, there’s no session keyboard players, everything you hear is me with a bit of Ed. But I do think ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’ is like Walter’s solo album but we were the writers for it and he used our band but with his ideas *laughs*
With the Flaunt The Imperfection’ tour, it was like you were finally enjoying playing live for first time because I’d seen you at the London Lyceum in 1983 and you weren’t very good then…
Yeah, there was no stage presence and no stage craft in 1983, because we weren’t particularly interested in that. I certainly didn’t want to stand up in front of people, there was a lot of pressure on us to become a band. Everyone else was enjoying being in a band but I wanted be at home with my Portastudio and Jupiter 8, I was generally the only one who ever turned up for albums with a finished demo. I might get Eddie or Gazza round to do a bit but mostly everyone was happy to just elevate the band thing.
My favourite CHINA CRISIS album is ‘Working With Fire & Steel’, I do like ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’ but it is music of its time which was more Americanised, more FM radio-friendly with more live playing… but the album of yours which despite its highlights that I’ve never got on with as a whole is ‘What Price Paradise’…
What happened with ‘What Price Paradise’ was we got a residential rehearsal place and then made the songs. Y’know, I can’t stand the sound of that album… quintessentially the drums were the wrong sound and they were used for all of it. I was like, you can’t fix it if you’ve used it for all of it! Again, we got into a position where it’s moving at such a pace, it wasn’t me and Eddie anymore and more so once we’d got to ‘What Price Paradise’.
Of course, Brian McNeill had joined as the keyboard player and happy to be involved. So even though I would arrive with ‘Arizona Sky’, it would be completely redone sonic wise. I was resigned to it being “this is the band” and not being about my little demo as great as that sounds… I feel the band went a bit “blokey” on ‘What Price Paradise’…
I’d never thought of it like that before but it makes sense and I’ll try and use an analogy… it’s like those two NEW ORDER albums without Gillian Gilbert, they’re a bit rock and not that good yet when she’s back on ‘Music Complete’, some of the old magic reappears. You know yourself that it’s often the chemistry of the people you have that makes a band successful rather than musicianship or contribution… I seem to remember from reading the deluxe reissue booklet notes you weren’t that keen on the live drummer you had for the ‘Working With Fire & Steel’ tour?
Oh Traxie O’Toole, he went on to do quite well actually and ended up playing for Steve Hackett who was in GENESIS. But for us, he was f*cking shocking man! He just couldn’t help himself, he paid no attention to what Kevin had done or was on the tracks, but he couldn’t restrain himself, he’d be doing proper jazz fills and stuff inappropriately, in the wrong place in the wrong song *laughs*
He sounds like the live drummer that DEPECHE MODE have now! *laughs*
Yeah!
OK, next card is an Octave Cat… you had one and it was supposed to be an ARP Odyssey copy but with knobs instead of sliders, was it ever any good?
Oh yeah! It felt a bit cheapskate, it just wasn’t made very well. We used it on a memorable occasion when we were playing Kirklands in Liverpool 1981 for the release of ‘African & White. We did three Mondays as a kind of residency, first Monday hardly anyone come, second Monday f*cking mobbed, third Monday hardly anyone come. It was me, Ed and Dave Reilly on drums while we had backing tracks on the Portastudio. At one of the gigs I remember, I played a topline on the Cat and managed to detune the oscillator! I couldn’t f*cking get it back so I had to turn the volume off and mimed to look like I was doing something with the actual music everyone was hearing! *laughs*
So not a great synth?
No, I think we gave it away! It didn’t make an appearance on any record! You sort of fall in love with what you are working with which is why guitarists have their favourite guitars. Keyboards have their particular sound.
So there’s a 10th anniversary reissue of ‘Autumn In The Neighbourhood’ as a vinyl LP coming as well which will see it more widely available?
The only reason it’s happening is to get it in the shops so that people around the world can get it. I won’t be keen to make it available for too long, I do like having ownership of that record and I want to retain that really. A lot of those songs originally were me starting my solo album. I convinced Ed that we should send them round to a few people to get a reaction and they all thought it was CHINA CRISIS. I knew nobody was interested in me doing a solo record so that was it. I want the album to get the credit it deserves, the fans absolutely loved it but otherwise, it was like nobody knows about it. Why hasn’t it been reviewed, why hasn’t Mark Phythian won a Grammy for the mix, y’know?
A bouncy little ditty called ‘Everyone You Know’ came from those sessions and was given away free as part of the original Pledge Music crowdfunding campaign, it wasn’t on the CD but was an added bonus on the first vinyl issue of the album, will it remain?
It wasn’t on the original CD because I felt the approach we took on ‘Everyone You Know’ was a bit too poptastic and I was like “Ooooh! Who’s that?” *laughs*
It’s a great song, a Gary and Eddie one because that’s his riff, although I played it. He had that in another tune but he did nothing with it so I started playing it and then the next thing you know, I wrote a song and showed it to Ed, he absolutely loved it.
I made a bit of a mistake, when we put it on the first vinyl, it didn’t seem to fit into the running order. The end of ‘Autumn’ with ‘Wonderful New World’ just seemed correct as its about loss but you’ve got to look forward, it’s beautiful… and then it goes “BANG!” into ‘Everyone You Know’, it’s not f*cking right! So we might think of about maybe changing that running order for this edition. It will be a great one live though, it would suit the CHINA CRISIS synthpop quartet format but it’s a bit of a one that…
2025 also sees you opening for SIMPLE MINDS somewhere in summertime, that’s going to be a nice reunion as they were important early champions of CHINA CRISIS weren’t they? You supported them on the ‘New Gold Dream’ tour…
I’d never seen anything like it. We’d toured with ORANGE JUICE and played little gigs with ALTERED IMAGES and stuff, but when we were with SIMPLE MINDS, they were the hottest f*cking band in the country! Every gig was mobbed, it all had an atmosphere and then the whole place would go mental when they opened with ‘New Gold Dream’! I can imagine for me and Ed, we’re stood there, a couple of nice boys with their nice songs looking at the whole theatre jumping, it was SO electric, it was like F*CKING HELL MAN!
They were so kind to us, they took us on their bus, we stayed in the same hotels and in the US, they were the same… they didn’t have to, they could have insisted we buy onto the tour and we do our own transport. It did help that Bruce Findlay, their manager was about to start managing CHINA CRISIS so he would have told them that we were going to be part of the Schoolhouse Management set-up. But they were like us, working class lads who taught themselves everything they know and we were learning just being with them, experiencing what it was like. They were so self-assured, they’d been doing it for a good while so they were ready and they were great.
It’s a shame about what happened to that line-up of SIMPLE MINDS, oh my god! Mick MacNeil, I’ve never heard a keyboard player like him, the fact that it was all on the Jupiter8 was like WOW! And Derek Forbes, those basslines and Charlie was just like, he was so handsome and his sound was so great, y’know. I originally saw them supporting MAGAZINE at The Empire and then on their own at Eric’s. So me and Ed would have seen them and bought ‘Life In A Day’ and ‘Real To Real Cacophony’. I remember the first song I wrote, I tried to do something like the ‘Life In A Day’ title song.
In 2025, it’s like CHINA CRISIS are playing live everywhere, in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, Germany, Holland, plus dates opening for SIMPLE MINDS and SQUEEZE, how does it feel to be almost busier than back in the day?
I think we’re good at it now, which I don’t think we ever were back then… I mean, if we could have the classic band of Kevin, Gazza and Brain now, we’d be unreal.
We started CHINA CRISIS so we didn’t have to get a job, the jobs they wanted us to have were on an industrial estate or in a factory if you know what I mean. I feel like after 40 years that we’ve made it our job so we are very workman-like, we’re professional about it and we make sure we turn up at the right time, we make sure everybody goes home relatively happy, that kind of thing.
