Dream Machines // Interviews

  From 808s to MDMA, dancefloor remixes to transgressive videos, Soft Cell were ahead of a lot of the UK electro-pop pack in the early eighties. I spoke to synthesizer player Dave Ball about their avant-garde origins as students in Leeds, creating the perfect sonic combination of high-tech and dirt-cheap, flouting gender norms and enduring homophobic reactions, and the wonders of ecstasy and nocturnal New York. He also spoke about how everything fell apart for the duo – and how the emergence of acid house offered him new creative possibilities. Something that’s interested me while doing research for my book is that after the Second World War, there were all these ex-military oscillators and other pieces of electronic equipment being sold in secondhand shops, which were used by some of the innovators to create new music... My dad was in the Signals Corps in the RAF at the back end of the Second World War, and he became an engineer, working for what was then the GPO [General Post...

  In this wide-ranging interview, Human League and Heaven 17 synth-pop instigator Martyn Ware takes us back to his childhood fascination with spaced-out sounds, talking about the seductive appeal of Roxy Music and David Bowie’s bright and shiny “fantasy worlds” for teenagers seeking escape from the greyer realities of 1970s Sheffield, and revisiting the ramshackle, do-it-yourself “pragmatic futurism” of his first electronic bands, The Future and The Human League. Moving into the 1980s, he recalls how Heaven 17 created funk-influenced synth-pop hits while promoting socialist messages in their lyrics, how competition with their erstwhile Human League colleagues spurred them on to greater heights of achievement, and how a gig in the “insane lotus-eating environment” of Studio 54 was one of their wildest nights. What was the initial attraction of electronic music for you? It just sounded like the future, really. I grew up in the sixties in the middle of the space race, when there was o...

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. ...

Don 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...