After the explosion of punk rock in the U.K., the underground split off in many directions including synth pop, dance punk, post-punk, new romantic, and many others. Most groups, no matter the style they played, were looking to experiment or make a statement, often political, and generally treated the pop charts like a curse to be avoided. Around the time that the 1970s turned to the ’80s, there were a number of groups and journalists who decided the time was ripe to remake pop music, not ignore it, and to storm the charts, not disdain them. Chief among the writers was Paul Morley in the NME and his thoughts helped direct many bands to set aside the gray abrasiveness of their music in favor of something shiny and technicolor that wasn’t built for student bedsits, but for…
Category: new wave
Released by Edsel, Toyah’s 1987 studio album Desire receives its first ever standalone CD reissue in a new expanded edition, in deluxe 7” sized gatefold packaging. Originally issued on the EG label, the album was produced by Mike Hedges (Siouxise & The Banshees) and recorded at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in the autumn of 1986.
This deluxe 2cd edition includes a second disc of 18 rare and ‘desirable’ bonus tracks including the 12” mix of lead single Echo Beach plus outtakes and B-Sides from the album sessions. Excitingly six previously unreleased tracks feature including the long-awaited release of the post-Desire rarity We Play Machines.
Rare live concert recordings of Desire songs…
After Buzzcocks disbanded in 1981, frontman Pete Shelley teamed up with Martin Rushent, embracing the producer’s newly acquired synths and drum machines to rework his tracks, crafting a new blueprint for electronic pop music in the process. A production blueprint that would soon achieve massive mainstream success with another Rushent production; Dare by the Human League.
Across both LPs, Shelley combines his urgent songwriting with chugging synthesisers and electronic percussion creating records that straddle rock radio and London’s nascent club scene. These albums sound as fresh today as they did upon release, but the innovative nature of Homosapien and XL-1 has been overlooked. Overshadowed by the influence of Pete’s former band…
The hilarious thing to do in schoolyards in Britain when ‘Homosapien’ came out in 1982 was to sing its title line as “you’re homosexual too”. Yet former Buzzcock Pete Shelley was way ahead of the mockers and rockers on this synth pop venture, ‘Homosapien’ being far queerer than playground masculinity patrollers – or the banning BBC – could imagine. It’s not just the lyric’s double entendre, “homo superior, in my interior” but the song’s expansion from the personal to the political: “I just hope and pray that the day of our love is at hand”. A love song hence becomes a demand for liberation, insisting that “homosapien” is the only label that matters: “I don’t want to classify you like an animal in the zoo”. But there was something equally queer about the sound…
Featuring rare tracks of auto-didactic progressive pop music, proto-techno punk, shoot-for-the-stars-land-in-the-gutter chart flops and heralded, underground synth classics, School Daze paints a picture of beautiful failure. Complete with extensive sleeve notes written by King and never before seen imagery, all 24 tracks were remastered by RPM in-house engineer Simon Murphy, many from vinyl copies due to lost master tapes.
The story told on All The Young Droids is one of the dawning opportunity presented by both the emergence to the market of cheaper analog synthesisers and the distribution networks plus indie labels that exploded with the advent of punk music in 1976. While the music that sprouted out all over the globe in the wake…