I do love getting to play for people who may never have seen us before. Last year we played Singapore for like only the second time and there’s families there who can’t believe they’ve finally got to see you, their kids listen to your music in the car and on holidays, they’ve come with mum and dad; that’s a really lovely thing, that’s the positive in that we can still do it and still enjoy it. Even when I’m annoyed, I have a laugh, I let the audience know that I’m having to work tonight but guess what? Let’s have a laugh, you have to enjoy your work.
When you’re a creative person, I feel you do need a bit of space, don’t be that person who’s an entertainer for a bit, be another person who plans to go into a studio and plans to get the songs recorded. With it being self-produced and stuff, the amount of energy and effort, you don’t appreciate it when you’re younger but I can tell you ‘Autumn In The Neighbourhood’ was a gargantuan f*cking task of just getting everybody available and everybody paid, all the bills met, keeping the quality control up etc, the level of teamwork you have to inspire in people… you haven’t really got the time and energy for that if you’re out the door every other few days entertaining people. The pro plus is you get to experience it all with everybody and everybody loves it so much including yourselves. We’re a great band at the moment, everybody’s happy and focussed and mostly sober. The only downside is I do feel it encroaches on the creativity being so busy.
It’s funny isn’t it when you’ve achieved so much, even though I don’t think it was a lot… if it was a school report, I would say it was “fair to middling, could have tried harder”. People respond to the hits so much and you’re lucky to have them, but actually it’s a lot of the other songs that I properly enjoy, I really do. Over the last 20 years, me and Ed have not stopped, we’re now in a position where you don’t ever have to stop… if you don’t want to, you can literally carry on. People have connected with us in such a way, they’re quite happy for you to still to keep coming and be around. We were so privileged to be indulged by our families when we were 17-18. And then we were 18-19 when we got signed.
Finally, is there a synth favourite of all time?
That would be the Jupiter 8, that IS ‘Working With Fire & Steel’… the Korg Polysix is ‘Difficult Shapes…’, the DX-7 is ‘Flaunt..’ and Roland D50 was ‘What Price Paradise’, I lose track after that! *laughs*
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to Gary Daly
CHINA CRISIS will be performing ‘Flaunt The Imperfection’ for its 40th Anniversary throughout 2025 – for information on these and other 2025 live dates in the UK and internationally, please go to https://linktr.ee/chinacrisismusic
While Gary Numan is often seen as the synthesizer’s first major pop star, his biggest influence was the first incarnation of ULTRAVOX! lead by John Foxx.
Following that self-titled 1977 debut with tracks co-produced by Brian Eno like ‘My Sex’, ULTRAVOX! gradually increased their use of synthesizers as part of a sound that stood out at the height of punk. The leadlines and soloing on ‘The Man Who Dies Every Day’ from their second album ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ demonstrated how powerful and fierce synths could be.
After the third album ‘Systems Of Romance’ in 1978 produced by Conny Plank which spawned standout moment such as ‘Slow Motion’, ‘Quiet Men’ and ‘Just For A Moment’, the technology had become so affordable and straightforward to use that Foxx saw he could realise his future musical vision without a band. Using just synths and drum machines with occasional bass guitar, the end result was the seminal 1980 debut solo album ‘Metamatic’ engineered by Gareth Jones. “It was minimal, primitive technopunk” said Foxx, “Car crash music tailored by Burtons”
For a short period with singles like ‘Underpass’, ‘No-One Driving’ and ‘Burning Car’, John Foxx became an unlikely pop star in his grey suit with Top40 hits, appearances on ‘Top Of The Pops’ with a band all equipped with Yamaha battleship keyboards and a previously unreleased track from the ‘Metamatic’ sessions ‘My Face’ given away free on a flexidisc attached to the front cover of ‘Smash Hits’ magazine.
Despite what appeared to be a long hiatus between 1986 to 1990 which can now be seen as nothing by today’s standards, John Foxx has been extremely prolific in his solo work and collaborations with the likes of Tim Simenon, Louis Gordon, Jori Hulkkonen, Jim Jupp, Robin Guthrie, Theo Travis, Steve D’Agostino, Steve Jansen, the late Harold Budd and his main partner-in-crime during the 21st Century Ben ‘Benge’ Edwards aka THE MATHS.
John Foxx is not just known for his music but he is also an esteemed visual artist. He recently published a 224 page book ‘Electricity & Ghosts’ collecting reproductions of the varied artistic media he has worked in, including drawing, photography, painting, graphic art, sculpture and collage. Created in collaboration with Grammy award winning graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, it includes a unique first-person narrative of his early college artworks and the creation of ULTRAVOX! which was initially conceived as an art project.
With ‘Metamatic’ soon to celebrate its 45th Anniversary, this was the perfect time for ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK to chat to John Foxx about his close encounters with synthesizers through the years over a game of Vintage Synth Trumps in Düsseldorf, the spiritual home of modern electronic pop.
Photo by Chi Ming Lai
OK John, the first card is a Sequential Circuits Pro-One… had you ever used much equipment from them before?
Not personally no, but Duncan Bridgeman who played on ‘The Garden’ album did. There were some very fine sounds he came out with.
On ‘The Garden’, there was a lot more of a band sound like on ‘Dancing Like A Gun’ and ‘Walk Away’, so were they shaped by jamming together?
I’d bring the song in and play it, then Duncan and Jo Dworniak who is a great bass player, together with Robin Simon from ULTRAVOX! So we’d get together and go through the song a couple of times and then record it.
Duncan Bridgeman and Jo Dworniak were from this Britfunk band I-LEVEL, so how did you come across them?
It was in the studio, I’d heard them recording and thought “these guys are good” so I had a chat with them and it turned out they knew about my music and particularly liked the song ‘Metal Beat’ because it wasn’t regular time, it wasn’t “funky” but it had a broken up rhythm and they enjoyed that. So we got together to try out a few songs and it worked really well.
Next card and it’s a Korg 770…
I liked Korg stuff, a lot of people used it. I had some Korg keyboards although I preferred Roland. THE HUMAN LEAGUE had quite a bit of Korg and profited greatly from it. I remember having a conversation with Martyn Ware about the early synths they got, his first one was a Korg I understand…
The affordability of Korg made things more accessible so could you see a wave of creativity coming with these cheaper synths?
Yes! Because much earlier, the first people I knew who got a synthesizer were GLORIA MUNDI from which Eddie and Sunshine came. Sunshine bought a synthesizer and she put that through an amplifier, it was a knockout sound, so I thought “I’ve got to get one of those!”. It was that which started my interest in actually buying one. This was before ULTRAVOX! had recorded anything.
Did the rest of ULTRAVOX! need much persuading at the time to get into synths and technology?
Not really, Chris Cross particularly was great at getting hold of synths, Billy Currie did it slightly later because we needed to spend more money and we didn’t have any. I remember suggesting to Warren Cann about getting involved is using a drum machine and when he got to grips with it, he really enjoyed it, this was when we were recording ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’. I asked him to switch in rhythms live which he did really well as I played guitar and sang it. That was the beginning of it.
You mentioned Eddie and Sunshine earlier and they did your first ‘Top Of The Pops’ appearance with you… this was visually significant because they all had big Yamaha CS80s. Although they weren’t actually on ‘Underpass’, did you have to hire those in?
No, I couldn’t afford to! The BBC kindly did it for us, they didn’t actually ask us, they planted these things there because they looked good. I use one now because Benge has one, I don’t know how much he paid for it, something like £5 I think but it’s worth a fortune now because it’s one of the most complex synths ever made!
Next is a Roland SH101, did you ever own one?
I have used a 101 but triggered with a rhythm to make bass parts. It was very useful for that but I never used it for anything else… I sold it after I used it which was foolish! I did that quite often!
They’re worth quite a bit now!
I know! Everything I sold is worth quite a bit now! *laughs*
Obviously working with Benge, he has massive synth armoury but when you owned The Garden studio, did you have a stash of synths for artists who hired it used?
