I was raving about them all the next day. Raving absolutely. Woke up in the morning and – they’re great they are. I could remember the songs as well. It was like a flash. I thought they were very threatening. They threatened me. I don’t know whether it was the next day or a couple of days after. Say that gig was on the Friday, I think it was on the Friday. The next Monday I was phoning, I was phoning someone up and in the next . . . you know in Spring Gardens where all them phones are by the Post Office . . . in the next one was Bernard.
And er, I went and asked him, ‘Do you want a manager?’ And I thought he was a really weird-looking character as well. He looked really weird.
And he said ‘Well we’ve signed this contract and we’re going in the studios to record an album tomorrow.’ Which they were. He just said ‘yeah’ when I asked. And well, he said ‘Come down the rehearsal rooms on Sunday and we’ll talk about it.’ But apparently he never fucking told anyone.
And I walked, I went down the rehearsal studios, walked in.
‘Hang on, who the fuck’s that?’
‘Oh I forgot to tell you . . .’ Which is his usual . . . ‘This is our new manager.’
Anyway I talked to them, became their manager, and they’ve never looked back.
16
THE SOUND OF THE FUTURE
Funny the stuff that sticks with you, isn’t it? And the stuff that doesn’t . . . I can’t be certain but I guess it was sometime around now that Bernard bought a synthesiser. Well, a potential synthesiser.
Found in the pages of Electronics Today magazine were circuit diagrams and assembly instructions for the synth. They began ‘Despite the high complexity of this project, its construction should pose no ELECTRONIC problems to the competent hobbyist . . .’ before descending into solder-ese. Designed by Tim Orr, the Powertran was available by mail order for a bargain price of £172 plus VAT.
What you got for your money was a bag of electrical components, circuit boards, keys, knobs and switches, all in a box proudly labelled ‘Powertran Transcendent 2000 Synthesiser’. This may seem quaint and charming (hell, these days it’s vintage and valuable as well) in today’s age of smartphones, iPads and laptops, but back then in the good old, bad old days of yore, most affordable technology arrived this way. In a box of bits.
The DIY electronics kit trade, an odd amalgam of radio hammery, home organists and early practical computing enthusiasts, attracted single men with a passion for soldering and few female friends. It became a big business.
Sir Clive Sinclair, before he was a Sir, of course, sold most of his stuff (calculators, pocket TVs and eventually microcomputers) direct by mail order as a bag of components and an instruction sheet. That some of these technological marvels failed to work on completion could be put down to the sometimes puzzling and often confusing sheet labelled ‘guide to assembly’. No problem for the seasoned assembler of Airfix kits.
By the mid-seventies, I was already sold on the idea of anything electronic, and particularly digital. In 1975 I became the proud owner of a digital watch like Kojak on the telly. I began purchasing digital gizmos and whatnots like there was no tomorrow. These were all pretty useless calculators with a bit of spin. Biorhythms were a popular fad in the 1970s – by entering your date of birth into the calculating device you could discover if today was a good one for doing any work or if you were likely to be in a bad mood and should avoid stress. Hocus pocus, really, but I thought because the biorhythm information was built into a calculator, then surely it must be true? With one of these you could be some kind of digital swami to your friends. Who needs horoscopes when you’ve got technology? A triumph of pseudoscience.
I began spending as much time in Dixons and Currys (in the electronic knick-knacks dept) as I did in record shops, eyeing up every gleaming new device to appear on their shelves with the word digital in its name. These things were, I thought, a boon: life enhancers, answers to prayers, and problem solvers. If only I could figure out how they worked. That each one failed to live up to my expectations of its largely imaginary potential did not deter me from my obsession. For it was becoming exactly that. I’d just keep buying them until I found one that did what I wanted it to.
Which was what exactly?
To be honest, I’d not given the practicalities much thought. But I had faith. It was only a matter of time until I found a gizmo that would improve and enhance my life.
