The Blindboy Podcast - A history of the synthesiser in pop music with Martyn Ware

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Martyn Ware is a founding member of The Human League and Heaven 17. He and other acts from Sheffield pioneered British electronic music in the 70s Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cover it your husband's rucksack, you bear back gubernates. Welcome to the plane by a podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast. But if you're a regular listener, if you're a 10-foot deckling or a steaming quaver,

you know the crack. I have a very special episode this week. This week's episode is a bit of a... It's supposed it's a part two to last week's episode. Well, technically know it's a part three. Last week's episode was about my love of analogue synthesizers and I went into the history of analog synthesizers.

But then the podcast before that was about artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence could never replace real human analog artists. So this is a bit of a part three. So I got a massive surprise last week. So as you know, I've gotten my hands on some analog synthesizers. If you've been following me on Instagram at Blind by Boat Club, you know that I've been using my spare time to make a few tracks with my analogue synthesizers and upload them and I've been loving it. It's been healing my neurodivirgent burnout. I'm consistently in and out of neurodivorgent burnout.

It's something that, so someone who's noradivirgent ADHD, ADHD, or autistic, when we consistently find ourselves in situations that are overwhelming or overstimulating to our unique place on the spectrum, then we experience burnout. Social interaction, that's what will trigger burnout for me, consistent social interaction. And I've been on tour. I've been gig in nearly every week for the past two months. And every time I do a gig, I love it. But each time I gig, I'm interacting with maybe between six and 12 strangers each night that I gig. And it's not that I don't like doing that.

It's because I am autistic. Meeting people, for me, it requires me to put on my learned performance of being a normal person. Forcing eye contact, being conscious of my body language, my family, my family. facial expressions, what I'm speaking about. I'm well able to do it. I've been practising my entire life. But that does take up quite a large cognitive load as an autistic person. It's overstimulating and it's a bit overwhelming.

So after enough of that, over a sustained period of time, I start to experience feelings of what we call burnout. And burnout is a loss of skills, a loss of what we call executive functioning skills. So I become very forgetful, not responding to emails, not staying on top of tasks, needing to come home from my office at 5 o'clock, but then getting confused and arriving home either too early or too late. I become very, very irritable at the slightest things. And then my capacity to manage and regulate my emotions is more difficult. And then I have a very strong urge to just to be by myself. away from people and to not speak at all.

Complete silence with my own thoughts. Now, burnout isn't something that affects just nora divergent people. Neurotypical people would also experience burnout. It's called like the impact of stress. You might have experienced this over COVID in particular. If you've got prolonged stress or if you're at work and there's just a lot, a lot of, a lot being expected of you. and you can't deliver that.

Or you're struggling to pay bills and your efforts aren't being rewarded. You'll experience burnout too. Exhaustion, confusion, feeling a bit depressed, forgetfulness, brain fog, conditions which will lead to mental health issues if they go on long enough.

The main difference with noradivergent burnout is what causes it. So for neurodivorgent people, what causes our burnout, is whatever is, whatever overstimulates our particular brains, our particular way of, the way that our nervous systems experience the world. So if you go to a festival and meet a lot of people, you might have tremendous fucking crack and love it.

If I do it, after about an hour I'm going to start experiencing it as very intense, very confusing and a strong desire to get the fuck away and be by myself. But you know, I exist in a neurotypical way. world and I have to do gigs and I love doing gigs. So managing my burnout, that's very important. And something which is like a tonic for me specifically is when I get to make music, when I get to enter musical flow for hours, playing with synthesizers, creating music, losing a sense of time and space, sculpting with symmetrical vibrations of air. Whatever goes on in me when I do that, it feels like the part of my brain that is overstimulated

by social interaction. That very cognitive, language-based part of my brain that completely relaxes and sleeps while I experience the non-verbal bodily flow, the physical bodily flow of creating music. That's like taking a panadol from my burnout. It's like that if burnout was a headache, two hours of just creating a piece of music. By myself, I feel healed and rested after that. And my confidence returns, my self-esteem,

and then my executive functioning skills return. Then I'm able to answer that email, instead of ignoring it or forgetting about it and then dealing with the consequences in a few days. So this is what I'm at with my analogue synthesizers and posting those videos on Instagram. It's been really wonderful and joyful and I feel fantastic.

So last week's podcast was about my love of analog synthesizers because that's what I'm living right now. But I got a wonderful surprise. So when I put out last week's fucking podcast about analog synths, two hours after I put it out, I get a mail on Instagram. And it's from Martin Ware.

and he says, I loved your podcast about analog synthesizers. Now before I explain who Martin Ware is, if you don't know, this is like making a podcast about guitars

and then you get a mail from Jimmy Hendrix or Rory Gallagher. That's what we're dealing with here. Martin Ware is founding member of the Human League and Heaven 17 a serious pioneer

of the use of synthesize synthesizers in pop music. When we think of the first big explosion of synthesizers in pop, most people will think of Gary Newman, Gary Newman's first appearance on top of the pops in 78, I believe it was, with his song Cars. But he wasn't the first.

The Human League in Sheffield, coming out of the punk scene, were messing with sins first. If you want to learn about this before listening to this week's podcast, There's an incredible documentary that the BBC made around 2012. It's up for free on YouTube. It's called Synth Britannia. All about the history of electronic music emerging in Britain,

particularly in Sheffield and with the Human League. And also other Sheffield bands like fucking Cabaret Voltaire. Sheffield is an industrial city. And I just, I love how you look at all the industrial cities. in the world and that's where you see pioneering electronic music. I mean, you go to the, I've done podcasts on this years ago, I can't even remember, but you go to Detroit, you've got techno music, you go to Chicago, it's where house music come out of.

And something else that's always fucking fascinated me is, after World War II, the Axis powers in World War II, Germany, Italy, Japan are also for, for the world, war, war, and Europe, Germany, Japan are also some reason, pioneers of electronic music, you had the likes of craft work coming out of Berlin. Japan, of course, is where synthesizers were being made, Korg and Roland. And then with Italy, you can go further back to 1913 with the futurists, which was an art movement that was strangely aligned with fascism. But there was one fella called Luigi Rosolo, and he wrote a manifesto called the Art of Nises, which was revolutionary because you have someone writing about what electronic music needs to be when the technology simply does not exist at all, because

it's fucking 1913. I did do a podcast about five years ago where it contrasted the futurists, the Italian futurists of 1913 with the city of Birmingham in the UK and other industrial city and how heavy metal music came out at Birmingham because heavy metal it's not electronic but it's fucking noise music. It's industrial. But Luigi Rosalo's manifesto in 1913 it was cities now exist, industry exists. Humans are exposed to so much loud noises from machinery and cities that music itself is now obsolete and we must now think of a type of.

of music which isn't melodic but is abrasive and noisy and electronic and industrial. And it was the musicians of Sheffield who realised that the industrial city of Sheffield where steel was being made. A very ugly city. I love Sheffield. I love its ugliness. I'm obsessed with fucking Sheffield. I love the fact that because Sheffield has so many hills that in the

Victorian period, they were afraid that sewer gas would accumulate under the hills and you'd just get spontaneous explosions. So Sheffield has more fart lamps than any other place in Britain. A fart lamp is a type of lamp that is lit specifically with sewer gas to release it so that shit doesn't explode. But in Sheffield, yeah, it could have exploded at any moment because there were so many farts underneath the ground that would accumulate on the hills. But the musicians of Sheffield in the mid-70s who started messing around with synthesizers, they had an awareness of the futurists.