They usually brought their own stuff although I did have quite a collection by that time. I particularly loved the Jupiter 8 and I didn’t want anybody to touch it! But when Matt Johnson of THE THE came in, he surreptitiously took it out of the store room and started using it. He had a really great time with it apparently but I didn’t mind, it’s what happens in studios! *laughs*
Ah, the next card is a Korg Poly 6, I seem to recall when you started working with Benge that you quite liked the Korg Mono/Poly?
Yes, although it’s not that I favour one synth over another, some are appropriate for what you are doing. Benge is usually the one who says “let’s try this one” and I’ll try a few synths out and one will sound right. There’s no particular favouritism going on, far from it, you just want the right sound.
You have the 45th anniversary of ‘Metamatic’ coming out and there’s a new vinyl remaster??
Yes, we’re trying to digitise the old tapes but we might have re-digitise it because digitisation changes in quality over the years, so it’s better now than it has been.
A lot of the stuff that was in the ‘Metamatic’ vaults is out now but is there anymore left?
Well, there are lots of bits because Gareth Jones and I used to put things down at the end of tapes to see if we got a good sound, you could never get the same sound back again. So we put things down like drum machine and processing though flangers and phasers and all that, sounds on the ARP or whatever sounded interesting to remind ourselves what we were doing because quite often when you’re making sounds, you don’t get to the sound you want but halfway there, something interesting happens so you want to keep it, but you still need to go on get to the sound you want. So there are lots of moments like that which we recorded.
Another card and it’s the EMS VCS3… as a youngster, did that fascinate you seeing it being used on the telly?
Oh yeah, Brian Eno had one when we were in the studio with him and Chris Cross enjoyed playing with that, I think he used it on ‘My Sex’ for one of the parts. So he later bought the compact AKS suitcase version, that was the first synth we got so that’s the memory of that one. Eno used it extensively on all his records like ‘Another Green World’, it was a great record, I thought it was like a new kind of jazz, it was non-conventional jazz, it was kind of freeform music. There were pieces on that record like ‘Sky Saw’ which even now sounds tremendous. And ‘Becalmed’ is a lovely track so it was the beginning of Eno finding his feet properly in the studio, moving away from rock ‘n’ roll into something else.
Now ‘Another Green World’ was notable for being half vocal – half instrumental and paved the way for similarly structured albums like David Bowie’s ‘Low’, is that something you would ever consider in your future works?
No, I don’t like mixing the two. I think they should be separate because I don’t think albums should be like a variety show. I think they should set a mood or a world that you go into, and I don’t want any disturbance in that.
That’s an interesting answer…ok, final card and it’s an EDP Wasp…
Ah yeah, Wasps, great fun! I used to borrow one because lots of people had them. I knew where to borrow things from. You can get some beautiful sounds from them.
Photo by Chi Ming Lai
You have this book ‘Electricity & Ghosts’ out compiling your graphic designs, what was the idea behind this?
Like all these things, when I pop my clogs, it’ll all get shuffled into the dustbin if I don’t do anything with it! And it’s as simple as that really!
Your visual art uses a lot of collage like the artwork for the ULTRAVOX! singles ’Slow Motion’ and ‘Quiet Men’. Leading up to your third solo album ‘The Golden Section’, the preceding singles ‘Endlessy’ and ‘Your Dress’ had collage art but for the album cover, you opted for a striking portrait photo taken by the late Brian Griffin, what was your thinking behind that?
It was just me trying to look my best, I was trying to look good! *laughs*
Was the photo intended for the cover or was it you had the photo taken for some other purpose and you liked it?
No, I wanted it to be like that and I already had the name ‘The Golden Section’. I thought “what can I do visually for that?” and then I realised I could do it with Brian Griffin because he used tungsten lighting in his photography and I’d used a lot of it, so it gave you that very rich “golden” effect. I felt it would be right so I had a word with Brian and he said yes.
Photo by Chi Ming Lai
Finally, your favourite synth of all time and why?
Oh, the ARP Odyssey… it’s the best noise making little brute you can ever come across. I still haven’t exhausted it, I’ve been using it for 50 years now and it still surprises me.
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to John Foxx
Special thanks to Steve Malins at Random Management
‘Metamatic’ is released as a 45th anniversary a grey vinyl edition on 17 January 2025, pre-orders through the Official Store will include a limited edition signed print of the album artwork at https://johnfoxx.tmstor.es/product/152300
Although he began with a Fender Telecaster, twin stylus Stylophone and second hand Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder to compose primitive ambient experiments, when a young Dave Ball bought a MiniKorg 800DV duophonic synthesizer, he never looked back.
On his first day as a fresher on the Fine Art degree at Leeds Polytechnic, he asked for directions from a second year student wearing a leopard skin printed shirt and gold lame jeans; that student was Marc Almond and the pair were to make history as SOFT CELL…
Over four decades on, SOFT CELL have proved to be one of the most influential electronic pop acts ever with BRONSKI BEAT, PET SHOP BOYS, FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, PSYCHE, NINE INCH NAILS and even DEPECHE MODE owing more than a debt of gratitude to Messrs Almond and Ball for the doors they opened. During their imperial Some Bizzare phase between 1981-1982, SOFT CELL scored no less than five Top4 UK hit singles with ‘Tainted Love’, ‘Bedsitter’, ‘Say Hello Wave Goodbye’, ‘Torch’ and ‘What’ in little more than 12 months.
After SOFT CELL first disbanded in 1984, Marc Almond would go onto long and varied solo career while Dave Ball found success as a member of the dance duo THE GRID with Richard Norris. Almond and Ball would reunite to co-write three songs for the former’s ‘Tenement Symphony’ album, but a full SOFT CELL reunion would not take place until 2001. A comeback album ‘Cruelty Without Beauty’ was released in 2002 supported by extensive touring but behind the scenes, tensions were lingering. Following Marc Almond’s near-fatal motorcycle accident in 2003, the pair did not speak for many years.
But in 2018, SOFT CELL surprised the world by announcing what was intended to be a final concert at London’s O2 Arena. Having also recorded an excellent new single ‘Northern Lights’ b/w ‘Guilty Cos I Say You Are’, the special magic between Almond and Ball could not be denied. In 2022, their fifth SOFT CELL studio album ‘*Happiness not included’ was released with a number of its songs having been previewed during the duo’s 2021 live celebration of their debut album, now released as the concert film ‘Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret… And Other Stories: Live’.
However, Dave Ball was to have his own brush with mortality, spending part of 2022 in intensive care in a London hospital after seriously damaging his lower vertebrae. Placed in an induced coma, he had to miss SOFT CELL’s North American concert dates. Steadily regaining his health and fitness, Dave Ball is vowing to be on top form again for SOFT CELL’s series of outdoor live shows in 2023.
And it was a chipper Dave Ball who accepted ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s invitation to chat over a round of Vintage Synth Trumps and talk about SOFT CELL’s past, present and future…
So the first Vintage Synth Trumps card is an EMS VCS3…
The first time I saw one of those was Brian Eno using one with ROXY MUSIC and Dave Brock from HAWKWIND had one as well. So there’s a few legendary rock stars that have had them but I’ve never actually owned one. I had a quick play with one once at Guildford University, they have a big music college there so had a Moog System 55 and a VCS3. I was messing around with all the little pins and making weird echoey noises. I’ve always wanted to have one, they look like a lot of fun!
The next card by coincidence is the EMS Synthi AKS which is the compact suitcase version of the VCS3…
These EMS synths are the sort of synths I dream about, I’ve seen them but had no experience recording with them. I always get these two mixed up though, they were based in Putney weren’t they? I think there’s someone still making them but the originals cost a fortune and go for thousands now.
How do you feel about these remake synths, like the Korg ARP Odyssey which you have used live?
I think they’re alright y’know, I’ve got a Behringer 2600, that sounds pretty good… the one that I’m interested in at the moment is a rack mounted Wasp remake which they’ve done. There’s a connection to EMS isn’t there?
