uk-telly: tonight at 9 on Beeb 4

Really excited for Synth Brittania.

Anyone watching True Blood? Despite it's cheesiness I love it.

Forgot to say 'Hung' started on More4 last night so catch it on 4OD if you didn't. Slow builder from HBO starring Tom Jane as a male prozzer. Guid stuff likes.

iain 

True blood rocks! one of the few things i dont wanna miss each week... a mate has been watching it via torrents for ages.. loving it and Synth Brittania was excellent! So good to see John Foxx get a little recognition for his contribution to synths

Was ok but wish they talked more about the actual synths rather than just cover the bands.

On a side note this series of Peep Show, especially the last one featuring the part, is proper comedy gold.

ahh, guess a lot of people would have wanted that... having obsessed over the machines for the best part of the last 20 years it was the acts i wanted to know more about.. beeb did an awesome late night show in the late 90s called something like machines that shaped the future.. each week was a different classic, they had the S1000, 303, 909, Moog... i have it on VHS somewhere but prob crap quality!

Some people on uk-dance would have wanted that, but we're weird. The viewing public couldn't give a monkeys about the difference a Moog and a Roland, and any discussions about actual synths would have led to a great national switch off. But anyway, I'll let you know what I think once I've downloaded the show from the mighty UK-Nova and then watched it!

LB

Not me, I was in synth-pop fanboy heaven each time Wolfgang, Chris & Cosey, Richard Kirk or John Foxx appeared.

Must wear my long grey coat more often.

i only found these 2 recently... short docs on John Foxx. I've seen very few docs on JF over the years. also most of his videos are on Youtube... most of which I'd never seen at the time of getting into his work

heres the minidocs.. 2nd one is more of a microdoc ;0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyKmuQe0siQ&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5tYPBhaMUI&feature=related

John Foxx and Gary Numan, 1979

cool. i was a little surprised at how John Foxx felt about Numans music... it did sound bloody good on the program along side all the other synth classics

It's BBC4, techie nerds and and completists of the bands mentioned should have been their only demographic.

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-2874082422033984340#docid=2520461739591700600

Like this?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/scotlandsmusic/2009/10/pick-one-synth.shtml

First post in a while, so this probably won't work!

Alan

aww man, if you're gonna send filth like that during office hours you need to at least label it NSFW ;-) heaven on a webpage!

that's funny – 2 of my friends are on that list

Finally got round to having a proper sit-down watch of Synth Britannia and it made me remember how much I adore this song. It also made me realise how much of a huge synth pop head my mum is as I grew up listening and singing along to this stuff in the car and in the house...

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Guess I got my taste for harder music from my dad who was more into metal and punk.

Also the sound of the Newman stuff compared to the rest of the early stuff was HUGE... amazingly produced and still sounds great today, a lot of that early stuff with the crappy tinny drums and monosynths sound rubbish!

Watching it also made me a bit depressed that there's no music out there that mega excites me anymore through it's newness... seeing all those kids in the late 70s/80s being like WTF is this made me realise that because electronics/sampling now allows any kind of noise there's not going to be another quantum leap in music, is there? Also part of the feeling of belonging to a special scene that no-one knows about is now gone because of the internet. Back in the day I remember there were only about 100 folk in Scotland into Jungle/Breakbeat Hardcore and we pretty much all knew each other... now you can just tippity-tap into the internet and be part of any scene automatically. *sigh*

iain

GAH! Why do my youtube links never work properly?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9DOmlfICGw

iain

It was indeed another compelling music documentary from BBC4, the subject of which was always going to be of interest here. That early adoption of synth tech set the course for the dance music exlposion towards the end of that post-punk decade - the Eighties.

As Para said, it was maybe mis-named concentrating as it did on the bands more than the technology, but nevertheless it was a sumptious trip down memory bank. 

I remember going to see Depeche Mode's Construction Time Again tour in Bristol and being blown away by all the new and unique synthesised sounds, if not necessarily the songs themselves. It was a brave new wave, perfectly post-punk and pioneered, with the exception of Kraftwerk, on this very Isle - much like what went immediately before and after. How the hell else could the transition between punk and dance have been made?

Iain also wrote:

... seeing all those kids in the late 70s/80s being like WTF is this made me realise that because electronics/sampling now allows any kind of noise there's not going to be another quantum leap in music, is there?

Perhaps wait until Quantum Theory gets applied to music making!

With the exception of some local free festivals, my first 'proper' gig was Depeche Mode, Construction Time Again tour, at the Brighton Dome. 1983?

Lord Borthbury

T'was indeed 1983 and in some ways, way ahead of it's time. Check this out from

Wikipedia, on the song Everything Counts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depeche_mode

'A good example of the new sound was on the first single from the album "Everything Counts", a commentary on the perceived greed of multinational corporations,...'

This was mine. I think we were in rather different head states in '83.