WELCOME TO
ELECTRONIC
SOUND 02
There are so many subliminal strands connecting the people featured
in this month’s Electronic Sound, it’s uncanny. It’s almost as if there’s
some vast, unknowable circuit board joining them in voltage controlled
harmony.
Take our cover stars, Devo. We spoke to both chief architects of the
Devo project about their primal soup years, the evolution of deevolution in the 1970s. Jerry and Mark told us some amazing stories
in an epic interview that takes us up to 1978, when they recorded
their debut album with Brian Eno in Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne.
Of course, it was David Bowie who led the world to Devo’s door and
claimed that he was going to produce Devo himself. In the end, his pal
Eno took on the job, leaving Bowie to continue his hobby of collecting
post punk synthesiser pioneers, chief among whom was The Human
League. We’ve talked to Human League founding member Martyn
Ware about the night that Bowie showed up unannounced at one of
the group’s London shows in 1978 and Martyn has given us a neverbefore-seen photo of Bowie snapped backstage at the gig.
Martyn Ware and Vince Clarke’s close association goes back a long
way and we’ve got an interview with Vince’s former Yazoo partner
Alison Moyet in this issue too. We hardly need to remind anyone of
Alison Moyet’s links with Depeche Mode, and DM fans will enjoy our
unique scrapbook of fans’ reports, pictures and videos of the very first
show of the band’s Delta Machine world tour, which opened in Nice in
France. Keeping the connections going, we also have interviews with
Tim Simenon of Bomb The Bass, who produced Depeche Mode’s ‘Ultra’
album, and Jon Hopkins, a long-term Eno collaborator and DM fan. By
the time you realise that another of our big interviewees, Little Boots,
had her debut album produced by Greg Kurstin, and that Greg Kurstin
produced Devo’s 2009 album ‘Something For Everybody’, the circuit
is closed and the feedback loop will have sent you into an oscillation
from which you may never recover.
See you on the inside!
Electronically Yours,
Push and Mark