I mean, you had a band called Cabaret Voltaire. The Cabaret Voltaire originally, it was a nightclub in Zurich in Switzerland in 1916, which is where the data movement, so the data movement would have been associated with the futurists, but the data movement was barthed in the Cabaret Voltaire. So then in Sheffield, you have a group called Cabaret Voltaire, so they have an awareness of this history. They're artists, they're deliberately modernist.

They know what they are doing consciously to popular music with the use of noise and electronic instruments. And the person who I'm going to chat on this podcast is one of the architects of that. One of the most important living musicians of the 20th fucking century. And the thing is, with the 20th century, You know, the way we look back at the Renaissance and you think of the Renaissance as this great period of art if the world is still around in 500 years they're going to speak that way about the 20th century

in terms of music specifically and this is why I think that music is most likely the earliest human art form via singing, right? So we've been making music for as long as humans have been around let's call it 50,000 years, okay? The 20th century is unique because it's the first time that we could record music.

You see, for years we had paintings, and you make a painting and it doesn't disappear, it's an object, same with sculpture. But with the exception of classical music that you can write down, you can write down classical music and someone can play it, but folk music.

Like Jimmy Hendon, Hendricks existed in the 16th century and he's forgotten, you know, and in the 15th century and the 14th century and 13th century. Music was created amongst regular people and then it disappeared into the air once it was finished and possibly was remembered in the form of humming or learning tunes, but music would disappear. The 20th century was the first time that we could record music and then you have copies of it and now you don't need to be able to read music, you can just hear a record or a CD or a tape and then that inspires other people. So that's why I think the 20th century is going to be viewed like the Renaissance.

It's the first time that we could record music and then the creative explosion that comes from that. So Martin Ware whom I'm about to chat to, he's a huge part of that. He's a pioneer of the use of the synthesizer in popular music. He's one of the inventors of synth pop. we just take this for granted now because all music contains synthesizers but there was once a time

in the 70s where this was nuts this was punk this was radical a lot of people didn't like it you've definitely heard of the Human League you know about Heaven 17 what a lot of people don't know

is the early Human League music was quite difficult and strange and punk and they didn't know what to call it and revolutionary. So I spent the day with my jaw wide open. It's like,

when I make this podcast, I'm not really thinking about an audience. I'm showing up each week and being passionate about what I'm passionate about and it's just me here in my studio and I don't really have

an awareness of how many people are listening. I'm certainly not thinking that when I'm speaking about analog synthesizers that one of my fucking heroes is not only listening but it turns out

like he's a 10 foot deckland. He's been listening for years. He's been tuning in every week. He's one of the people who, when my podcast comes out, he gets up on a Wednesday morning and it's like, I'm going to listen to Blind Boy. So that's deeply surreal for me. But anyway, look, we had a chat and I loved every bit of it. This might be a little bit too nerdy for you if you're not into music. If you're a fucking musician, this is going to be utter heaven for you because we just go on huge tangents about the history of music and the history of harmony in Western music and recording techniques.

If you're not a musician specifically or a producer and you're an artist, you're still going to love it because we're speaking about the creative process. If you're none of these things, go and listen to some early Human League, the first two albums and some Heaven 17 and maybe take a look at that Synth Britannia documentary that's free on YouTube. But at a class chat with Martin Ware, and I don't want to interrupt it with an ocarina pause, going to go straight into an ocarina pause now. I'm going to play my ocarina.

It doesn't feel right me playing a synth on a podcast where I'm chatting to Martin Ware, so I'll just go with the ocarina. You'll hear adverts for some bullshit, all right? Oh, that's not very dog-friendly. That was the ocarina pause. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page,

patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if you listen to it regularly, please consider supporting it directly because this is my full-time job and it's how I pay my bills, how I rent out my studio, how I exist and how I have the time and space to show up and deliver a podcast each week. This is an independent podcast, listener funded, I'm not beholden to advertisers in any way. So if you're listening regularly and you enjoy it, if it brings you distraction, entertainment, whatever.

Please consider funding this directly. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee. Once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living. I'm coming to the end of my tour.

So I'm just going to call out some gigs before we get into the chat with Martin Ware. This Saturday I'm up in my... Monaghan and Castle Blaney. Can we call that sold out? I'd say that's sold out. You might get lucky on the door. It's a small gig up in Monaghan. I just really want to go up to fucking Monaghan up to Paddy Cavanagh country.

Then next week, Thursday, the... The 9th of April, I'm in Limerick in my home city at the University Concert Hall. Please come along to that. That's going to be fucking tremendous crack. There beside Yarty's couch, the spiritual home of this podcast. Then the 20th of April, up in Vicar Street, in Dublin, I have a class guest for Vicker Street. You don't want to miss that gig. That's on...

Is that a Monday night? Lovely Monday night gig in Vickr Street. I love my Vicar Street gigs. They're fantastic. I always put my Vickr Street gigs on. And the nights that no one else wants, I put them on on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays. No one wants those dates because usually it's music. and if it's a music gig, people want to go out and drink or whatever.

But with my live podcasts, it's like going to the theatre or going to the cinema. You don't have to have a drink. You can come to the live podcast on a Monday night and you're up for work the next day with a clear head. Saturday, 25th of April, this one is nearly sold out, but I'm up in Galway in Leisureland. That's that gig that I cancelled and now I've rescheduled,

so your tickets are still good for that. So that's Galway Leisureland there on the 25th of April. Then in May, on the 9th of May, I'm in May Note, Maynooth University as part of the Arts and Minds Festival. Now this is a daytime gig at 1.30 in the day. Now, I thought it was just students that could go to this gig in Maynooth, but it's not. It's the public. The public can actually go to this gig. So if you fancy a nice little daytime live podcast in Maynooth University, come along to that on the fucking 9th of me.

the Arts and Minds Festival. Fifth of July I'm in Sheffield at the Crossed Wires Festival. I think that's Sheffield City Hall. I'm going to make a fucking day of that now. And I'm just going to walk around by myself listening to Human League, listening to a bit of Cabaret of Voltaire

and I'm going to drink a pint of whatever the local shit is. And then I might have a little bit of Baldi and go down to Sheffield Cathedral and have a think about the Anglo's accents. Oh and I'm going to try and visit visit that fridge in the co-op there in Sheffield that hums in the KSE. Very spiritually Sheffield behaviour when you think about it. There's a fridge.

There's a fridge at the back of a co-op right now in Sheffield and it hums perfectly in the KSE and people go and visit it to experience the musicality of a fucking fridge, which is very Sheffield, as you can tell by this conversation that I'm going to have with Martin Ware. What I'd like to do is go into that co-op. with an analogue synthesizer and jam with that fridge dressed as the IRA. I'm going to try and steer clear the festivals now over the fucking summer and just concentrate on growing vegetables. I have numerous seedlings. I'm getting very excited about.

Podatoes, broccoli, kale, spinach, spring onions, garlic and San Marzano tomatoes. I can't grow cannabis anymore because I have children. Then October, my big to there of fucking England, Scotland and Wales in October, right starting off, Brighton at the Brighton Dome. Then over to Cardiff, a bit of Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, the Barbican, I think that's sold out, possibly sold out in London, Glasgow, Gateshead, can't wait a bit of, get a bit of Gateshead into me, Gateshead as I understand it, was the inspiration for the film Blade Runner because Ridley Scott, who directed Blade Runner, grew up around Gateshead. And there's some industrial area there that was an inspiration for Blade Runner.

