The Machines Arrive
In late 1978, Gary Numan walked into Spaceward Studios in Cambridge to record a punk album with his band Tubeway Army. In the corner of the control room sat a Minimoog that another band had left behind. He pressed a key. “It made that famous Moog sound, that low growl, and the room vibrated,” he later recalled. Within five months, the resulting single, Are “Friends” Electric?, reached number one in the UK. By Numan’s own admission, his total time sitting in front of a synthesizer when he had a chart-topping album could be measured in hours.
That same year in Tokyo, Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, and Ryuichi Sakamoto formed Yellow Magic Orchestra. All three were session veterans, drawing on Kraftwerk, arcade game sounds, and Japanese traditional music. Their 1978 single Computer Game sold 400,000 copies in the United States and cracked the UK Top 20. YMO anticipated the electropop boom by two full years, proving that synthesizers could carry pop songs without any guitar at all.
But the fuse had been lit even earlier. In 1978, Daniel Miller recorded a single in his London apartment using two Revox B-77 tape machines and a Korg 700S synthesizer. The A-side, T.V.O.D., was backed with Warm Leatherette, a track inspired by J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash. Miller pressed it himself, catalogued it MUTE 001, and accidentally founded Mute Records, the label that would sign Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Erasure, and half the genre’s essential acts.
The British Explosion
John Foxx left Ultravox in 1979 and recorded Metamatic at Pathway Studios, a tiny eight-track facility in Islington, using an ARP Odyssey, an Elka string machine, and a Roland CR-78 drum machine. Released in January 1980, it reached number 18 on the UK Albums Chart and established the template: one person, a few machines, no band. The synthesizer was not an add-on. It was the entire architecture.
Then everything happened at once. In Sheffield, the Human League split in two. Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh left to form British Electric Foundation and then Heaven 17, naming themselves after a fictional band in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Philip Oakey kept the Human League name, recruited two teenage backing singers he spotted dancing at a nightclub, and hired producer Martin Rushent. At Rushent’s Genetic Sound Studios in rural Berkshire, they built Dare (1981) by layering up to 24 analog synthesizers on a single line, all programmed, all drifting slightly out of tune. Oakey’s ambition, as Rushent described it, was to make “a new electronic Abba.” Don’t You Want Me hit number one in both the UK and the US.
In Basildon, Essex, four teenagers played a gig at the Bridge House pub in Canning Town. Daniel Miller was in the audience. He signed Depeche Mode to Mute, and their 1981 debut Speak and Spell, written almost entirely by Vince Clarke, reached the UK Top 10. Clarke left at the end of the year, formed Yazoo with Alison Moyet, recorded Upstairs at Eric’s at Blackwing Studios (working overnight sessions because Fad Gadget had the daytime slot), then dissolved that project too. He placed an ad in Melody Maker for a singer, found Andy Bell, and launched Erasure in 1985. Three bands, one songwriter, each one a hit factory.
The Gear
What separated synthpop from earlier electronic music was accessibility. The Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, introduced in 1978, was the first fully programmable polyphonic synthesizer with patch memory: you could save a sound and recall it at the next gig. The Roland Jupiter-8, arriving in 1981, added a built-in arpeggiator and richer analog warmth. Drum machines replaced drummers entirely. The Roland TR-808, the LinnDrum, and the Oberheim DMX became as recognizable as any human player.
New Order demonstrated what the machines could do on Blue Monday (1983). The track opens with the Oberheim DMX’s 16th-note kick pattern, borrowed from Donna Summer’s Our Love (produced by Giorgio Moroder), layered with a Moog Source bassline and sequenced Oberheim OB-Xa chords. It became the best-selling 12-inch single of all time. Factory Records lost money on every copy because Peter Saville’s elaborate floppy-disk-style sleeve cost more to manufacture than the retail price of the record.
Then in 1983, Yamaha released the DX7. Fully digital, based on FM synthesis, offering 16-voice polyphony and 32 patch memories, it cost less than a Jupiter-8 and never went out of tune. Its crystalline electric pianos and metallic bell tones defined the sound of mid-1980s pop. The warm analog textures of early synthpop gave way to something colder and more precise.
Soft Cell, Pet Shop Boys, and the Second Wave
Not all synthpop was clinical. Marc Almond and Dave Ball met at Leeds Polytechnic in the late 1970s, formed Soft Cell, and in 1981 recorded a cover of Gloria Jones’s obscure 1965 Northern soul track Tainted Love. It hit number one in 17 countries, became the best-selling British single of 1981, and spent 43 consecutive weeks on the US Billboard Hot 100, a Guinness record at the time.
Pet Shop Boys arrived later but lasted longer. Neil Tennant met producer Bobby Orlando in New York in 1983, while interviewing Sting for Smash Hits. Orlando produced an initial version of West End Girls that became a club hit in Los Angeles. Two years later, Stephen Hague (a Trevor Horn protege) re-recorded it. The new version reached number one in both the UK and the US, and the duo’s 1986 debut Please established a cooler, more literate strain of synthpop that carried the genre into the late 1980s while most of its originators faded.
The Long Tail
Synthpop never really disappeared; it just became the default language of pop production. Every chart hit built on programmed drums and synthesizer pads owes something to those early-1980s experiments. The genre’s direct descendants emerged in waves: Ladytron’s icy electronics in the early 2000s, La Roux’s 2009 debut bringing back gated reverb and analog arpeggios, CHVRCHES building The Bones of What You Believe (2013) on layers of bright digital synths and Lauren Mayberry’s voice. Future Islands brought synthpop to late-night television in 2014, when Samuel T. Herring’s performance of Seasons (Waiting on You) on Letterman went viral for its raw physicality, proving that the genre’s emotional range had always been wider than its detractors claimed.
Essential Listening
- Kraftwerk – The Man-Machine (1978)
- Gary Numan – The Pleasure Principle (1979)
- Yellow Magic Orchestra – Solid State Survivor (1979)
- John Foxx – Metamatic (1980)
- Depeche Mode – Speak and Spell (1981)
- The Human League – Dare (1981)
- Soft Cell – Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (1981)
- Yazoo – Upstairs at Eric’s (1982)
- New Order – Power, Corruption and Lies (1983)
- Pet Shop Boys – Actually (1987)
- Erasure – The Innocents (1988)
- CHVRCHES – The Bones of What You Believe (2013)