Yeah, Chris Huggett who did the original EDP Wasp worked on the Akai S1000 alongside David Cockerell who was at EMS…
…so I’ve bought one, they look like a lot of fun and I really like the sound of them as well. It actually sounded like a wasp, really thin and nasty! *laughs*
You were using the new Korg ARP Odyssey for basslines like on the live version of ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’ that is featured on the ‘Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret…And Other Stories: Live’ film, how you find it compared to the Korg Synthe-Bass SB100 or other synths like the Minimoog?
A lot of the stuff live is programmed to computer and I’m just beefing things up and adding to them. I do like the Korg ARP Odyssey, it’s got a very distinct sound. When I hear one of those, I always think of Billy Currie, especially the early ULTRAVOX stuff, he got that machine sounding fantastic. Also, a lot of early KRAFTWERK videos, you see one as well. That famous ‘Tomorrow’s World’ clip, they had a Minimoog and an Odyssey. I’ve never actually played an original authentic Odyssey so I wouldn’t be able to compare although the keys are smaller… I just take it as what it is. It IS a Korg version.
How do you find those small keys cos you’re a big fella? *laughs*
Yeah, I’ve got big fingers but I’m quite nifty with them. At home when I’m just messing about, I sometimes use one of those Akai MPK things and they have little keys on them. You get used to them and I’m quite nimble with my big fingers! *laughs*
So with the ‘Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret…And Other Stories: Live’ film, what are your memories of those shows and revisiting material like ‘Entertain Me’, ‘Chips On My Shoulder’, ‘Seedy Films’ and ‘Secret Life’ which hadn’t been aired in concert since 1982?
It was great because I’m not in the habit of listening to my old material at all, but as I knew the shows were coming up, I had to check the first album again. It was really refreshing to hear it and listen to how much we’ve changed and stuff. But what was really good about doing the shows was for a lot of people who have great memories of that album, it was the first time they’d ever heard us live, so I think it was great for them to hear the whole album being done live. It was actually the first time we’d done it, we’d never performed the album in its entirety in sequence before.
When we first made it, we used some of the tracks off it but not all of them. It was good to hear it as a whole peace. We are thinking of maybe doing the same thing with ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’, cos that could be quite a good show because a lot of people really love that album as well…
I think that would be a brilliant idea Dave…
We’ve got quite a few possibilities and options after these upcoming outdoor shows and ‘Let it Rock’… is it called ‘Let It Rock’?
It’s called ‘Let’s Rock’ but I do think is the weirdest possible name for a heritage pop festival brand… *laughs*
‘Let’s Rock’, it sounds it could be SHOWADDYWADDY on the bill! *laughs*
Yes! EXACTLY! That’s my point! It’s easy to understand the brand concepts of ‘Rewind’, ‘Here & Now’ and ‘Forever Young’, but ‘Let’s Rock’ when there’s no rock? It is head scratching but they are doing the business…
I’d never heard of them until we were approached… my only problem at the moment with playing gigs is my mobility; I’ll probably have to use a wheelchair to get on stage! It doesn’t really matter because I sit down when I play anyway. So getting on and off stage is my only primary concern at the moment, never mind the 10,000 people that are going to be watching us! Once I’m on stage and I’m locked in, so long as I don’t start wheeling backwards, I’ll be fine! *chuckles*
Here’s another card, and it’s an Oberheim OBXa…
There were two schools, those who went for the OBX and people like me who went for the Prophet 5, it was a very similar sort of synth in terms of the way it worked and the polyphony of it but I was always a Prophet 5 man. But I did buy an Oberheim DMX drum machine which was part of that kit series that included the DSX sequencer and OBX.
Was the DMX more cost effective than the LinnDrum?
When we recorded ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’, we used the Linn 1, the Linn 2 and the DMX so it wasn’t to do with cost, it was just sonics. The Linn was a better machine in terms of it being easier to trigger with a click track, whereas the DMX wasn’t quite as simple, but it was being used on a lot of early hip-hop and electro records so I liked the sound of it more, it was a bit more punchy I thought.
Here’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you Dave, you used the Synclavier on the first two albums but bought a PPG Wave 2.2 for ‘This Last Night In Sodom’, so why did you pick that over the Synclavier or Fairlight?
This was to do with price! I never bought the sequencer for the PPG though because I always used to play everything by hand. I liked the sound of it, it was a big machine and I wanted something that sounded quite modern and metallic. The Fairlight and Synclavier had dated by then and everybody had used them on everything, so it was nice to break away from that really.
So no Fairlight, no Synclavier, that album was PPG and the DMX although my favourite drum machine would probably be the Roland TR808 out of all of them. That’s the one we used on the first album, I think we got one of the first ones off the production line. Mike Thorne also had it when we got to New York, he had a Synclavier and TR808 set-up ready to go so that was great, so we didn’t do it totally fresh *laughs*
The next card I’ve pulled out is a Roland Juno 60 and I know you used this at the O2 show in 2018…
I had one for a short while, a friend had one second-hand so I got it off him. The thing about all Roland synths is they all have a fantastic sound, you can’t really beat them. Gary Barnacle who plays sax for SOFT CELL, he has a Roland Jupiter 8 in mint condition and he said the asking price for them now is £30,000 which is crazy! I wouldn’t pay that even though it’s a wonderful synth, I might give you three and a half grand! *laughs*
How do you feel about the software emulations of these classic synths?
They’re not bad, because it’s electronic sound, it’s easier to emulate that than it is a natural sound. The drum sounds, they’ve got nailed. The thing about the original synths is the oscillators, sometimes they drift a bit and you get that lovely fadey thing, but they’ve probably got that built into some of these reproduction VST plug-ins so that they drift in amongst themselves.
‘Monoculture’ was the launch single off the first comeback album ‘Cruelty Without Beauty’ in 2002, so had your approaches to making music for SOFT CELL changed by then?
‘Monoculture’ was sort of conceived for live and mixing purposes, I made it so that it was the same tempo as ‘Memorabilia’ and it’s in the same key. So when we used to start the show with ‘Memorabilia’, it would segue straight into ‘Monoculture’, it was almost like a DJ mix to get everybody dancing with the same groove on a familiar and new track. It was a looking backwards and facing forwards kind of thing, looking back at what we’d done before and projecting what we were going to do next, recreating our own past in a way, future retro, whatever you want to call it *chuckles*
The show saw the premiere of songs from ‘*Happiness Not Included’, one of them was ‘Purple Zone’ and at Hammersmith Apollo, PET SHOP BOYS were in attendance…
On the second night at Hammersmith, we knew that PET SHOP BOYS were on the guest list so I told Marc, he was like “oh great” and pretended to be nervous as they had front row seats. Funnily enough, they were sitting next to Richard Norris, my other half in THE GRID… he said they were taking loads of photographs which is quite flattering *laughs*
After the show, my manager Chris Smith came to say that Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe were backstage and did I want to say hello? I did of course, but Marc doesn’t stay around at gigs and he’d already gone, so they came into my dressing room and we had a few beers. We chatted for about an hour and they asked about ‘Purple Zone’; Chris Smith then enthusiastically suggested to them about doing a remix and they were like “Yeah! We’d love to do it”.
Neil then asked if he could sing on it and I thought that would be fantastic so we let them do what they do best. They came back with the PET SHOP BOYS version of SOFT CELL. Neil and Marc’s voices work so well together and it was a really good record for both PET SHOP BOYS and SOFT CELL, the profile we got, I think it was the most played record on radio at the time and it No1 in various dance charts and No7 in the Music Sales chart, whatever that means. It did us all a lot of favours and a lot of good.
But then…
The weird thing was that while that was all going on, I was in hospital. Normally if I got this kind of news, I’d be out with my mates celebrating with champagne… but not in hospital I’m afraid! Chris Lowe had been chatting to me after the gig about how it was going to be a weird year in pop in 2022! I thought “what does he mean?”, but it turned out to be a weird year for me! So it was like having a third year of lockdown! But I’m out and on the loose again, not quite on the streets yet but I’m raring to go! I’ve not quite got my dancing shoes on yet! *laughs*
Another card and it’s an OSCar, I don’t know if you’ve ever used one?