So I'm going to try and visit that. And then... Nottingham. Fucking Nottingham. Large Anglo-Saxon underground cave network. Let's not forget about Nottingham. So anyway, look, here's my chat with Martin Ware. Pioneer of synth music.

Very kind man with sound politics who gave me a lot of his time. When you first heard craft work, how did you hear it? Well, big question. My musical journey of expansion in my taste started when I met Phil Oakey, really, at school in the fourth form. And he had a, yeah, 14, 15, like that. And he came from quite a wealthy background, and I only knew like poor people. I mean, and he had a big record collection. And it really opened my ears.

So I was listening to a lot of experimental electronic music that he had. I was listening to avant-garde kind of experimental jazz, like Carla Blay and stuff like that. The Blay, the Blay, what is it, Peacock, Synthesizer Show. Annette Peacock but also Frank Zappa and the whole tape manipulation stuff you know which is really important

people kind of don't really understand it so much unless you've had to deal with you know real to real tape recorders and recording studios and stuff so all that meant that I mean I came from a background of loving rocks and music and so did Phil we saw some of the early

rock's music gigs in Sheffield when Eno is still there. I saw rock to music with Eno five times before he left. It changed my life, I have to say. And I just wanted to be Eno. It symbolized the future. But really good vibrations was the start of that kind of journey of thinking, wow, this doesn't sound like a band in a pub at all. you know, this is like the future.

I still think that actually about that record. That's really fascinating because the one, so something I was really, really wondering about and I couldn't figure it out and now you've just answered it for me is like I know that you're from working class Sheffield. I know you told me that bought your grandparents are Irish. Yeah. And I'm just going, how the fuck did working class Irish immigrant kids,

how are they even being exposed to electronic music? But now you tell me that Phil Oakley was middle class, so there's a whole different cultural literature there that you just have from having a bit more money or maybe parents. I'm assuming his parents might have been, maybe went to college today. No, his dad was head postmaster of Sheffield.

Wow. He was not from Sheffield. He came to my school, which was like the biggest grammar school in Sheffield, King Edward Sevenths. in the fourth form and he just moved, his dad had just moved the family from Lester where he was head postmaster. And so it was like to me, Phil, apart from having a fantastic haircut, was it was like a bromance really. We were so close. We spent most of our spare time together,

Vibing on, you know, films, science fiction, you know, Oz magazine. Anything that was kind of transgressive, really. We took acid together. We went to a rock music year actually and took acid for the first time. That was interesting, I have to say. And so we were super close. but were you freaks? I mean, it seems like

what you were doing was so if you think of in the context of the early 70s was so strange like there's no way you didn't get picked on Ah, but the interesting thing is and it's a cultural

thing to understand in Sheffield we immediately we saw rock's music and of course Guy Glitter and all the

all the other glam acts on top of the pops and stuff, we thought that's for us, because it had this element of transgression, and it wasn't really about, were you gay, were you bisexual, were you, it was like just an exciting escape from the mundanity of a depressed city, you know?

So we used to dress in extreme, well, we used to dress in women's clothing. There's a funny story that Glenn tells on stage normally. And he says, one day I was living in some council flats near the centre of town. Phil came to pick me up and we were going out. No, sorry, it wasn't Phil. It was Glenn. And Glenn turned up in a dress, right, with makeup and everything.

It was a good looking lad. And my mum answered the door and said, oh, Glenn, don't let Martin go out like this. and he went, I'm wearing a dress, you know. So I was wearing like tight loon pants, white loon pants, a one-armed lurex jumper and a la, you know, kind of bowie, and a green fun for belero jacket and six-inch platform boots, silver. and we were going and walking through the center of town to the crazy daisy I think it was at the time

which ironically is where Phil met the two girls and went on to join the human league and we never to cut a long story short we never got picked on because I think we were so out there and so extreme that the beer monsters just thought I don't know what to do with this I don't I don't know whether to, you know, kind of intimidate them. They just thought, I'm just going to steer clear, you know. Was Sheffield a bit more accepting? Like, I know, so in Ireland, right, if, if, Jesus Christ, I know a fella who once walked into a pub

with a particularly long leather jacket, and from then on his nickname was, was Style. They just, they just caught, you know what I mean? Art, there's another dude. He was seen coming out of River Island. with three sets of the same pairs of jeans such three sets of trousers and his nickname became Spider.

But in Ireland, if you deviated in any way, you got a fucking nickname and people took the piss out of you. And I know from, speaking to people from Manchester in particular, Manchester seems to be the same vibe that there's an enforced conformity

that if you are weird, you're going to get picked on. Was Sheffield a bit more accepting? It was definitely more accepting. I mean, the original club that we went to in Sheffey was called the penthouse. And it was, they used to have like a student night midweek, which was like Tempe drinks night, right? And so of course we went down there. And that was like a glam kind of musical set. So you used to end up, we, this is where we started dressing up in that fashion. But you'd also get like, we used to joke about it, you'd also get like people coming in from Doncaster,

which was an even poorer town at the time, like, you know, big, burly kind of plumbers and builders who've not changed the clothes at all, but had started wearing eye makeup because they'd seen the sweet on top of the pops or mud. Go away. Yeah. The other thing as well is so many of these groups were working class.

Yeah, yeah. Nobody, nobody, nobody picked on anyone. It was a really, uh, uh, I was, it was a really accepting thing. Yeah. Slade, like I was looking at Arley Slade and they were dressed like, like at the very start, Slade were dressed like 60s skinheads. That's right. And they had shaved heads and Doc Martins and suspenders.

And then all of a sudden they went glam. That's right. But at the end of the day, you've got, so you had working class kids with an award. that even though these people on top of the pops, they're wearing makeup, they come from the same streets that I come from. Yeah, it was like a fashion thing. It wasn't even to do with sexual identity or anything.

There's another thing in Sheffield, in the area I lived in Broom Hall, across the street from these ultra-modern kind of minimalist, brutalist, concrete, walkways in the... the sky, there was a whole bunch of very old pre-war two-up-two downhouses. This is what we call the slums. Yeah, the slums.

They were slums. I grew up. I mean, I was born in a slum. I lived for seven years in a two-up-two-down house was outside toilet. Yeah, you said in your, in your biography that you had a tin bath in an outdoor toilet. Yeah, that's it. That's it. And no, no fridge.

You had the, you had the cellar-ed, you know. What's that? the cellar. There were steps down to the cellar where the coal was stored. But at the top of the stairs was the shelves where he stored stuff instead of the fridge because it was cold. Anyway, so it's a bit like the four Yorkshiremen sketch this, I know, but, you know, that multiplies and things.

Where you're having a competition about who was the poorest? Yeah. Your dad was a toolmaker. And did you grow up with music in your house? Yeah, loads of it. What crack were you listening to? We didn't have any books. We only had four books in our house.

What were it? There were four volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That's not bad. It's pretty good. They were different subjects. And this is the weird thing. So one of them was science, which is great. and I read it from cover to cover.