* * *
The synthesiser had been around in one form or another since the 1930s. They were supposedly capable of producing an infinite range of sounds, from imitating ‘real’ instruments to sounds no one had ever heard before. That was the theory. My interest in synthesised sounds probably began with the tune ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados, closely followed by the weird soundtrack of Doctor Who made by the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. That music was definitely interesting: the icy sounds of other worlds and the terrifying metallic voices of the Daleks and the Cybermen.
That early synths looked more like pieces of laboratory equipment than anything capable of producing music made them all the more appealing to me. In the late 1960s Wendy (at that time still Walter) Carlos had used the first Moog synths on his recordings of Bach and Beethoven. I didn’t find them particularly appealing. Given the choice between Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Kraftwerk, Bach was bound to lose out no matter what it was played on.
Synthesisers quickly caught on with prog bands and pretty soon any self-respecting ivory tinkler would have one piled on top of the mountain of gear that was the trademark of any keyboard wizard worth his salt in the 1970s.
They could often be seen noodling away on one of Robert Moog’s inventions. That these marvels could only perform one note at a time (as opposed to multiple notes simultaneously) was not seen as a problem considering the wide range of sounds they could produce.
For me, it was in Germany where synthesisers were being used in a more inspiring way. Krautrock bands such as Tangerine Dream, Cluster and Kraftwerk were using synths in a rhythmic or more atmospheric way, rather than trying to mimic the sound of acoustic instruments. In 1977, Giorgio Moroder’s synthesiser pulse on Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ was irresistible, even though I still thought ‘disco’ was a dirty word. That was more like it. Moroder went on to produce Sparks’ ‘Number One in Heaven’, which was sublime, but he also wrote ‘Son of My Father’, which was not.
I’d always liked the repetitive sounds that machines made. The clattering rhythm that the looms made during the brief spell I spent working at Uncle John’s mill was loud and hypnotic. If I could make a sound like that somehow, that would be cool. There was no chance it would ever actually happen though. I had no idea how a synthesiser worked, much less where to find one. Not in Macclesfield, that was a dead cert.
Machines that made music were surely going to be a big thing, I thought, but not everyone agreed. Synthesisers were viewed by some with the sort of hatred and distrust that Ned Ludd had for the spinning jenny. ‘No synthesisers’ was a slogan on Queen’s early LPs. They gave the impression that using technology to make music was cheating, as though any fool could do it.
I had a conversation on the subject with another drummer, a bit of an old pro, a cabaret, show tunes, end-of-the-pier kind of guy (probably a mate of Doug and Dave), who said, ‘They’re all right them synths, in their place, but you’ve got to keep yer eye on ’em or they’ll take over.’
Crikey, he made them sound like the Daleks. Great, I thought, where do I get one?
I was, as always, looking for musical short cuts and this new and potentially dangerous instrument sounded just right.
I was labouring under the mistaken belief that these things would make life easy. Make me a better drummer/musician. That they were for cheats who wanted to be clever but couldn’t be bothered putting in the hours to acquire sufficient knowledge.
It didn’t turn out to be quite that simple.
There was one thing in 1975 that had a big effect on me and that was Kraftwerk’s a
ppearance on Tomorrow’s World. They performed ‘Autobahn’, which had been out the year before and which at the time I admit I thought was a bit of a Krautrock novelty track, a synthesised German Beach Boys kind of thing. I suspect that at the time my reticence towards the song was more likely due to its chart success. How dare they get played on Radio 1 alongside the Osmonds, Showaddywaddy and Windsor Davies and Don Estelle. It was an outrage! What were they thinking, making a popular record? (That didn’t stop me from dancing to it though. I got my head kicked in by a bunch of skinheads for dancing to ‘Autobahn’ at a Judas Priest gig at Poynton Civic. My dancing frequently offended.)
Despite my reservations, seeing the enigmatic and reclusive Kraftwerk on Tomorrow’s World was a revelation. It was the most un-rock-and-roll thing I’d ever seen and all the more enticing because of that. Electronic drums played with knitting needles, that got my attention. I might never be Keith Moon, but I could see myself doing something like that. Above all, Kraftwerk looked very weird – hang on, they looked a bit like me. My mid-seventies geography teacher look was suddenly fashionable.