No, a friend of mine had one of those, it had a great cutting sound but the designed was quite weird wasn’t it, it looked like a bit of Lego! They’re very sought after those, I don’t know much about them, most of the synths you’ve picked out, I’ve never actually owned! That’s quite remarkable really *laughs*
So there’s an extended version of ‘*Happiness not included’ coming out later this year entitled ‘*Happiness now extended’?
Yes, this was done in my absence, so I can’t take any responsibility for the artistic input for it. In the past, we used to do the longer version first and then edit it down; so this is kind of the other way round. For the early SOFT CELL stuff, we’d put a longer arrangement down for a 12” version.
Marc would do the vocal and ad-lib sections and then we’d get it down until we got the single. That was when we had to use razor blades and tape, we didn’t have digital editing which is so much easier. People who have grown up with digital and can just splice tracks together and move vocals around, they don’t know they’re born! *laughs*
I’m sounding like an old bloke cos I am, but it’s so much easier to do stuff now with computers. Back in the olden days, you had to do it physically. You could sort of fly things in but it was a lot more tricky.
I’m looking forward to hearing the extended version of ‘Nighthawks’ which was a stand-out on ‘*Happiness not included’… but that started as a solo track?
I put that together in my kitchen initially, I used just one Roland synth and a couple of little Korg sequencers to have these two patterns going. I then went to Warner Brothers Studio, I just recorded the MIDI off the two sequencers and tidied it all up on the Mac and re-ran it to the Roland and did various overdubs of that with different filter settings and stuff, decays, delays and what have you. There a bit of real piano reversed and I did the original voice on it.
It was just a bonus instrumental on a CD compilation for the deluxe box of my book ‘Electronic Boy’ but then Marc heard it and loved it. It was quite different to everything else, it was very sequencey. He did a vocal and got this New York drag performance artist Christeene to do this weird mad voice on it that sounds fantastic, it was very scary sounding. We kept the music and the original title ‘Nighthawks’ after the famous Edward Hopper painting that reminds you of loneliness and isolation, it’s what the original track was inspired by.
Was the stylisation of the sequencers on ‘Nighthawks’ influenced by any of your work with CABARET VOLTAIRE on ‘The Crackdown’ in 1983?
I never thought of that until you said it but I suppose it does have that CABARET VOLTAIRE static funky sequence about it, but you’re right, it is!
I don’t if you’ve heard it but there’s a remix of ‘Nighthawks’ by Chris & Cosey, I love that. When they asked for the brief, I just said “dirty disco”, I think it’s one of my favourite SOFT CELL remixes of the last period of work we’ve done, it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the original but it still sounds fantastic.
There is also going to be a ‘*Happiness now completed’ companion album featuring unreleased mixes, remixes and B-sides as well as covers of Giorgio Moroder, X-Ray Spex and Fad Gadget?
‘Back To Nature’ by Fad Gadget we did a while ago but Marc’s done a new vocal. X-Ray Spex ‘The Day The World Turned Day Glo’ was recorded with my friend Dave Chambers who has a Pro-Tools set-up at his home and we took the music over to Marc who did his vocals at Dean Street studios.
And the Giorgio Moroder thing ‘First Hand Experience Of Second Hand Love’ was recorded with Rick Mulhall, we sequenced that up at his place in Richmond; that’s the track that Marc and I always wanted to do because we’d bought the album ‘From Here To Eternity’ when it came out in 1977. We both had vinyl copies of that, with Giorgio and his wonderful bristling moustache, the dark sunglasses and curly perm on the front cover, it was a classic look for a synth wizard at the time. We’d recorded it once before with Ingo Vauk but that recording got lost, it had disappeared into the electronic ether so to speak! It’s probably on a hard drive in a skip! Who knows? *laughs*
Marc suggested we should do it again, it’s such a great song and a perfect one for SOFT CELL. Marc did the lead vocals and Philip Larsen did the vocoder bit as I was not able to attend. I think it sounds great, my manager Chris Smith said they’d sent a copy to Giorgio Moroder’s office in Los Angeles so we’re just waiting to see if we get a thumbs up from Da Maestro. Hopefully, he’ll be pleased that we’ve covered one of his songs.
OK, we’ve got your final Vintage Synth Trumps card and it’s a Powertran Transcendent 2000…
I know that JOY DIVISION had one which Bernard Sumner built from a kit, the synth sounds they had were fantastic, very haunting and I really liked that. My only experience of this was a guy at my art college bought one, but he made it into an art piece! He built it but had taken off the original control panel and drilled out a new one that was made of Perspex. He put all the knobs back on so there was no way you knew what any of them did! Then he had it wall-mounted with two speakers and set up a basic sinewave tone and it was up to the person looking at it to twiddle a knob and see what it did, it was like Dada synth and totally random, it was brilliant!
Was there ever a synth you bought that didn’t meet expectations?
I bought a lot of synths in my time but all of them made at least one good sound. Even if I buy a synth and only use sound, it always pays for itself. Every synth I’ve ever bought has been used on a record. I don’t think I’ve ever really wasted money on a synth. But there was this Akai sequencer which I could never get working properly. I’ve actually had trouble with Akai sequencers before to be honest. I used to love the Akai samplers, I still have an S1100 which was a great machine but I never got on with Akai sequencers, I’ve never really liked those MPC things… I can’t get my head around the architecture, that’s probably the only time I’ve spent money and regretted it. They’re my only “bête noire” I suppose, Akai sequencers! *laughs*
What are your future plans?
I‘m working with Richard Norris on new tracks for THE GRID, we’ve put a new spin on the way we’re doing THE GRID which is sounding fantastic so very pleased about that. We’ve got no guaranteed release yet, but we’re talking to a number of record companies and things are looking positive in all that respect. We’re very excited.
In my home studio, I’ve been getting some new rough ideas for backing tracks for SOFT CELL, should there be another album. Marc seems to want to do another one and I do. I hope there may be another SOFT CELL album but you’re going to have to wait a while, it probably won’t surface until the back end of next year so it will be 2025 when it actually comes out… 2025, its sounds so futuristic that doesn’t it? *laughs*
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to Dave Ball
SOFT CELL perform in the UK and Europe throughout Summer 2023, dates include:
Rochester Castle (7 July)**, Let’s Rock Southampton (8 July), Let’s Rock Shrewsbury (15 July), Barcelona Poble Espanyol (23 July), Saffron Walden Audley End (11 August )*, Steyning Wiston House (9 September)***
* with special guests OMD + HEAVEN 17
** with special guests PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT
*** with special guests HEAVEN 17 + ABC
A contender for one of the best albums of 2022, ‘Living In Fear’ is SIN COS TAN’s most accessible and immediate body of work since their 2012 eponymous debut.
A prolific period between 2012 to 2015 saw the Finnish duo of Juho Paalosmaa and Jori Hulkkonen release three albums ‘Sin Cos Tan’, ‘Afterlife’ and ‘Blown Away’ in quick succession. But the creative intensity over took its toll and while the pair continued to work together on other projects, SIN COS TAN went into hiatus.
Paalosmaa returned to his other band VILLA NAH for 2016’s ‘Ultima’ album which Hulkkonen co-produced. Meanwhile Hulkkonen continued his solo career, releasing a number of solo albums, EPs and singles to continue a tradition in music making which had begun in 1995 and even hit the mainstream when as Zyntherius, he scored a 2002 Top30 UK hit with a cover of ‘Sunglasses At Night’ in collaboration with Tiga.
Inspired by the experiences of separation during the pandemic, a toe dipping exercise between Paalosmaa and Hulkkonen led to the ‘Drifted’ EP, the first SIN COS TAN material in six years. However with current world events and the bear next door looming like The Cold War had never ended, SIN COS TAN became creatively re-energised and presented their fourth album, the aptly titled ‘Living In Fear’.