One was biology, which is great. One was geography, which was Duller's Dishwater. And one was the Commonwealth, which was unreadable. And it was just the basis of the Queen's shaking hands with lots of black people in... Propaganda. Yeah, propaganda. And anyway, so getting back to the music thing,

I've got... I've got two sisters who are 10 and 20 years older than me. and they I'm the same I was the exact same I was born into a family with a lot of older so that's why I got exposed

to music from the 60s and 70s even when I was born in the 80s yeah exactly the same so they had a dance set player and lots and lots of 60s singles and but all interestingly also

soundtracks you know things like West Side Story oh Leonard Bernstein yeah Leonard Bernstein cat on a hot tin roof I mean I fell in love with

soundtracks before I fell in love with film okay and that influenced my compositions I'm pretty sure because I still think when I write stuff I often think I'm composing for an imaginary film in my head wow okay

so when you're writing is it you're you that's a bit like writing a book really You're seeing pictures and then you're matching the emotion of the music with the pictures that you're seeing in your head. It's quite a synesthetic, yeah, I would say. The Irish connection, were your, so even though you had grandparents who were Irish on both sides, did your parents retain any of that Irishness or had they become fully assimilated into Sheffield? Well, their parents lived nearby us in a place called Netherthorpe, again,

quite close to the city center in Sheffield. So they, you know, very much the tradition there was they looked after them, visited them every day and everybody lived close to each other. I mean, it's quite similar in a lot of ways to, you know, more remote communities in Ireland, I suppose. Where were they from your grandparents? One was from, um, One was from Belfast and one was from Limerick.

Fuck off. I think so. Wow. And did you, like, they'd full Irish accents and everything, so they were full... I can't remember them. They were very, very, very, I was very young when they died. And they were very old. They were like, they did live to be like nearly 90, but I can barely remember them.

And so did you have any type of Irish culture growing up? No. That was just so your parents had become fully assimilated. Absolutely. Wow. You see, that's the thing too, is a lot of, you know, when I was chatting to Johnny Marr and Johnny Marr was telling me he grew up more or less in an Irish household in Manchester, but also telling me that he was aware that his parents were also very much trying to escape Ireland.

So even though he experienced a lot of Irishness in his house, it was involuntary. they didn't want like you got to realize because we were fucking colonized a lot of Irish people felt shame about being Irish about what Irish culture is

felt shame about Irish music so it was kind of hidden away and when people then emigrated to America or to the UK they tried to forget it a bit you know well they tried to reinvent themselves

and it was quite interesting when I married my wife Lansley who's from Armagh as I mentioned yeah But, you know, the first kind of six months of our relationship, she was going, she was hammering on about the bias, because she was in advertising in London, clever girl, you know, and made her way and left home when she was 16.

And, but she was going on about, you have, telling me, you have no idea how much racism is. there is towards Irish people in London. And I'm going to, because I'd never really witnessed any of this. Because I didn't really, I knew a few Irish people, but they were all in the kind of creative industries and quite, I suppose, middle class.

Wow. And I didn't, I didn't, I used to think she was exaggerating. And then as soon as she pointed it out over the years, I've noticed it is completely really. Well, in the 70s and 80s in particular, like I, Jesus, my brothers had to emigrate there.

And I had a brother in London in the early 80s. And he just went into McDonald's to take a shit. But he happened to have a backpack on. And he's sitting on the toilet. And the manager and the workers kicked the door in at the toilet. They were terrified. They were terrified. But they were fully sure this dude is here to.

bomb the place just because of his accent, you know? He also worked that he worked in M&S and he was at the cheese counter and there was people who'd refused to be served by him because of his accent. And the thing with, like it's not like that now, but Irish people in the 70s, 80s and 90s in the UK, they were British until they spoke. And then when people heard their accent, then it'd be like Islamophobia today. People just associated being Irish with. with terrorism and this, like, it didn't help the Irish community. I suppose I'm bringing up the Irishness because we don't have, electronic music is not an Irish thing,

but sometimes I challenge it because, like, we have an instrument, I don't know if you've ever heard it, it's called the I'llin pipes. Oh, cool. So, in fact, I've used, I've tried to find I'llan players in London. and I'm sure I didn't look hard enough because That drone, that's an electronic drone Like it's not an electronic instrument But that fucking drone

From the Ilin pipe is very And then of course Someone who gets looked over a lot Enya Like Enya's contribution Like Very good You know people think of Enya as

What's the word that's used I often say it because it feels quite misogynistic But Brian Eno gets to be called ambient music whereas Enya gets, is called New Age. And I don't like the phrase New Age because it suggests that the music is, is wallpaper, it's decorative, that it's not real music, whereas ambient is real music. But Enya came from a proper traditional trad music, Irish trad music background. And in the 80s, she just decided, I'm going to invent a new genre.

I'm going to start blending electronic music with Irish traditional music and create something in which we can only call Enya. And it's only in the past 10 years that people have started to reappraise her and look at her as a pioneer, you know? Well, some people, it's interesting because I work with a lot of young people. I do a lot of education and stuff.

So I talk to them about their influences and stuff. My view of Enya was at the time, and I'm being honest here, I liked it, but I thought it was a bit anodyne. But for the younger generation, I believe they see her as a totally credible and authentic artist. And I think that's very interesting because it's got a kind of eternal quality, which is predicated on the whole, God, listen to me with all the posh words.

It must be you bringing it out of me, predicated on the traditional Irish music, obviously. But you know it was Simon Cowell who's responsible for popularizing you. way. Really? Did you not know that? I did not know that, no. He was on Simon Cowell's label. I think that was his first big success. Wow, because she's like huge, huge. She's nearly Michael Jackson level when it comes to sales. And like when I was growing up, like when Enya was on the charts, I was pissed off because I wanted to hear the prodigy and stuff and Enya was knocking her off the top of the charts. You know, so it's me too, only in later years that I start to go, hold on a second here.

I think I'm not, I'm not looking at the art for what it actually is and instead I'm, the marketing, the marketing is, she was never marketed as cool, you see,

and she never tried to be cool. And what she's doing was actually quite challenging and transgressive. And she was herself and she didn't give a fuck, you know? Nothing, nothing is quite as alluring

as somebody who doesn't want to be, isn't chasing fame. and she's not and she's never done a gig actually you never done when you started having 17 yeah you started off as we're not going to do gigs we did yeah

we did TV shows what was that show why did you make that decision because with the early Human League you know you're kids and you think oh I'm going to be a big star signed a record contract in fact we took a wage cut of 50

percent to to uh so we could pay ourselves a reasonable amount and eke out the money that they given us as in advance for the first two human league out of them so it wasn't quite as glamorous as it appeared to be but what what we realized at the end of the uh humiliation mark one is that we'd all the all the uh tour support that the record company had been paying to get us on like the Susie and the Banshees tour and Peru and various other, you know, stranglers and Iggy Pop and all this stuff. We were paying for it. It was going on our bill. We didn't realize that.

So we looked at our accounts and went, hold on a second. We are paying. We are getting into big den. It was just the start of Hems 17 just started at the same time. as more or less MTV. So we thought, well, fuck this for a game of soldiers. We know, we're going to, if we're going to spend money and get into debt with the record company, we're going to make videos because then you can service every territory on

earth simultaneously. Secondly, it's cool and innovative. And thirdly, we didn't want to play live. because we didn't want to be away from our loved ones and our friends in London. We were having the best time of our lives. And I saw what happened to people like friends of ours, like simple minds, who turned into, from a relatively experimental rock kind of synthetic band, writing fantastic stuff into more of a kind of stadium rock band.

and then you have to change the music. Yeah, it changes the music. It changes the music. It's like they call this the Bon Jovi effect where once you move into stadiums, the type of songs that you have to make now must accommodate the size of that space, the amount of people in the audience.