Another nugget from the future came to me courtesy of the magician David Nixon. He was Basil Brush’s first straight man, if that’s any help.
When he wasn’t pulling rabbits out of hats and making glamorous ladies vanish from boxes, David had an interest in a revolutionary keyboard musical instrument that could reproduce any sound by means of a series of tapes stored in its innards. An orchestra at your fingertips.
This was generally known by the company name, Mellotron. Mr Nixon was an investor in the company and could clearly see the appeal of every family having one of these in their living room. One of the keyboards was offered as a prize on a 1960s quiz show and he was on hand to demonstrate the machine’s potential. One minute he was playing what sounded like a full orchestra, the next he conjured up the sounds of planes, explosions, car horns and machine guns. I don’t think the bemused contestants were much taken with ‘tonight’s star prize’. They were probably hoping for a car. What use was an organ that sounded like World War Three had just broken out in your living room? But it was the explosions that sold it to me.
I’ve never come across anybody else who can remember this particular TV gem. But I’m sure it happened. The idea of an instrument that could make any sound imaginable being played by a man with a talking fox for a friend? That’s not the sort of thing you just make up, surely.
The Mellotron accomplished its feat of sonic mimicry by having an eight-second loop of magnetic tape connected to each of its keys. Press the key and, hey presto (as only old magicians say), the sound recorded on the tape plays back. Of course, the tape wears and stretches over time and it’s this that gives the Mellotron its own peculiar sound. A kind of haunted gramophone tonality. In the 1970s, you couldn’t really get yourself taken seriously as a prog band without owning at least one Mellotron. Just ask Robert Fripp.
Seeing Kraftwerk reminded me of an odd incident from my childhood back at Gawsworth Road. I had a friend called John Shufflebottom who was two or three years older than me and was the proud owner of a BSA air rifle, which I coveted. So any excuse I could dream up and I would cycle up the road and knock on the Shufflebottoms’ door.
‘Is John playing?’ I would plaintively ask, meaning let’s get the gun and go shooting.
So one afternoon I knocked on the door. There was no answer, but there was this weird sound coming from somewhere. It was musical but in an odd, mechanical way. Thinking that perhaps they couldn’t hear me, I made my way to the back door. The sound was definitely getting louder and weirder – an odd nicky-nocky-click-click-boom rhythm and some sort of throbbing undercurrent seemed to be coming from the Shufflebottoms’ back room. I ventured further round the back and peeped through the patio windows, and was startled to see that the back wall of the room was taken up by a monstrous wooden multi-keyboarded electric organ resplendent with many switches and flashing lights. It was like finding the lair of a sophisticated supervillain in a Bond movie. Then I spotted, to the right of the organ, John’s dad, Charlie, playing a brand new Fender Precision Bass, providing the throbbing undercurrent to the organ music. He was engrossed while I was spying on him, but for some reason he looked up and spotted me staring wide-eyed through the patio glass.
‘Crikey,’ I said in my best Just William-type voice, ‘I’m for it here . . .’
But Mr S just laughed at his discovery.
‘John’s not in, Stephen. Would you like to come in and wait?’
I was rewarded with a tour of Charlie’s organ, no pun intended, and it was the drum machine or rhythmic accompaniment section that I found compelling.
The cartoony tick-tock robotic sounds were magical and otherworldly, and I thought, When I grow up I’ll definitely have one of these in my living room. It was the stuff of Thunderbirds’ Tracy Island.
After my tour of the keyboard, I wasn’t that interested in the bass, to be honest. I lost all interest in waiting for John and his air rifle, and cycled home as fast as I could.
A few months after Kraftwerk’s appearance on Tomorrow’s World I was walking past a music store on Manchester’s Oxford Street and there in the window it was, the instrument of my dreams: the Synare 1. A percussion synthesiser.
