Electronic Sound - Reviews (Issue 126)

(First published in Issue 126 of Electronic Sound magazine, June 2025)

VARIOUS ARTISTS
All The Young Droids: Junkshop Synth Pop 1978-1985
(School Daze)

This wasn’t always the future.

For every wide-eyed teenager in thrall to the electric dreams of a synthesized space age, there was a hairy, flare-wearing teacher putting a yellow ‘Keep Music Live’ sticker in the back window of a Citroën 2CV. For every bedroom tinkerer squinting at the pages of Everyday Electronics, there was a beardy grumbler with a Stratocaster complaining that Minimoogs couldn’t play diminished sevenths, and that the only acceptable form of “paying your dues” was to trot Rory Gallagher licks around the social clubs while beer-sodden punters shouted loudly for the meat draw.

Synths, the old guard insisted, were cheating. “You push one button and you get a hit single,” they chuntered, weeping disconsolately into stale pints of Double Diamond. This hugely enjoyable compilation assembles a jostling parade of such wannabe cheats, all raising two defiant fingers at “real music, man” bores in an era when – arguably for the first time – the potential of The Brilliant Pop Idea finally began to trump Transit van authenticity.

And make no mistake, if life really had been that simple, everyone here would have pushed the “hit single” button. These are not experimental ambient soundscapes or 18-minute modular workouts. These are unashamed (and often endearingly deluded) tilts at Top 40 stardom from a roster of one-finger converts who had seen Gary Numan on the telly and thought “Bloody hell, I could do that”. It’s an attitude epitomised by ‘Lucifer’s Friend’, a cracking 1982 single from floppy-fringed Sheffield fivepiece Vision. Essentially, it’s Speak & Spell-era Depeche Mode, but with added vampires. “I only go out in the evening / Never seeing the sun / Draining the blood from my victims / To give me the strength to go on”. They were, it seems, particularly big in the Mansfield and Worksop area.

It’s not all fresh-faced newcomers, though. Equally interesting are the old (well, mid twenty-something) sweats eyeing up potential reinventions. John Howard had made three grown-up Elton John-style albums for CBS before growing Mark Lawrenson’s moustache and donning a Thunderbirds uniform to record irresistible 1980 banger ‘I Tune Into You’. Bassist Harry Kakoulli spent three years on a tour of duty with Squeeze before ‘I’m On A Rocket’ became his debut solo single. “I like to watch films on TV / Space creatures under the sea,” he sings earnestly, with a vague but possibly unintentional whiff of Jilted John. And there’s very little about John Springate’s extraordinary, multi-part ‘My Life’ to suggest he was once lead singer with The Glitter Band. Verily and truly, we have unearthed the synthpop ‘MacArthur Park’.

Just to prove that unfettered but ultimately fruitless pop ambition was a reassuringly global phenomenon, there are also inclusions from exotic foreign climes. Design were a Brussels duo whose 1982 track ‘Premonition’ is a dancefloor-friendly riot of charmingly unsequenced Yamaha CS-5s, while Andreas Dorau was a Hamburg teenager who somehow persuaded three girls from his school to sing on 1981 bedroom sci-fi epic ‘Fred Vom Jupiter’. A rare English version, recorded for Mute Records, is included here. Meanwhile, back in the States, Selwin Image were San Francisco new-wavers whose 1980 earworm ‘The Unknown’ gets a first-ever release on this compilation. “The unknown I really don’t know / And the known is really unknown,” they sing, pre-empting Donald Rumsfeld’s most famous political assertion by over two decades.

As this review rather shamefully proves, it’s sometimes easy to mock the wonky daftness of many of these recordings. But that’s kind of missing the point – the daftness was often an intentional part of that studied snook-cocking to the dreary rock purists. And when it came to musical inclusivity, synthpop was more punk than punk. Three chords? Three… chords? That kind of hoodoo required at least four functional fingers and a working knowledge of string gauges. Who could be bothered with all that rubbish when you could write a No 1 hit single on the Casio VL-1 that your auntie bought you for your birthday?

Album compiler Philip King has expertly assembled a collection that reeks of such optimism, of the possibility that The Brilliant Pop Idea was actually more likely to come to spotty schoolkids in suburban bedrooms than to hairy fret-botherers with pockets full of plectrums. Ultimately, none of the artists featured here achieved the chart success they were seeking, but it doesn’t really matter. By the mid-1980s, they had all done their bits as conquering footsoldiers in the ongoing battle to reinvent pop music.

As Gibraltar-based trio The Microbes sing profoundly and presciently on their 1980 single ‘Computer’, “I am a computer / Programmed to dance / I am a computer / Programmed for romance”. The future had finally arrived, and there wasn’t a yellow sticker in the world that could stop it.

Album available here:
https://night-school.bandcamp.com/album/all-the-young-droids-junkshop-synth-pop-1978-1985

BHAJAN BHOY
Summer In St Mary’s
(Feeding Tube / Wormer Bros)

Nestling in green nowhere, guarded only by massed flocks of vigilant North Yorkshire sheep, stands St Mary’s Church. A surrounding village, South Cowton, has long since vanished. But this 15th century shrine stands in timeless perpetuity, and – over two days in the summer of 2023 – Ajay “Bhajan Bhoy” Saggar sat on a bum-numbing mahogany stool behind its 150-year-old reed organ and recorded this stirring double album.