Jori Hulkkonen took up ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s invitation to chat over a game of Vintage Synth Trumps about the making of ‘Living In Fear’ and the workings of SIN COS TAN…
So the first card is a Multimoog…
The thing about Moog synthesizers is I’ve always been a bit scared of them… I never felt like I was a keyboard player and I’m still the same. My approach to making music has always been programming and sequencing stuff in the studio, I always felt Moogs were more like a keyboard player’s synth, a more traditional instrument like a violin. With the panel layouts, you could play it with one hand while controlling it with the other… it was made for live performance but I can appreciate that.
Also back in the 80s when I started out, you needed CV/gate to control the stuff and there were a few different systems. I preferred the systems that Roland were using… Moog was different from that so having the CV/gate stuff didn’t really support it. The Moog was also more expensive than Japanese equipment, they were always out of my reach. The Japanese stuff I had was very small and tight so not so great for the live environment but that wasn’t my thing anyway, especially back in the day.
I had this strange fear of anything Moog and they sound amazing and beautiful, I’ve heard them in other people’s studios and I’ve worked with Moog stuff, but I’ve never actually owned anything by Moog.
When the first self-titled SIN COS TAN album came out, social media photos had it placed in front of a Minimoog, who did that belong to?
That’s Tom Riski’s, the boss of our label Solina; he used to be in some bands in the 90s and he was a keyboard player and collector. He sold pretty much all of his stuff when he gave up being an active musician, but he still had that when the album came out. I did buy something from him *laughs*
You’ve mentioned fear, and this new SIN COS TAN album is called ‘Living In Fear’, how did you and Juho come up with the title?
This album came together rather quickly, the first session was in January this year and finished by the start of May as that was the deadline for mastering. There were some ideas and songs but at the time of recording, the Russia / Ukraine conflict started and obviously in Finland, that was a big thing. So we suddenly realised we could make that a motif for the album. It was Juho’s idea to call it ‘Living In Fear’ and that felt like it defined a lot of the songs we had there. The album even ends with a song called ‘War Time’.
There’s also a lot of commentary with the fears and pressure people have in this day and age from social media. Artists, what we are supposed to do these days is be like Instagram stars and promote our music online. But people like Juho and me aren’t into that, so it kind of scares us in a way. So that’s one level, another is the change in the world right now environmentally but another is the dawning of AI; Artificial Intelligence scares a lot of people, is it going to take away our jobs? It’s going to change a lot of things and funnily enough, we did an music video for ‘Endless’ which was AI based… a year ago, a video like that would have cost a million dollars and now AI is doing it for a few pennies.
Then of course, there are personal fears you might have and there are some quite personal songs on the album from Juho and me. Fear is a really strong motivation in people’s lives and we realise that was something that the album could reflect. It’s not a theme album as such, not like ‘Blown Away’ was. But it’s an album that does have a theme and something we wanted to focus on because it was there.
I can imagine in Finland, you have that 1200+ km land border with the Bear Next Door and on your website bio, it mentions how growing up, music was your escape from The Cold War, Chernobyl and imminent nuclear destruction… so in your head with everything going on, has it been like “NOT AGAIN!!”?
Definitely, but at the same time, it’s weird and probably not very healthy either, it feels kind of comfortable to be back in that same state of mind that you grew up in!! It’s like you grew up in not a nice place, but you get 20-30 years out of it and then you get drawn back into The Cold War state of mind. It’s where I come from and there’s nothing good about it, but somehow feels very familiar so you can handle it in a different way, compared to others. Our generation grew up with it and it’s interesting how the 90s generation grew up very optimistic and open, while the Millennials were free to travel all over Europe and suddenly it’s a big change.
I totally get where you are coming from, because where I live, it was the centre for UK missiles so was a nuclear target. As an ULTRAVOX fan, you will know ‘Dancing With Tears In My Eyes’, ‘All Stood Still’ and ‘All Fall Down’ were songs about Armageddon while there were other similarly themed songs such as ‘Enola Gay’, ‘Fireside Favourite’, ‘I Melt With You’…
Yes, for us, it been like “well, it’s back to the norm”, it’s something we became accustomed to growing up in the 70s and 80s, it’s like the baseline…
Do you anticipate if this tension goes on any longer, it will affect the artistic expression? Do you see art as channelling that angst again?
I think I’ve been channelling that through the years anyway! *laughs*
But overall, this decade has been a real downer with the pandemic and now the war, so if we are trying to look for silver linings here, I think it will be interesting for the creative community to get something out of it, the frustration, the fears and all that. For sure, it’s going to do something for music, for the arts, for anything creative. It remains to be seen, it’s not going to happen overnight.
Like now at the end of 2022, people are starting to release all the music they did during the pandemic and the lockdowns, so now we are getting the pandemic music. Yes, some people released stuff during the pandemic but now we can play gigs and people can travel, so the records are coming out.
Something we discussed during the making of the album is, has the pandemic affected how we listen to music? Suddenly you’re stuck for 2 years at home, so do you listen to a different kind of music? Is it stuff to calm you down because you’re not in the mood for party music because there’s nowhere to go as the planet was closed! So did it change how people react to music, what kind of music they want to listen to? Did they dig up some old records for comfort? That remains to be seen, I hope there’s some real studies out of all this.
The return of The Cold War is going to be a big thing for a lot of Europeans. Obviously in Finland, we follow a lot of this but even though NATO is more or less involved in the conflict at some level, in America or Asia or Africa, this is like this local thing that’s happening in Europe. Let’s hope it says that way, we don’t want World War 3! I think the effect will also be local and probably affect the Scandinavian music and arts. There will be a big impact.
Despite the surroundings it was created in, ‘Living In Fear’ has turned out to be your most accessible album and possibly your poppiest as a form of escape? Any thoughts on that?
When we realised a lot the songs deal with pretty heavy issues as the lyrics were quite dark, we wanted to juxtapose that with some light production and make it chirpy even. I guess on our level, it’s light if you don’t look deep into it. I think it was the contrast of the lyrics and the easier approach of keeping the darkness inside, so it looks shiny and nice outside. But once you open the door, you realise it’s doom and gloom, it’s in there but not in your face. Only on a couple of songs ‘Not in the Business of Forgiving’ and ‘Killing Dreams’ did we let them drown on their way as they needed to sound heavy. But otherwise on the other tracks, we tried to keep it escapist, like that escapism of the 80s, the plastic innocence to hide the doom and gloom.
I’d like to highlight ‘More Than I Can Love’ which drops in ‘What Is Love’ and ‘Enjoy The Silence’, there is this Eurodance with melancholy thing about it?
Juho had this demo and it was leaning towards early 90s, my guide if there was a song that had the right balance of uptempo dance beat and melancholy was ‘Disappointed’ by ELECTRONIC. I was aiming that kind of driving Eurodance but with this classic UK synth indie pop melancholy, that was the lead idea. We wanted to avoid sounding too much like 90s Eurodance but also we didn’t want to do the ‘Enjoy The Silence’ thing. It was like a balancing act, you don’t want to sound like you are just ripping someone off or doing an 80s rehash. You try to sound modern while staying true to the essence.
With the music we do and the influences we have, there are no secrets, people know… if you listen to our records, whether it’s SIN COS TAN, VILLA NAH or my solo stuff, it’s easy to figure out where we come from musically *laughs*
It’s really interesting that the technology at the time back in the day was moving so fast… compare the records people were making in 1980 and then 1990, how they sound and how they were made, it’s one of the biggest shifts we ever had in music in terms of production. I always felt like there wasn’t enough time for this sound to be explored enough because people were already moving onto the next thing.
Famously John Foxx said samplers ruined music and in a way I kind of agree, although I also disagree as I think samplers are great. But at the same time, the period of late 70s synthpop like the early stuff of THE HUMAN LEAGUE, it would have been interesting if that level of technology had been around for 10 years. People would have had more time to really dive into that sound and the different possibilities it offered… but it was all going so quickly and suddenly it was digital and samplers, going to the next thing.
So records started to sound dated within a year or two which was crazy. Pop music today, I think in the last 20 years, there hasn’t really been a sound in the sense of “a sound that you haven’t heard”. Modern music doesn’t date as quickly as it did in the 80s, but I still feel there are so many things that you can go into a rabbit hole of listening to with the 80s, stuff that could have been explored more.
