Futuresex lovesounds... Kraftwerk: the granddaddies of them all.
This year, according to the good people of 6 Music, marks the 25th anniversary of synth-pop. Let's forgive the dubious dating (even if you ignore Kraftwerk's 1970s albums and Giorgio Moroder's robo-disco, surely Gary Numan inaugurated pop's machine age by taking Are "Friends" Electric? To number one in 1979) and celebrate a week which sees interviews with John Foxx and Mute's Daniel Miller, an old live session from Kraftwerk and Andy McClusky from OMD counting down the top 10 synth riffs.
6 Music have called the week Back to the Future, which is a poignant title. Why should 1981 sound more like the future than 2006? But it does. If, back then, Numan had stepped into a time machine and shot forward 25 years to discover that the biggest selling album of the year was Snow Patrol's drizzly, anodyne comfort-rock, he would have sat down in his shiny silver jumpsuit and wept.
It's hard to imagine how exciting it must have all been for the musicians involved. Until the late 1970s, synthesizers were expensive, cumbersome things generally available only to soundtrack composers and prog-rock behemoths. The joy of the synth-pop explosion was the accessibility of this technology. For those who loved punk's DIY agenda but were disappointed by its three-chord ramalama, the synthesizer promised a bright and glittering future: radical yet attainable.
The diversity was amazing, from Soft Cell's mechanised northern soul to Afrika Bambaataa's sci-fi funk, the tinny pulse of early Depeche Mode to the mournful tides of the Cure's Faith album, the filth and grit of Suicide to the brilliant shine of the Human League. And they moved fast. In 1979, the Human League were making frosty European machine music. Two years later, they were emulating the pop symphonies of Phil Spector and Motown. Of course, the synthesizer, like nuclear power, could be used for dastardly purposes, but this first flowering looks, in retrospect, like a golden age for forward-thinking pop. The final chapter of Simon Reynold's excellent post-punk history Rip It Up And Start Again, in which the revolution ends in compromise, failure and a call for "real" rock, is almost too depressing to read.
Futurism rebounded with techno and house music at the end of the '80s (I remember almost falling off my chair when I first head LFO on Radio 1) but I don't see how it could happen again without the appearance of some completely unforeseen new piece of technology. The real heroes of the synth era were those boxes and wires which inspired talented bands to push the envelope - Blue Monday was really just the sound of New Order coming to grips with new technology - while enabling even pillocks like A Flock of Seagulls to make strange and moving pop records.
But the thought of just rearranging the same old ingredients in different ways more makes my heart sink. I want to hear records that make me think, in the best possible way, "What the hell was that?" So when I hear one of Timbaland's outre cyber-soul constructions, or the Knife's bizarre machine-pop, I think maybe there is a future after all. It's just not what it used to be.