And now the more, the quiet or weirder stuff just simply does not work in a venue of that size. And now you're a band where it's like, we've lost what we started off doing. And yeah, in fact, with simple minds, it was virgin, and we were both on Virgin, it was Virgin who persuaded him to do,

don't you forget about me, which was written by Kim Fowling. It wasn't rid by them at all. A lot of people don't realize that it was the record company going, you guys need to get real, we need a hit. And it was fantastic, of course. but that then that like

shifts the whole paradigm didn't it somewhere else so the early human league stuff right late 70s up until 82 so reproduction and travelogue they're

yeah like even today I would listen to that and I can see how difficult that music is you have to really listen to it and you have to be into it which means that in the late 70s

that must have been insane like did the record companies even they're putting you with Susie and the banshees and stuff like what did they know what to do with you or what we were doing was it so strange they didn't know where to put you they had no idea what to do with us

they they the only thing they could think about was there was this over overarching explosion of public interest in in punk and I suppose you call it new wave and they just so you're in this kind of

absolutely mad chaotic period where everybody was getting signed you know friends of ours who never have ever sought commercial success like Cabreux got a big record contract with EMI Spears

that's crazy like the stuff they were doing was so anti-pop anti-radio Spids, clock DVA I mean I'm glad they got signed I'm just saying Where it not for punk None of this would have happened I honestly believe

We would never have had a A career Were it not for punk Kind of Opening as a doors kicking down the doors You know As I understand it

One band would come out of an area And then A&R flocks to that area And just signs everybody Who's mates of that band Like is that how it was. No, not at all. Okay.

It's a bit of a trope. I read that on Wikipedia, so I haven't a fucking clue. No, no, no, no. It's kind of a tempting idea, but there were bands, for instance, in Sheffield, who were always being touted

as the next big thing. And they were generally kind of influenced by, they were like kind of slightly off the wall, kind of rock bands. There was a band called the extras who kind of model themselves a little

bit on early rock's music. But that kind of went on for years and years and A&R men rarely came up to Sheffield. So of course when we get signed, then ABC suddenly comes along who were brilliant. But they had a band

before that called Vice versa, who were more like the early Human League. There was no, it wasn't like oh, Sheffield's the place to go now they would because a lot of people had to move out of Sheffield like we did to make a success of it you know I mean the second version of the human league stayed in Sheffield good a look to them that was fine and but they still did all their recording down in London you know and stuff we decided

we wanted to be on the on the on the case of the record company in their face at all time. So we actually lived in Notting Hill where Virgin Records was. So we were in the offices every day. We were like part of the staff. And they loved us for that because we were passionate about what we were doing. So we didn't have management. We looked after ourselves, you see. I saw, so Phil Oakley was speaking about the beginnings of the Human League and he said that you called around to his gaff with a Georgia Marauder record, played it and said, we can do that. Yeah, that's true. Where, like, what was going on in your head at the time where you're going, we can do that?

I mean, what I'm trying to get it, I suppose, is, like, how did you go, I'm going to get my hands on a synthesizer? And could you play instruments beforehand? No. Like, when did you first go, I'm going to get one of them? And where am I going to fucking get it? Well, you probably, you may have read the story in the auto, but. but it's very funny, I think. So myself and Ian Marsh have both become computer operators.

Okay. In separate companies. And so for the first time, we'd actually got a tiny bit of disposable income. And amazingly, finance companies would give higher purchase agreements to anybody who was drawing a wage who could prove they got a salary. This is pre-credit cards. Yeah. very mine.

So we thought, hold on a second. They're going to let me buy something on HP. I'm going to get something. This coincided with the first kind of cheaper, kind of more diffusion range synthesizers, like the Corg 700S. Because you're looking at Eno, because when you're looking at Eno in the club,

he's probably using a mini-mug or something that's really expensive. I think he was using the VCS3, which was like 10 grand. 10 grand, yeah, something like that. Again, I think people need to understand that all the people that were doing electronic music from Van Gellis, obviously brilliant,

as you mentioned, the CS80 was like, you might as well, I might as well have said, I'm going to buy a rocket and go to the moon. Do you own one now? Do you have a CS80? No, no, no, no. I've got a virtual one. Okay, yeah. I love, I mean, it's great for certain things.

So, I was lucky enough to work with Vince Clark and produce an album of this called I Say, I Say, I Say. We became very close friends. He had the most amazing, futuristic Jules Verne-like circular studio. When you say circular, does that mean you sit down and you're just surrounded by sins? Yeah, like Vangelis had. Yeah, 360. Yeah. And walkway to round the back to get to the module ones.

Wow. And it was all connected via CV and Gate. I mean, you would literally ejaculate, I think. Yeah. He had every cent, I think. I mean, just about, there are obviously some kind of academic bespoke things that he didn't have. But he had pretty much everything. and actually duplicates of most of them as well.

So he had really experimental stuff like Buclers and, but everything had been plumbed so you could connect it by a patch bay with CV and gain. Now, for people who don't know what that is, is how you basically make different analog synthesizers talk to each other and synchronize. So I, when I was producing stuff within, I mean, I remember doing a John Peel session in 1978. The highlight of my life at that point was going to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and seeing the whole thing.

This is before everybody had since, right? It was like, I could not believe what I was looking at. It was like Aladdin's cave for me. And this was so inspiring to me. I thought, well, I know what I'll be spending my money on. I'm not going to buy cars or yachts. or anything like that. I still can't drive

and I don't want to. But this is, if I get money, I want to firstly have my own recording studio and secondly, because I think recording and learning recording techniques is as much of a tool as any synthesizer.

Yeah. So analog synthesis was the way forward then. And I tended to to feel that like the kind of, it all started falling apart bit when we went to FM synthesis. The case that I was making, like I've been using VSTs, as I said, for 20 years and only in the past couple of weeks is the first time I've had an analog synthesizer that I can touch. Wow. I know.

It's like, when I got the fake mini move, I'm physically touching something that I know inside out for 20 years. So there's no learning curve. I know, and the same with the profit, but it's all digital for me. for 20 years and now I'm touching it. And what I compared it to was when you have a VST and you have all those presets,

it's like buying tubes of paint and just using them straight from the tube. But with the synthesizer, you have to mix your own colors. And when you're mixing your own colors, your personality comes through. You think about every decision. And it's a much more involved

and artistic way of making sound. Well, we still, this is a really important point. when we started with the Human League there were no drum machines so the only way to make rhythms and we were lucky because

I never found this out until later but he transpired I'm going how did how did Ian Marsh managed to buy a complete system 100 because they are

even at that time that was like nearly £5,000 that's a lot of money now and he transpires. I only found this out like, you know, I think 10 or 15 years later. His dad had won the polls. And this is what he bought with it. So I'm going, okay.