One cool thing nowadays is something like Spotify and YouTube because you can find ALL the records that you never knew but existed but I don’t have enough time. There is so much more stuff I hear from the 80s that I would have loved to have heard back in the day. I keep finding “new” old records almost weekly that came out sometime in the 80s that I like. That’s the thing, things moved so quickly and people moved onto the next thing, so those records never really had a chance.
When it comes to what kind of sound you are looking for in a song, I think there is an endless bowl. SIN COS TAN has been put into this category of “80s synthpop” and all that, but “80s synthpop” is so much bigger than a lot of people realise and there is so much to explore. There’s so many things that could have become the next big thing but they didn’t because of trends, technology or whatever reason, the pace was just so quick.
Talking of technology, time for another card and it’s a Yamaha CS60…
I had the CS60 and the CS80 which was the big brother, it was one of the biggest and most expensive synths that you can still find, if you can find one. The CS80, in the late 90s, my friend and I were still living up north and found one in really bad condition. The guy who sold it to us said according to the serial number, it once belonged to Stevie Wonder; I don’t know if it was true… but then he didn’t charge extra and we got it super cheap. Me and my friend were both just doing dancefloor stuff and the CS80 was more of a keyboard player’s synth, even more than a Moog.
We had it for a while and realised because of its size and its weight that we couldn’t go back and forth to our studios with it. So it was stuck in one place and not used that much. Later on when I had my peak crazy synth collection period in 2006-2007 and had a really big studio, I had a CS60 there and that I did use quite a bit. I was more comfortable with my keyboard playing by then. I used it on a lot of records from that period, we used it on the first SIN COS TAN album, solo stuff and productions for Tiga. It’s another keyboard player’s synth and one time, I had Jimi Tenor come to my studio as he was doing a gig in Turku. So he was playing it and I realised it really is not about the equipment, it’s about the idea and your ability to play an instrument, those are the ingredients.
The magic that Jimi was able to get out of the CS60, it was mind-blowing but also depressing in a good way because you see people who are super-talented at an instrument… I’ve always been more of a programmer and classic producer type where I’m not great at anything, but can handle a lot of things to put it all together and make little tweaks.
When you work with people like Jimi who are super-amazing at playing or with Juho and his voice, you are happy that you know them and get to work with them. So there are keyboard players that can make those machines come alive. When choosing a synth, you have to think “what can I get out of this machine or is it wasted on me?”
I remember there was this classic ‘Top Of The Pops’ where John Foxx did ‘Underpass’ and the band had like three CS80s on stage which was crazy…
So how important then was “synth image” to you as a fan getting into this type of music, where your favourite artist uses a particular piece of equipment?
That was everything! That was kind of the whole thing, when setting up my first studio, it was like living this childhood dream being surrounded by synths. So yes, for sure, growing up in the 80s and seeing these pictures, watching the videos and reading magazines and all that, it seemed so futuristic and out of this world, especially all the drum machines and synths.
In Finland, most of the music you heard and saw was uninteresting rock and heavy metal so you would be lucky if there was a keyboard or even a piano player in a band. So this futuristic world with keyboards, flashing lights, LEDs, computers and all that, for me that was Science-Fiction. It was a really big part of the appeal that got me interested in electronic music. I did like electronic music even before I realised what it was, so it all ended up enhancing all those ideas.
Another card and it’s a Korg Poly 6…
I never had one but I’ve had a lot of Korgs; the thing with Korgs is a lot of my friends had the MS10 or MS20 but I never liked the sound. There was something about that sound that I never really took to, I appreciate it as a synth and I like that it is semi-modular.
But it’s also on a different scale than the Rolands with all the CV stuff so it didn’t work that well with them, so that was one reason. I think it was also something about the filters that I never really loved. I used a Yamaha CS15 for that sort of stuff, it was similar but duophonic and it also has audio-ins so you could use the filter and the filter was smoother than the Korg MS stuff.
Of the Korg polyphonic stuff, I hit the jackpot 20 years ago at an amazing synth store in Stockholm called Jam, the guy running it Johan was amazing and we became really good friends. I used to go there quite a bit. They are still going strong, I love them.
In Finland, we never had really good synth stores for vintage stuff. Although we are neighbours and Finland is bilingual with Swedish being our second language, the culture is so different when it comes to pop music. I was fortunate living in the north of Finland, I was close to the Swedish border so grew up with Swedish radio and TV.
In Sweden, they have an amazing scene with synthpop and electronic music, even from the 70s and 80s. There was so much stuff and variety and that’s how I discovered a lot of music. In the Swedish language, there is even a word “Syntare” for a person who listens to synth music and Italo disco. So I’ve always had really close relations to Sweden and because they had such a big culture in electronic music, there was more equipment going around. When I went there for the first time, it was like “WOW!”.
What did you buy at Jam?
I got this Korg PS3100 which is like a blown-up MS20; it had a patch bay and was semi-modular but a 48 note polyphonic analogue synth! It was again made for keyboard players but because of the semi-modularity, you could control the gates and outboard gear. So that became the staple of my sound for 15 years; I used it on so many records for the polysynth pads.
The Korg Poly 6 was one of the last of the analogue polyphonics of the 80s, I’ve had a lot of the drum machines and I had the Mono/Poly so I’ve had a lot of Korg stuff. Again, the Japanese stuff was cheaper to buy than Moog or Oberheim…
It’s interesting what you say about not getting on with the MS10 as Juho has one and used it in VILLA NAH who you co-produced…
VILLA NAH love the MS10 and they used it on the ‘Origin’ album, it was one of the key synths for their lead sounds and solos. It was fine by me; they get exactly the sound they want and it fits with their music. Me personally, it was never the kind of synth I wanted to have.
I take it that Juho might be less of a tech-head than you are, so within the dynamic of SIN COS TAN, does he stop you from going too far with that and gets you back on track with the song?
It’s a totally different hat that I’m wearing when I’m a producer for an artist. But when I’m working in SIN COS TAN with Juho, then it’s a band so it’s my project as much as it is Juho’s. However, when it comes to working for others, you forget about your mixed feelings about the MS10 and you embrace what they can do with that *laughs*
I really like the idea of having these different roles when it comes to making music, it really is a big part of the fun with a project. Even when I make stuff with Juho as SIN COS TAN, there really is this moment where I decide I’m not going to be the guy who writes music with Juho, I will be the producer and mixer and now take a different approach. I change the perspective that I have on those songs and it’s something that I learned when people have approached me to work with them. Remixing and producing other people are totally different animals but there is something similar. I like the idea where people reveal their music’s secrets to you in the studio, whether it’s a remix or a production to make it work on the dancefloor or whatever.
That’s always been super-fascinating and again, we get into the cool things and the modern age where things on like Spotify, you can listen to classic records that are re-released as boxed sets where they have demos and works-in-progress. The idea of these different stages of a journey that a song takes, that really intrigues me infinitely as a musician, producer and fan. I don’t want to necessarily buy all these records and in some cases, there is stuff that I don’t even like, but I like to be able to hear how the demo became the song.
It’s nice that people are putting all this stuff out, like a cassette demo of the just-written song, then the band comes in and there’s a version with a producer that didn’t work out, and the remixed version that works, that is so fascinating.
You’ve always struck me as being a music fan first and professional producer or musician second…
For me, being a music fan is the No1 priority, that is what I am foremost… everything else is a category under that. Being a music fan is where it all comes from and that’s still how it is.
‘Own The Night’ from the album is very film noir and for Halloween, you synchronised it to the 1922 version of ‘Nosferatu’… did you already have images in your head while making the song?
