A 1975 Kraftwerk gig persuaded two future pop stars to ditch their guitars
When Kraftwerk played their first British concert in 1975, two young men in the audience, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys, decided to throw away their guitars. They went on to found Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, part of a wave that made the synthesizer the lead instrument of early 1980s pop.
Synth-pop rests on synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers, sometimes to the exclusion of every other instrument. Its early sound was shaped by limitations: monophonic synths could only play one note at a time, and many players had modest technical skills, so songs were built from simple repeated riffs, often with no chord progression. Writers described the first wave as eerie, sterile and faintly menacing, with lyrics about isolation and urban alienation. Rather than looking to American blues or folk, bands leaned toward Europe, especially the East, as names like Spandau Ballet and songs like Ultravox's Vienna suggest.
The roots went back to Robert Moog's synthesizer of 1964 and to German bands such as Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, whose largely instrumental music crossed language barriers. For many Britons, Wendy Carlos's soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange in 1971 was a first taste of electronic music, and Philip Oakey of the Human League cited it as an inspiration. Giorgio Moroder's programmed beats on Donna Summer's I Feel Love in 1977 and David Bowie's Berlin albums with Brian Eno fed in too. In Japan, Yellow Magic Orchestra brought the TR-808 drum machine into popular music, and the term techno-pop was coined by the critic Yuzuru Agi in a 1978 review of Kraftwerk's The Man-Machine.
Punk at first dismissed synths as inauthentic, but its do-it-yourself spirit meant nobody needed years of training to get on stage. After Gary Numan topped the UK chart in 1979, the sound went commercial. Cheaper polyphonic synths, MIDI and dance beats made it warmer and catchier, and MTV carried British acts across America. Simon Reynolds singles out the era's operatic singers, Marc Almond, Alison Moyet and Annie Lennox, usually paired with one partner handling all the instruments.
Critics complained that the machines seemed to write the songs. By the late 1980s house and techno had taken over, though the genre revived strongly in the 2000s.
Source: Synth-pop