Saggar’s recitals are an invocation of the church’s musty history. The rhythmic throbs of ‘Sir Richard Conyers’ are a rousing homage to the church’s founder, and the pulsating melodies of ‘Alice Wycliffe’ pay similar tribute to Conyers’ young wife. Alabaster effigies of both lie in deathless repose nearby, and Saggar re-animates them on an album of tangible physicality, his feet audibly pumping like a wide-eyed Olympic cyclist. The closing drones of ‘Parvis’, however, are a gentler evocation of this dusty nook, where pale shadows lengthen beneath bloodless summer skies.

Album available here:
https://bhajanbhoy.bandcamp.com/album/summer-in-st-marys

VARIOUS ARTISTS
My Grief On The Sea
(Bring Your Own Hammer)

A nascent label intent on creating a new Irish folk tradition, Bring Your Own Hammer pour meticulous historical research into songs crafted by an illustrious roster. This debut 2024 release – freshly reissued on vinyl – focuses on the post-famine migration of the late 1800s, with Michelle O’Rourke’s title track a lament for a lover now departed across the Atlantic. “My grief on the sea / How the waves of it roll,” she sings, consoled only by minimalist piano and an ominous, swelling rumble. “For they heave between me / And the love of my soul”.

The undisputed star, though? The late, great Cathal Coughlan, contributing two heartrending vocals. On ‘The Man With Open Arms’ he is a rich baritone, accompanied by the electronic textures of Cork composer Linda Buckley. On ‘Old Oak Road’, his fragile whisper is woven around Jah Wobble’s restless bassline and Mike Smalle’s elegant ambience, making stark poetry of the (genuine) testament of an Irishwoman once accused of killing her infant son in New York. “Little body found / Coal ribbon bound”. It’s achingly poignant.

Album available here:
https://bringyourownhammerpresents.bandcamp.com/album/my-grief-on-the-sea

REB FOUNTAIN
How Love Bends
(Fountain Records / Flying Nun)

“Let’s stay at home for the weekend / Möbius strip is how love bends,” sings New Zealander Reb Fountain on the title track of this, her third album. Swathed in crystalline synths, it’s a handy summation of the overall philosophy here: relationships are fiddly. And it’s a theme explored with increasing intensity, so while the breathy oddness of ‘Ring Ring’ brings Billie Eilish to mind, the semi-spoken ‘He Commands You To Jump Into The Sea’, sounds for all the world like a synthpop Nick Cave. “I am the last minx / A feral killer / Your lapdog,” whispers Fountain, and it’s chillingly beautiful.

Album available here:
https://rebfountain.bandcamp.com/album/how-love-bends

THE ALL GOLDEN
Chambers
(Woodford Halse)

There’s now an entire generation profoundly mourning the demolition of urban 1960s edifices. Joining the lament? Mackem multi-instrumentalist Pete Gofton, with this melodic and heartfelt synth eulogy for Sunderland’s recently bulldozed Civic Centre. Performed almost entirely on a 1980s Roland Juno-60, it’s a touching salute to the hexagonal, red-brick complex that Gofton passed on his daily walk to school and where his mother once served as a local councillor. The keystone here? ‘The Well And The Pillar’, an eight-minute electronic hymnal of Brutalist synths and dark, subterranean chanting.

Album available here:
https://theallgolden.bandcamp.com/album/wf-94-chambers

LE VOLUME COURBE
Planet Ping Pong
(Duophonic Super 45s)

Charlotte Marionneau’s third album as Le Volume Courbe was heralded by ‘Two Love’, a slice of faux-naïf funkiness with High Flying Birds bandmate Noel Gallagher contributing piano plonks and ping-pong ball percussion. But the single’s daffy charms are tempered here by an overall sense of jazzy melancholy. ‘Mind Contorted’ has Marionneau duetting with the late Terry Hall on a bittersweet Daniel Johnston cover, and ‘Alone On The Rope’ is a piano-driven olive branch to a desperate friend. “I won’t let your smile get lost in the fog / I won’t let your dreams run away in the dark”. Heartbreaking.

Album available here:
https://www.levolumecourbe.com/news

PULSE: THE WORM

WHO?

Passing through portals into bucolic parallel realms, The Worm is the nom-du-jardin of Cornish artist Amy Lawrence. “The name actually came from a place in Wales called Worm’s Head,” explains Amy. “It’s an island that you reach by causeway. I lived near there for a while and became obsessed with it.

“And I love garden worms because they process material and they’re fascinating and important. Although for my performance character, The Worm is perhaps a bard or trickster character that exists across timelines.”

WHY THE WORM?

New album Pantilde – named after the story’s “loveliest donkey” – is a genuinely magical voyage to a medieval fantasy world. “In my story, the portal is one-way,” says Amy. “I like the idea of asking, is this world so bad at the moment that you would risk travelling through time to a potentially better one?

“The world where these characters live is based on a historic Britain, but it has glitches and fantastical differences. I wanted to picture a past with fewer binaries and to imagine a community life that could be relatively simple and equal.”

TELL US MORE

Creating an affecting soundscape that combines Early music, manipulated woodwind and delicate folk trappings, Amy cites Vashti Bunyan as an influence, together with the Earthsea books of Ursula K Le Guin and the work of fellow performance artist Jill Smith. But Amy’s own travels away from their native county also play a part.

“It’s impossible to say that Cornwall hasn’t inspired my work,” they say. “But parts of Wales, Ireland and Scotland and Yorkshire have influenced me as well. Being away from Cornwall and being more solitary has really helped me develop the idea of The Worm”.

Pantilde is available here:
https://wormery.bandcamp.com/album/pantilde