Four square black rubber pads, a whole section of sliders and switches that probably did marvellous things and the one thing that caught my eye the most: a handle! Like a futuristic attaché case, the Synare was effortlessly portable compared to a gazillion-piece drum kit. And it didn’t have all those bolts and pipes and nuts that always went missing or came loose mid-song. This thing seemed to have no downside. I had to have it.
Luckily it was a Sunday and the shop was closed.
For I had failed to notice the price of this marvel was around £1000. You could get a car for that – two cars if you weren’t too choosy.
Synthesised drums actually existed and in Manchester too, but they were slightly out of my league for the moment.
Never throw anything away. You never know when it might come in handy.
By 1978 things had changed. Electronic drums were in, the prices came down and I was finally able to get into drum synthesising myself, courtesy of the much more economical Synare 3.
Like Barney’s DIY Powertran Transcendent synthesiser, it was a mail order purchase and cost almost exactly the same: £171.30. No soldering required, though. The Synare 3 came ready assembled . . . just stick in a couple of 9-volt batteries and you were off.
If you wanted something that sounded like a real snare, forget it. Luckily it was sounds from another planet that I was after. I was off to the future with this matt black flying-saucer-shaped instrument. I spent hours and hours figuring out how the thing actually worked, in the process transforming my tiny bedroom into Ivy Lane’s ear-splitting equivalent of the Radiophonic Workshop. The neighbours were terrified.
I loved the Synare 3, and we used it for the sci-fi whup-whup siren intro in the live version of ‘Disorder’, noise washes in ‘Shadowplay’, chi-chi sounds in ‘She’s Lost Control’ and, more alarmingly, for the disco drum and ray-gun blaster break on ‘Insight’. On a good night, it would sound like ray-guns. On a bad night, if I got the switches wrong, it sounded like a flock of enraged pigeons.
Using the Synare live was challenging. Adjusting the tiny knobs and switches while still playing the rest of the drum kit was difficult with only two hands. I soon discovered it was easy to dislodge or break a control knob with a bit of overzealous pounding. Collateral damage.
This was the first stage in what would years later become an unhealthy case of gear addiction.
Meanwhile, we were all a little sceptical as to the successful outcome of Barney’s foray into the world of DIY synthesiser construction. Hooky’s bet was that it would end up stuck in a bin bag under Bernard’s bed, never to be mentioned again. Being a habitual fence sitter, I’d have given you even money.
I think Hooky felt ambivalent towards Bernard�
��s Transcendent synth project. I guess he thought it unnecessary as he was under the impression we were in a rock band. To Ian, it was all magical hocus pocus. Ian was not one of the world’s most practical people. He knew synthesisers and computers were going to be the future, but as to how all this might work in practice, he had no idea. It just would and it would be great.
Bernard’s soldering project proved to be a great success. The Powertran actually worked. Better than that, it sounded incredible. It looked like a pretty simple synth but looks can be deceptive. It was a lot more sophisticated that it seemed and it was easy to get confused by its innocuous-looking switches. But back then it was absolutely fascinating. What did an oscillator do exactly? What did VCFAD mean?
Bernard used the synth to make some ambient background music for the launch party of The Talking Parcel, a Cosgrove Hall animated film he’d worked on. It sounded very sophisticated, and I remember being really impressed. It certainly didn’t sound like someone pissing about on a synthesiser they’d just made from a kit.
Bernard had also acquired an Akai two-track reel-to-reel tape machine, which Ian thought we would be using to record our rehearsals. Ian was annoyed when that only happened very occasionally. To be fair, I don’t think Ian thought of the practicalities of carting a large tape recorder around on the back of a motorbike. We were all still ferrying our gear to and from rehearsals every night. But logistics did not figure largely with Ian Curtis. He remained miffed.
A friend of mine, who worked in Terry Blood’s record shop in Macclesfield’s shopping precinct, heard of a Tandberg two-track tape machine that was going for a reasonable sum in Upton Priory if we were interested. Well I was, and with Ian in tow just in case it was very heavy, I acquired the machine and began ferrying it to rehearsals in the Cortina. Problem solved. Happy Ian.
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