So he had a, excuse me, a hardware sequencer, which enabled us to create basic rhythms, which if anybody who said being boiled, that's the hardware sequencer. But you're making your own drum pads Yeah, every individual sound had to be designed from scratch

so there are no memories so every time we wrote a new song we had to design it from scratch every sound, every individual drumbeat was designed from scratch and if we performed it live it's different it's different every time

but there's great value in that because now because that I'm sure at the time you had critique from quote unquote real musicians saying you're not a real musician but that there is your personality and the choices are there in the sounds that you're making and that's

unavoidable. That's what makes Jimmy Hendrix incredible or Stevie Ray Vaughn incredible as guitar players is it's their hands, it's the touch and that's in synthesizers too and the choices that you're making. Totally and I mean I've from

say to people who who have this kind of attitude towards synthesis. I'm not a trained musician. I can't read or write music. But it doesn't matter. But I often say to people, look, if you look into the history of the development of musical instruments,

the, when the piano was, the piano 40 was invented, exactly the same arguments were used. Yeah. because before that it was harpsichords where all the notes were identical volume and if you go to

I was lucky enough to live in Venice for 30 years and I used to go down to the church of the Pieter where Vivaldi wrote for which Vivaldi wrote for the four seasons and you go into that church and you hear like them playing the authentic instruments from the period

performing the four seasons. And you realize that he composed that the only keyboard they had at the time was like a clavid, you know, a harpsichord. It's really quiet. I mean, you can barely hear it. It's only in the most pianissimo passages that you can hear it being played. But it's there. And then the other thing I noticed about that, I mean, this is going off topic a bit,

it but no fuck it what go wherever you want to go uh is the entire composition of that piece and presumably other pieces from that period they were designed they were designed size specifically for that church in in the acoustic in this this perfect acoustic in this church it all blends into one chord. Okay. So when you hear contemporary recordings of things like four seasons, it's all about the virtuosity of the violinist. But not the space. Inside that space, it was a site-specific soundscape. If you look at the history of harmony and Western music, right? So we'll say Gregorian chant, which would have been 11th and 12th centuries. So those monks were singing Gregorian chant in a cavern as such, in a monastic cavern.

So it's just a large round room. So it was quite monophonic. And when Notre Dame Cathedral was built, and this is fucking fascinating, the architecture of Notre Dame Cathedral, whatever way it rose up to the ceiling, the architecture was mathematically in fifths. And then when monks started to sing in Notre Dame,

they naturally started to harmonize with the architecture of the building and that changed harmony in Western music. Resonant reinforcement. And another interesting point about Venice is Monteverdi, I can't mean what year, it's 14 something,

wrote the Vespers for San Marco, St. Marge Cathedral. It was written specifically with different sections of the choir in the different knaves around the place, the different Alcoes in the church because it's built on the plan of a Greek cross.

So the different points of it had different reverberant characteristics to create different effects. So this was, you know, this is all in the glory of God, right, trying to make you feel like you're experiencing something that's transcendental. And so, you know,

when I started doing in the start of the 2000, as myself and Vince formed a company called Illustrious, based around immersive three-dimensional music. It was really inspired by that kind of shit. Using the space. Because one thing that bothers me about music today

is, so we're all listening to music on Spotify and we're all listening to them on the same iPhone earbuds. So everyone is hearing music in the exact same way. And like if I listen to hip-hop from the late 80s,

and 90s, I can tell the difference between East Coast and West Coast hip-hop. Yeah. Because, like, I was looking at Teddy Riley, the producer, a pioneer of New Jack Swing. When he used to make music in his apartment, he would play it out the window. And it's how that music, you're talking about tower blocks. But then you go to the West Coast and Dr. Dre, and they didn't have tower blocks. They had large, wide open spaces. So the beats are completely different because of the environment that they're being played in.

Interesting. And then, like in San Francisco, hip-hop started to get incredibly bass heavy. And one of the pioneers was this was about 86, too short. And two short said that they wanted to listen to hip-hop in their cars. And the bass had gotten so heavy that when they were listening to it at home, the base was so heavy that the needle would skip on the record. And only when cassettes became a thing and you could throw it in the car, could you turn that fucking base up because now no needle is going to jump.

And then what changed from that was the sound of the hip-hop as it's in a giant speaker in the back of a car. And sometimes what they used to do was, when it came to the 808 in particular, they'd loosen their license plates. So when the 808 played in the car, the license plate would buzz and create a distortion. But that's kind of last now, you know. I mean, the Jamaican sound systems that is a similar type of thing. Even in fucking Ireland, this is nuts.

You're going to love this. So they did excavations and cottages in Ireland and they'd be cottages from the 1800s. And when they dug up the floors of these famine cottages, they would find underneath the floorboards loads and loads of horses, skulls

underneath the floorboards. And the archaeologists couldn't figure out Why are their horses, skulls, so many of them, underneath the floorboards of these cottages? And they looked into it and what they found was, so when the first, we'll say, Protestant colonizers came from, not from Scotland, from England to Ireland, Protestants in the 1700s from England, they had a fear of witches. The fear of witches isn't an Irish thing, it's an English folk thing. So when Protestants would move to cottages in the 1700s in Ireland, they would place a horse's skull underneath the fireplace because they believed that a horse's skull would stop a witch

because horses were such nervous animals. So they would put a horse's skull underneath the fireplace or sometimes what was called a witch bottle, which was a glass bottle full of piss and nails, and the witch's spirit would get caught in this. So the Protestants were doing this. Then the Protestants move out. And Catholics, about 50 years,

later move into the same cottage. And when they play music in the house that has the horse's skull, they just notice that it sounds better. So then they start putting more horses' skulls there. They don't know why, but they put more horses' skulls there. If you look at the structure of a horse's skull, it's like, you know those microphones you used to have as a kid, which don't have a battery, and it naturally reverberates like a resonator. A horse's skull is a type of resonator. So that was an 1800s Irish sound system. The houses would have horses' skulls and sometimes they'd put bottle caps in the horse's skull

and then you're dancing on the floorboards and playing music and the skulls themselves reverberate the music better. So that's a, that's a... Isn't that crazy? I love that. I've got a version of that for you. Go on. So we, with the early human league, when we got our first advance,

we decided to move into yet another derelict space where we had a studio. It was a derelict vets. It had a kind of five meter by five meter studio, and we had all our new studio equipment, blah, blah, blah, blah, and mixing desk. But next to it was the place we used as a vocal booth was like a small kitchen. It had been left derelict for about 10 years. and when we went in, there were, I think, about 30 or 40 milk bottles, wow, in the kitchen. So anyway, we were recording the first week that we were recording, HEM17, the first thing we recorded was Wichita Lineman,

the conversion for the first BF album. And we put Glenn into the room, put the microphone in the room, and we noticed the vocal, had this amazing kind of presence, which we'd never noticed when we'd put the microphone somewhere else. I'm going, what the hell is that? And we figured it out. It was the reverberance coming off the milk bottles that were emphasizing the kind of presence frequencies,

around about 2K-ish. And so we just kept the milk bottles there for the rest of the time. We're there, even though it's filthy. we thought this is we just stumbled across this secret that's so beautiful it's a plug-in isn't going to do that you see no and people are going to like when when i was mentioning teddy riley there he had a particular reverb on his tunes and no one knew what it was and people tried to recreate it and it was just all he could record in was a shitty shower with a bunch of tiles you know, we lose a lot of that stuff

and even for you guys to have the awareness and to have the ear to go, something is different here, let's not clear away the milk bottles, this is working. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you keep that as a little secret? Not really.

I mean, it was just, it was so horrible. I mean, it was filthy. The kitchen was not a pleasant place to be, but it just sounded great, you know. And then, of course, a lot of that, kind of the beauty of the, kind of roughness of the recording techniques got ironed out as soon as we were commanded by the record company to go and mix it in a professional recording studio like at the townhouse

in London and you know they got every piece of you know high-fi kit you know high-fi recording equipment the best reverbs the best digital reverbs you know Steinway pianos and it just The first Humelig album is beautifully recorded and everything, but he sounds a bit kind of washed out because it's just not got that kind of punkiness and that grit. So we insisted to the record company that when we did the second album, Travelog, that we wanted to record it, we'll mix it in London, but we're not going to re-record it in London

like we did with the first album. So the grit remained, right? That reminds me a bit of, you know that band Boston, more than the feeling. Yeah, I love that record. I can't think of your man's name. But like Boston, it's kind of one guy. He was a total nerd. He was like an audio engineer.

