Dream Machines // Interviews

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 Engli...

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...

Mark Moore became a pop star in 1988 when the gloriously exuberant ‘Theme From S’Express’ topped the UK singles charts. But even before that, he was a shining star of the club scene and one of the first London DJs to become an evangelist for house music. We talked about his earliest nightlife experiences at legendary clubs like the Blitz, the glitzy delights of hi-NRG, the “temporary utopia” of acid house, and how sampling empowered non-musician DJs to make hit records. Along the way, he also offered some wonderful anecdotes about going raving with classical composer Philip Glass and how he helped turn a bungled vogue tribute track by former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren into a club classic. I want to start off by asking how you first got into the club world. Billy’s [‘Bowie Night’ run by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan from 1978 in Soho] was the first club I went to. Was that mainly Bowie music or was there a significant amount of other stuff as well? They were playing Bowie, Roxy ...

Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy have been making psychedelic music for more than five decades. They first played together on Gong’s delightfully deranged album You in 1973, collaborated on one of the keynote statements of early ambient music with Rainbow Dome Musick in 1979, and in more recent years they ’ ve been making fine techno recordings as System 7. In this interview, they talk about how they met, the trippy realities of life with the Gong collective, Giraudy’s experience of being one of the very few women synthesizer players in 1970s progressive rock, how they got involved in the acid house scene, and Hillage’s elucidation of the decades-long “quest for the psychedelic experience in music”. What was your first connection with electronic music? Miquette Mine was meeting Pierre Schaeffer and Stockhausen because I was working in French TV. I was working as an editor and I did an interview with Stockhausen. One of the films you worked on with  director Barbet Schr...