The song that started the ‘Synth Revolution’

In the second half of the seventies there were two musical revolutions. One concerned the punk that tried to bring the rock back to the primigenio fury by ranging it from the apellies that had gradually incapsulated along its path, the other was linked to electronics and synthesizers who becoming economically more accessible and logistically more handy were no longer for the Super Band Sole Band.

Here begins the story of a Sheffield computerist, Martin Ware. So he explains it in an interview from 2013: “For the first time in my life I had a little money on the side, the choice was or learning to drive or buy a synthesizer because at that point they were cheap enough to be purchased. So I went to the local guitar shop that had just received the first entry-level synthesizer. They were all rocky tices, they knew nothing about synthesizers”.

Together with the former frontman of Musical Vomit Ian Craig Marsh He started experimenting with a Roland synthesizer. The next step was to recruit an old schoolmate, Philip Ookeyboth for his aesthetic talent and for the quality of his voice and, having to perform without guitars, bass and battery, including a live visual officer Adrian Wrightin addition to adopting Human League As a name, the Proto-Synthpop quartet therefore prepared to affect the first single.

The Human League They went with their minimal equipment in a damp disused cutlery factory.

The walls were soundproofed with the trays of the fruit, of those used by the fructivoing in stores, and so the recording session could begin. Ookey thought of the texts by writing a piece that spoke of the Chinese practice of boiling the cocoons of silkworms for the silk industry and the contrast with the Buddhist respect for all living creatures.

“Being Boled”This is the title of the song, was published for Edinburgh’s Fast Product in June 1978. The opinions were discordant: David Bowie he declared that that was “the future of music”, while John Lydon boiled the Human League Like “fashionable hippie”. As it happened once, to help the spread of “Being Boled” It was the radio. Specifically the passages offered by the well -known DJ of BBC Radio 1 John Peel who led the song to sell 3,000 copies.

The synthpop was in the air, albeit missing a scene.
Daniel Miller
with its pseudonym
The Normal
had not yet published
“Warm Leatherette”
The
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
they were a year after
“Electricity”
The
Ultravox
Of
John Foxx
they were in the neon glam and
Tubeway Army
They were still mainly a punk band. All together they formed a strange electronic consciousness that buzzed in the air, as reported by Farout, creating the sound borders that would explod in the early 1980s.

“The Model”
of the
Kraftwerk
had been published two months earlier on
“The Man Machine”
of 1978, published as a single in Germany that September, but it was
“Being Boled”
of the
Human League
To break the electronic dam that dominated the first British pop scene and contributed to creating the “second British invasion” that would have conquered MTV, starting the Synth revolution and the New Wave. Ware and Marsh left the

Human League
In 1980 they founded the
Heaven 17
continuing to have some success.