Dream Machines // Interviews

Stephen Morris was always much more than the drummer in Joy Division and New Order; he played a key role in the sonic experimentation that made both bands so special.  In this interview, he talks about Joy Division’s tinkering with electronics and how Factory Records producer Martin Hannett’s use of the studio as creative instrument often baffled the band, and how happy accidents with drum machines and synths created some of New Order’s most memorable moments. He also explains the impact that electro producer Arthur Baker and the ecstatic vibrations of Ibiza had on the band’s music. In one of your two autobiographies (‘Record Play Pause’ and ‘Fast Forward’), you write about how you were keen on Hawkwind when you were young. And a lot of people I’ve spoken to while doing this book have been saying that Hawkwind were quite important to them growing up, when they were expanding their musical horizons. Why was Hawkwind’s sound so exciting at that point in time? That's a good question.

D on Letts is the film-maker who documented punk rock as it happened, and was the highly influential DJ at the Roxy club in London in 1977, where he schooled young punks in reggae grooves. He has also played a significant part in UK electronic music history as the samples man for Big Audio Dynamite, the band formed by Mick Jones after he was ousted from The Clash. The inimitable humour of the self-styled ‘rebel dread’ shines through here as he talks about Big Audio Dynamite ’s hybrid multicultural sound,  getting away with sonic larceny and why he had to put stickers all over his keyboards when playing live with the band. Back in the mid-eighties when you started , Big Audio Dynamite looked like a gang of  swashbuckling, stylish,  righteous dudes who knew all the best tunes. Was that the kind of image you were trying to put across? I think ‘Medicine Show’ [from 1985 debut album This is Big Audio Dynamite ] was really like a manifesto of what the band was about. We were just doing o

John Foxx’s work with Ultravox in the late 1970s and then as a solo musician prefigured so many of the developments in  electronic pop in the years that followed. As he explains in this wide-ranging interview, Foxx always saw Ultravox as an art project, and synthesizers seemed to offer new possibilities to transform his ideas into sonic imagery - “to manifest an image of a new kind of scuzzy science fiction”, as he puts it. He also talks eloquently about his teenage tape-recorder experiments, the exploratory youth culture of 1960s art schools, the mind-expanding joys of working with Brian Eno and Conny Plank, the inventiveness of dub reggae and the vitality of Chicago house and Detroit techno - as well as how he styled his keynote  Metamatic album as if it was intended to be played on “a mysterious neon jukebox in a future European motorway café” . Michael Bracewell wrote in his book ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’ that art schools in the 1960s nurtured the development of a very English pop cu

When it unexpectedly became a British number one hit in June 1979, ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ helped to open up new terrain for electronic pop in the UK. With Tubeway Army and then solo, Gary Numan’s records brought cold-wave electronics to a mass audience, giving unprecedented opportunities to other post-punk synth bands who would go on to make synthetic pop the dominant sound of the early eighties. I spoke to him about how he initially had to fight to convince his record company that electronic music was the way forward amid widespread hostility to the genre from rock traditionalists; how he created his Gary Numan persona to overcome chronic stage fright; how the British music press taunted him cruelly but Black American electro musicians saw him as an innovator, and how he sometimes felt like an outsider even within the UK synth-pop scene. Around the time of the first two Tubeway Army albums [in 1978 and 1979], how much were you aware of what other people had been doing in electr