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

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Record covers were similarly embracing the DIY ethos with letrasets and freehand drawn record covers being de rigeur.

I think they feel so much of what they have to say is already available and they don’t necessarily want to talk about the things that aren’t, because they are the personal things. It feels like the same sort of sounds that I started responding to on ‘Top Of The Pops’ when we first saw DEPECHE MODE and SOFT CELL. I was listening to the album in the car one day and that song came on and I immediately loved the idea of using that lyric as the title for the book.This is a real doorstop of a book, clocking in at 500 pages, so it initially appeared that it would be quite a daunting slog to get through it. They were a brand new thing being judged entirely on their first forays into electronic music, it’s a very different way of looking at the music and the people who made it. With this book, you opted to reference archive material rather than talk to the stars of the period in the present day?

Vince Clarke's input proves fascinating, of course, and is the icing on the cake of a VERY good book that will aid musicologists, fans, and lovers of electronic music (and its incredibly vast and varied history) for years and years to come.We all started influencing each other, we all got better at what we were doing, and the technology kept developing. Evans draws on articles from Melody Maker, the NME, Smash Hits, Record Mirror, and other UK publications and presents quotes from interviews with the artists and reviews and commentary. I don’t know if I have an actual moment to be honest… I realised quite late that I’ve never particularly characterised myself as an electronic music fan, certainly not in the 80s.

The SPANDAU BALLET versus DURAN DURAN thing has been well documented, but what about SOFT CELL versus DEPECHE MODE? SL: On 6 th November there will be a special event in London to launch your book “Listening To The Music The Machines Make” where you will interview Andy Bell and Martyn Ware (The Human League, BEF, Heaven 17) about their lives in electronic music. But the process of going through all the edits, the photos, getting the artwork and style right, it’s been quite intense. By Janos Janurik) Temperatures are dropping, days are getting shorter and from now on the umbrella is a permanent accessory when you leave the house. This Is Not Retro founder Richard Evans set himself a challenging task in writing yet another account of that very well-documented period, but Listening to the Music The Machines Make: Inventing Electronic Pop 1978-1983 deserves to be acknowledged as one of the definitive histories of the period and the genre.Because of that, they appealed because they were SO pop, but because they were SO pop, they weren’t in the same credibility bracket as someone like SOFT CELL. The study concentrates on the big names in electronic music at the time which sadly allows more shadowy figures like Robert Rental, Thomas Leer, and Fad Gadget to slip out of the picture prematurely, though all are at least mentioned however.