And when he recorded that first album that more than the feeling is on, which would have been mid-70s, he did it all himself. He was even literally inventing equipment. he did it because that was his profession. So he went to the record company with the final piece and this was perfect. But the record company were like, no fucking way. You're signed now. You must get a producer. You must get this. We can't put this out because this is just nuts. You can't record something yourself. So what he ended up doing was creating a fake producer that didn't exist. And he lied to the record company. And what went out was actually him producing it, but with a person who didn't exist.

Wow. Yeah. I've got a related story. It's not quite the same, but when we recorded temptation. Yeah. Banger. Our biggest hit. The record currently didn't want to put it out.

Why? Exactly. So we went, what? It's just, in our opinion, and we go to nightclubs. We, you know, we're right in the middle of the real scene of the people who are going to be buying this record. I think they'll love this. And also we had this influence of Northern Soul in there and all that stuff.

And they said, oh, well, you know, I don't know. It's just something about it. So they sent it off to an L.A. producer, Debbie Kirchambeam, who just had a big hit with Joe Jackson. Came back and it was fucking awful. I mean, he missed the point of the record completely, washed it out with loads of reverbs and repeats. And it was just terrible.

If I'd like to hear it now, I don't, I think they may have destroyed it. So anyway, he came back and we talked to Simon Draper, ahead of A&R and said, look, you must put this record out, just trust us. And it transpires. It transpires that the reason why they didn't want to put it out is because they didn't have Carol Kenyon, the co-lead on it under contract. Oh, for fuck sake. They were worried about getting blackmailed.

and anyway so they did it when it came out temptation I rang him up midweek before the actual first chart the sales office and their words their exact words were I said how is it going

sales wise and they said it is pissing out they're having to commandeer pressing plants all over Europe because they can't press the single fast enough to sell for reorders. What I adore about temptation is you manage to do that thing that's really, really difficult to do with a piece of music where it's not an Northern soul song,

it's not a soul song, but it sounds like I'm hearing in it the memory of a child who heard that as a kid. Yes, exactly. I think the word for it is hypnagogic. it's you've managed to recreate the feeling of a child hearing it through a door or something or a distant memory and then it's coming through in the song without it copying or it's you've created something new and I'm hearing memories and that's yeah my sisters had the big motown is that it your sisters is that it so were they into northern soul oh they were into northern

Soul, but, you know, and mainstream Motown as well. Do you know that I heard, because I've always been baffled by Northern Soul, I've always been baffled by the fact that, you know, why did these Northern English towns end up with the B-sides, the songs that didn't perform? And one theory I heard was certain Northern English towns were exporting coal to Detroit and to Chicago. So the ships would leave the north of England loaded with coal, end up in Detroit and Chicago. But then when a ship comes back to England, it has to have a ballast that has to be weighed down.

So they would weigh the ship down with rubbish. And some of that rubbish were unsold records. So they'd weigh it down with unsold Motown stuff. And then it gets back to the north of England and the docks as rubbish there. And then people who were running cafes, that they had jukeboxes in. In order to save money, it's like, well, I'm not going to

fucking spend five quid on getting an Elvis record. I'm just going to pick up this record that I found down in the docks. And then the local kids are getting exposed to very obscure B-sides that didn't perform over in America.

And that's the possible origins of Northern Seoul. Because it's nuts. It doesn't make sense, like. I don't care, you know, I don't care if that's true or not. It sounds pretty... It's a brilliant story.

It's a fantastic... I want to believe it. I want to believe it as well. I think the reality is that it's like a bunch of kind of trendy DJs in the north of England were visiting New York and used to buy huge amounts of, you know, cheap cutout, stuff that were getting chucked out for cheap or free from record stores in New York or Chicago or whatever. And just bring you back. I've talked to a couple of them on the podcast.

I do and it's like they're going like they used to take just empty suitcases across and just pick any old shit up. You know, it didn't really matter because it was so cheap. They were, they, it was just, if it had not been heard before, but it was in the right genre, that was all that these people wanted. It was like, it was like collecting, uh, trading cards or something, you know. And you want to have the one that no one else has. So it's that exclusivity and scarcity.

And hence you got the thing where I used to go. to Northern Soul Clubs and you used to go, I was never a complete devotee. I was kind of like on the edge of it, but used to go there. And of course, there used to be young kids high as a kite on amphetamines. The dexies. Dexies. Carrying their seven inch record box boxes with handles on the top and just stacking them at the edge of the dance floor, going and dancing, completely in an alternative, not dancing with anyone, just

dancing. And then, when, while they were arresting, they'd just be trading these records, you know, swapping records. Like Pokemon cards. Yeah. Yeah. Like Pokemon cards. Yeah.

So I'd originally asked you the story of your first synth and we went on a crazy tangent that went from Italy to New York to the West Coast and back to Sheffield. So you got your first scent on a higher purchase because you were working as, in computers. Tell me about that. All right, yeah, this is funny as well. So there used to be only one musical instrument store for professional musicians in Sheffield.

It was called Musical Sounds, imaginative name. It was full of ex-hipies, long hair, beards, bike rider jackets, you know, awful shit. you know, denim jeans. They look like, they look like status quo roadies. And this shot was quite big, and it was basically 95% guitars. But when these first synthesizers came out, they obviously thought, the owners of the shop obviously thought,

there's this new thing, I suppose we'd better try it. You know, it's like running a deli and going, oh, well, you know, I suppose we'd better get some slice venison in because someone might want it. So in this big shop full of hippies And everybody playing stairway to heaven We walk in And there's the Cork 700 S And I wish we were on video

I could show you, I'm stood right next to it Sat right next The actual one that you got Yeah, wow Yeah No, no, it's not the actual one Because I got rid of it This is one that Vince bought for me

He tracked it down And And we played it And of course it that time, the only way you could play these things was through like a guitar amp. So he sounded a bit muffly, but I thought, fuck me, I want that. I'm going to have it. And so we bought it on higher purchase.

And next thing you know, being boiled, you know. You must have a really, like when it comes to creativity, the fear of failing is often what will stop a person creating. And you mustn't have given a shit about failure. has to go, I'm going to get a cent and I don't pay piano, but I'm just going to make something for the sake of it. There's a lot of confidence there. Like, what was going on? Did you, was this just a bit of crack or did you actually want to make it?

Precisely, crack. Yeah. It was all an artistic project as far as I was concerned. I didn't go to art college. I knew a lot of people who did. And we mixed in those kind of, those kind of, you know, kind of circles. We did things like did our own fanzines and stuff like that.

So it's very much a do-it-yourself, you know, make stuff, a maker culture in Sheffield. You know, it's in the blood. So people make stuff, they don't theorize about it. They just go on with it. It's very Sheffield there. And so we were like that. It's just like, you know, we'll do it for our own pleasure.

we're not doing it to be famous, we're not doing it to get a record contract. And actually the moment of realization for us that possibly we might be able to, there might be a future in the distant future somewhere as a professional musician, was we put together a kind of proto supergroup with members of Cabreville,

Was that the future, was this? No, no, this was a band that only existed for one gig called VDK and the Studs. And Glenn was called Voice Decay, which I thought was quite good. Yeah. And he was the singer, also playing three-string bass. I was playing dual stylus stylophone at this point. There was members of the cabs playing tape treatments,

and Richard Kirk and Chris Watson, playing tape treatments and I think they had a EMS Synthi suitcase model and then there was a guitarist and a drummer and my friends is at 2.3 punk band anyway we played

we played a gig at the art college and it was like a fucking happening right we'd only had an hour's rehearsal we said what we're going to play none of us could really play our instruments I know we'll play the Doctoo theme tune We'll just go

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da Because we could all pick up a tune Right So we did that And then we thought We need at least one more song So And Glenn said

Why do we do cock in my pocket By You Pop? Because it's great It's like three chords And it's like, you know I can learn the lyrics overnight So we did that Anyway, so on the same bill

were two punk bands, one called Slaughter and the Dogs from Manchester and the headliners were called the drones and both we did our thing, we got booed off in fact the manager of the drones came on stage while we were playing

and said, the drones want to come on now so the song turned into the drones want to come on now which was quite good and our drummer was wearing a boiler suit with a cut-student Grant's on the back. And he got a bucket of pig's ears because he was a butcher.