That was another demo that Juho had, but it was clear from the first draft that I had this idea of how it needed sound. If there is a song on the album that sticks out as not being within the ‘Living In Fear’ theme in the more serious sense, then it’s ‘Own The Night’. It’s slightly tongue-in-cheek especially with the video and vampire, it’s was some very subtle comic relief. We were trying to strike a balance, like in the intro where Juho is doing the deep “hmmm-hmmm-hmmmmm” voice, there’s 16 tracks of him doing this gothic choir thing and then there’s the build up with the harpsicord, it sounded super funny. But at the same time, we didn’t want to push it too much so that it didn’t sound too comedic. We didn’t want it to come across as cheeky or too light-hearted.
‘Own The Night’ reminded me of Ennio Morricone, I don’t know if that is a suitable reference?
Yes, it is overtly dramatic like a lot of the Morricone stuff with all these changes before the big chorus. It does have that classic Morricone feel to it, it was one of the toughest songs on the album to get right. From the original demo, we knew it had a lot of potential. At the same time, the execution needed to be punchy enough for the dancefloor but to keep that ethereal spooky atmospheric thing that controls the vibe, it was all about the balance.
This has made me think of PET SHOP BOYS ‘It Could Happen Here’ which used a section of that Morricone track ‘Forecast’ that had that almost comedic Bowie-esque vocal by BLIZZARD…
Well for me, I am obsessed with both PET SHOP BOYS and Ennio Morricone, so they are always in the back of my head whenever I make music, especially when I do stuff with Juho where we go for this extra flair or drama, these things do come out….
‘You Again’ is a good example…
Yes, that was like HI-NRG mixed with this Morricone-ish riff, it was upper dramatic with the verses and then there were his upbeat, uplifting chorus and dark lyrics for this contrast before the ending focussing on the violin riff building up. It’s a mixture of PET SHOP BOYS and Morricone, but one particular song that also came to my mind when making it was ‘Sounds Like A Melody’ by ALPHAVILLE which also has this outburst of energy in the outro as well.
Was ‘Tightroped’ influenced by DAFT PUNK or is that just in my head?
It’s in your head… but then again, DAFT PUNK is in our heads as well so… *laughs*
‘Tightroped’ was based on a track we started 5 years ago… although we had this break where we didn’t release anything, we had some studio sessions every now and then. But things never really clicked to make us go “WOW”, there were some good bits but it never crossed that threshold to make it continue and work towards an EP or album.
Then when we started this album, there was stuff we had never used and ‘Tightroped’ had this synth riff that I couldn’t even recall when we first did it! We didn’t remember it, it was like “Is that us? Yes, it’s us!”. The track was this downtempo John Carpenter thing, so I decided to disco it up which is something I always do when we go to a dead end with a song, like I did with ‘Trust’ which was originally downtempo. So it was time to put on a four-to-the-floor kick and not exactly do an Italo disco, but more late 70s Patrick Cowley track with live sounding drums. That opened up a lot of doors for it and then I came up with the chord change for the middle part and there was a new lyric, it kind of clicked. So it’s like retro disco that was fun to put out there.
I’ve always liked the way how you’ve never been afraid of disco, either saying it or doing it…
I do a lot of dance and club music, if you do like dance and club music, you have to love disco and even though I started my career in house and techno, you have to acknowledge there is the legacy of disco. There’s so much stuff in house music that sounds fresh and futuristic, especially when it comes to crossing into more electronic stuff like Patrick Cowley or Gino Soccio… even today, their records sound ahead of the time.
I was never a big fan of the orchestral disco, it was always the more minimal stuff where it is all about the groove and basslines with minimal changes and gradual growth as well as the more electronic end of it. Yeah, those records defined my taste in music.
Another card and it’s the Korg 800DV, otherwise known as the MaxiKorg, Dave Ball from SOFT CELL had one of these…
This would have been designed to sit on top of your organ where you would do chords on that and this would be the lead synth to do these melodies. Synths from this period, they were more aimed at this market so were slightly cheaper. That meant these types of synths were on a lot of interesting records that came out in the late 70s and early 80s. It was like a synth to add one layer or one riff or whatever.
What I love about this era was that each band had a particular sound because they could only afford one or two synths but they were explored more…
Yes, this is something I don’t think has been looked into in the documentaries… this will not sound very nice but there is too much credit being given to the people making the music, because a lot of the music was being made by equipment around at the time. The fact that people had their hands on 2 or 3 synths and they were at the mercy of these synths (not the other way round) and the records couldn’t sound like anything else than what the technology allowed at the time. So it was really about the imagination of the artists to abuse them and get the most out of them… it really was within the constraints of what the technology was at the time.
So I think the technology was what defined that music as much as the people who were making the music and it was true during that period, as it was later when techno came around. The records that people made were amazing but at the same time, if you get those certain pieces of equipment and you understand a thing or two about music and you know how things work, it’s very easy to get that sound, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get that great record. But the sound came from the equipment…
So are we talking Korg M1 piano here? *laughs*
No, we are talking about more about drum machines like the 808 or 909, the TB303 in acid house… things are defined by certain pieces of equipment. Like you couldn’t make a proper techno record if you didn’t have an 808 or 909. You really were kind of forced to have them or a sampler that could emulate a lot of that. If you had money, you could get the right equipment but that doesn’t mean you are going to make a great records because you still need to have some great ideas. But you could make these types of records without the equipment, you need the right drum machine to get the right dynamic in a club, you just can’t unless you have a million dollar studio with an engineer to make your record.
What I’m saying is the advent of the 808 or 909 enabled people to make a record in their bedroom that sounded good in a club, that for me was the big difference. It enabled dance music to become more direct for the people that were going to clubs, then going home and doing a record in their bedroom that sounded good in a club.
Obviously today, you can do anything with a computer so that has changed. But there was a brief period of time where you really did need to have certain pieces of equipment in order to make a dance record, regardless of how talented you were or what ideas you had or how great the songs were that you wrote. You couldn’t make a good dance record without a good drum machine. We sometimes forget the engineers who put all this stuff together … there was this documentary ‘808’ for example where even I was being interviewed, people are realising how hand-in-hand the technology and the changes in pop music just went super-fast in the 80s *laughs*
The final card is the EDP Wasp…
I never had one and I know there is a new version by Behringer… what makes the Wasp sound so interesting is the filter, so it’s on my modular system. I have an emulation of the Wasp filter, and I love the sound of it. But I think this was a really interesting time in the late 70s when these small UK and European companies doing these more limited weirder synths like the Wasp with its touch sensitive keyboard and Italian companies like Crumar that sounded different. There was this weird niche where people would be wanting something but couldn’t afford the American or Japanese stuff and would go for the weirder local products which adds something. I know in Finland, people had a lot of Russian stuff…
Oh, like the Polivoks? Did you have one?
Yes, I had one and I had a Faemi which was also Russian… so having stuff that’s not in the usual synth canon was great. There was a UK company that would sell synths as DIY kits and I got this CLEF B-30, a crazy, unpredictable little synth…
The kit company I remember in the UK was Powertran who made the Transcendent 2000, Bernard Sumner, Thomas Dolby and Ian Craig Marsh all had one…
There were a few different ones along with PAiA and I had a few of those, constructed by different people and put in different boxes, all sounding totally different and unreliable… you wouldn’t have wanted to go on stage with one! But in the studio, they were amazing and would provide those happy accidents. It was great that you didn’t know quite what was going to happen… the Wasp falls in some level into that category, with these giant companies doing their thing while these small companies doing their weird synths that are more punk in a way.
What’s your favourite synth that we haven’t mentioned yet?
I don’t know if it’s true, but I have a Roland Jupiter 4 which apparently used to belong to Simon Le Bon! The guy who sold it to me didn’t ask for anything extra but he said he bought it from him. I might as well continue my blissful life thinking that it is and for that reason, it is my favourite synth, if only because I get to share this story *laughs*
Otherwise, I don’t have any favourite synths, I had so much stuff over the years, I’ve come to appreciate them all, every synth I have ever owned or still own, had a purpose. They all do their own thing and they all inspire in a different way.
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its sincerest thanks to Jori Hulkkonen
‘Living In Fear’ is released by Solina Records as a limited edition vinyl LP and download
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