And he was throwing him into the audience. He was six foot four and he was built like a brick shit out. So nobody was going to argue with him. Well, it was basically going, we'll show you what punk is, right? You got bowed off stage. Was there something about the energy of this?

We watched the drones and slaughtering the dogs and they were worse than us. And this was, they'd both got independent record. contracts. So we thought, hold on a second. We are not worse than them. We're definitely more interesting. Maybe just maybe. We all started independently thinking there might be something in this. And was this before you went to fill with Georgia Marauder? I said, this is possible. Yeah, this is before we, this is before the future, I think. And then. So 70s.

7576. Yeah, yeah. And that's before, because you lads were before Gary Newman was on top of the pops too, wasn't it? Oh, yeah, definitely. When Gary Newman was on top of the pops,

I was gutted because I thought, oh God, he's beating us to the punch. Although we did like Tubeway Army very much. But, you know, when they brought out his Calnetside, you know, and all that.

I just thought, Dave just nailed it. because the synth sounds sounded great. And I just thought, oh my God, you know, we put so much hard work into this. And then we'd just been overtaken on the home straight, you know. Anyway, we'll get on really well now. Me and Gary are good mates.

You were listening, I'm assuming, too, to Bowie's Berlin trilogy. Oh, that was a low change my life. But that was as as transformative. as listening to Brooks's first album. The thing that you were doing then, right, was weird and radical and strange. And now it's so, it changed music so much. It's nearly impossible to see it as being,

it's like, like I love the Beatles, okay? But I heard the Beatles in the early 2000s. That's when I first heard the Beatles. And what used to kill me was, I wish I could hear this back then. How can I listen to Sergeant Peppers and see this as being as a revolutionary as it is? because it's changed so much after it.

And synth pop is just mainstream now. But you lads were pushing it forward when it wasn't a thing, when it was, is this going to work? I mean, how does it feel to be so influential? It's very flattering. I mean, it's hard to imagine, I mean, we got dropped from Virgin in 1986. and I did, you know, well as a producer. I went on to do directly after that.

I thought, well, you know, I was upset, but I was lucky in as much as I was doing lots of productions. And the one that really struck a chord was Terrence Tren Darby's first album, which I produced. And, you know, which went on to sell like 15 million records and stuff. And so I got a kind of career going on anyway. And but then I realized when it came to the 90s, what started growing was the massive surge of dance-orientated pop acts. Who are you talking about now?

Do you mean the stock egg and waterman type stuff? No, it's post that. I mean, I'm talking about the more credible end of it, you know, from kind of massive attack through to, you know, through to, you know, chemical brother. or Prodigy stuff like that, yeah. And stuff like that. And a lot of them, not massive attack, but a lot of the more purely electronic acts did actually credit early Human League and Hemps 17

has been a major influence. And I thought, we are, I mean, you know, and then kind of during that period, DJing became the kind of lingua franca around the world of entertainment for young people. That kind of made our kind of legacy and reputation more credible over time. And then, of course, in the late 90s,

we decided to start performing live and now we've been performing live for nearly 30 years. I want to finish with, you've been really solid with your politics throughout your career. Yes, let's do some politics. Yeah, outspoken about Palestine. and stuff, which is great. Where did that come from?

Where did your left-wing politics come from? My dad was a shop steward trade unionist. Same as mine, yeah. I mean, basically, I've always been left-wing. The majority of Sheffield has been, you know, solid left-wing. It's only since the kind of reform bullshit, you know, came along. The edifice has started to crumble,

But my kids, I'm glad to say, are extremely on board. And pretty much all their friends are on board with left-wing politics and the Green Party. And I've abandoned the Labour Party now. I was an activist for years. I was actually, I used to canvas with Kirstama in his ward. Wow. And I saw him at close quarters. He is a snake.

He's a place, man. He's been placed there by the dark forces of the establishment to, to, what's that, what's the metaphor? The, the parasite that gets inside insects and takes over the brain. Oh, the cardiceps. He's that, basically. He's been placed there to destroy the Labour Party from within. And I have to say him and Morgan McSweeney have managed it.

Yeah, we're all very fucking pissed off with him. Irish like Jesus Christ fucking hell it's not a good advert for the Emerald Isle I have to say But anyway I saw him first hand Before he ever got elected

To be prime minister He should never be prime minister It's a disaster I saw what he did to I went to a big meeting After you know When they tried to get rid of Corbyn Yeah I had Jeremy on the podcast

Speaking about that you know Yeah I mean I'm mate with Jeremy So You know He's a proper Yeah. Proper good man. And he, and I went to the big meeting in St. Pancras Church of the, of the constituency party.

The whole meeting, directly after that, everybody turned up furious with Kier Starrma, because the first time he revealed his hand. The whole thing was jerry-rigged and gerrymandered. They basically ran the clock down, so he didn't have time to answer any questions. And I thought, right, that's it. It's all over. The Labour Party is finished because this guy is going to be the leader.

And we are fucked. Now you're liking the Greens. Yeah. I like Zach Polanski. I mean, I'm always preferred to be disappointed by politicians, but he seems to be the real deal. Oh, can I just give a shout out for Gaza, by the way? Of course.

Because I did actually visit Palestine with an organization called in Place of War, which was a cross, a cross-faith mission. And I saw in my own eyes what's happening, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank. I came back and I was, this was before all this kicked off,

I was utterly shocked that it had never been reported in the West. So I actually put it out on my YouTube channel and spoke about it and I got vilified for it. Yeah, that's like your, quite outspoken about it. Have you received, like are people, are there people not returning your calls in the industry?

Yeah. I'm close friends that have abandoned me. Yeah. It's very sad. But fuck them. Yeah. You know, I know what the truth is. Absolutely.

And at the end of the day, you got it, it's about human rights. And what I always say, if I get criticism about speaking out about Gaza, it's like the UN have called the genocide, the international criminal courts. Amnesty International. Like, fuck off.

You know? Yeah, no, it's, it's, you know, we could, this is like another hour's discussion, but I mean, we are in the middle of the information wars at the moment. That's World War III. Yeah. Thank you so much, Martin, for chatting to me. It's great. I've really enjoyed it, and I hope to do it again at some point in the future.

So thank you very much to Martin Ware for that chat. That was wonderful. check out Martin's autobiography which is fantastic it's called electronically yours and also Martin has a podcast called

Electronically Yours where he speaks to artists whose work he is passionate about so I'll catch you next week I don't know what with we'll be into April there next week it'll be the first 10 days of April as I always mention

are very significant within Irish weather folklore. So I'll probably mention that and see how we get on over the next week. In the meantime, rubber dog wink at a swan, genuflect to a warm. Dog bless.