Great Lost Synth Sounds Of The Eighties

Whenever people start getting misty-eyed about vintage pre-digital synthesiser sounds, it's always 8-Bit this and monophonic that and someone that sounded a bit like a cut price Top Of The Pops album version of a Factory Records-inspired outfit who couldn't even get signed to Cherry Red the other. Nobody ever seems to wax similarly lyrical, however, about the next evolutionary step - that Roland/Korg-fuelled Whole Band In A Box sound, or rather infinite(ish) permuation of sounds, that dominated most of the eighties and made Go West records sound like, well, Go West records.

And, as you might have guessed, it's high time that somebody actually did. Here are five of the greatest synth sounds that you once couldn't turn on the radio without hearing, but which now everybody tries to pretend never happened...


1. The 'Squiggly Synth'
As heard in... Mama Used To Say by Junior


Weaponised sine wave doodle initially much beloved of the Pigeon Street Soul brigade (see here if you have no idea of who or what they might actually have been), but which later became a staple fixture of early to mid eighties primetime TV themes, most notoriously deployed for Nigel Havers-centric divorcecom Don't Wait Up and long forgotten post-Whirly Wheelgate Noel Edmonds 'soft launch' reboot Whatever Next?, which was a corker, especially in conjunction with the 'teleporting Edmonds' visuals.


2. The 'Flattened Trumpet'
As heard in... Love And Pride by King


Weedy yet widely adopted analogue approximation of a vaguely 'trumpety' sound, which gained huge popularity on account of the relative cheapness of getting the Barry Andrews-haired 2000AD-jacketed Synth Wizard every early eighties band had by law to provide the illusion of a brass backing rather than hiring a small army of real live session musicians. Most infamously used for the instrumental break in Nikita by Elton John, which still finds its way into the minds of office workers on a loop at 11am precisely to this day.


3. The 'Tin Can Orchestral Sweep'
As heard in... Feel So Real by Steve Arrington


Less aesthetically successful variant on the above, attempting to mock up the sonic experience of a full orchestra with some ham-fisted ADSR-fiddling that sounded more like someone scrunching up some inadvertently tonal tinfoil backed up by a malfunctioning washing machine calling you on an old-school telephone where the magnet's gone in the earpiece. A surprisingly enduring example which lasted to the end of the decade, last sighted hidden somewhere behind Big Fun's cover of Blame It On The Boogie.


4. The 'Kamizake Portamento'
As heard in... Yellow Pearl by Phil Lynott



'Future Is Now!'-heralding plummet down the musical scale, possibly intended as a call-to-arms for robots, New Romantics and people drinking Quatro, but ending up more as something that the most annoying kid in your year in school would be able to provide a note-perfect emulation of without anyone ever asking them to. One of the most short-lived examples on this list, spending a short time as a go-to effect for everything from Heartache Avenue to Say Say Say, but ditched in favour of the 'orchestra hit' even before The Tripods began striding across our screens.


5. The 'Existential Flute'
As heard in... Does Caroline Know? by Talk Talk


Introspective Blue Jam-friendly soft-toned World Music-esque woodwind pretence usually reserved for when they were trying to get a bit 'soundscape', doubtless intended to convey a sense of zenned-out globally aware musical mindfulness but invariably ending up with nobody listening to the lyrics and just whacking it alongside Anita Baker and Oran 'Juice' Jones (who had his own neglected synth tones, but that's another story...) in the average local radio 'Love Zone'. Peter Gabriel was not available for comment.


6. The 'Entirety Of The Blockbusters Theme'
As heard in... The Entirety Of The Blockbusters Theme 


Requires no explanation.

This Is Sadcore

Given how much genre-defining debate (translation: a couple of people mused over whether it should really be called 'UK Funk' or something) was kickstarted by the post about so-called 'Pigeon Street Soul', it's high time that we took a look at another unnamed, unformed and singularly unimportant non-existent musical genre that doesn't particularly warrant celebrating in any way, shape or form, and which most of the alleged participants probably didn't even realise was a genre. This time: Sadcore.

Yes, Sadcore. Or, in other words, that curious strain of early-to-mid-nineties post-'rave' dance music wherein blue-hued chunky piano motifs vied for space with bawling full-throated vowel-expanding mono-monickered Eurodisco vocalists who constantly sounded on the verge of crying, and lyrics pondering great existential posers in the sort of vocabulary more normally to be found on greetings cards, which were not so much sung as they were stretched out on a rack. And, what's more, have more recently given rise to Wikipedia entries that stretch out coverage of their one or two stray hits to give the decade-straddling illusion of a career roughly equatable to that of Iggy Pop.

If you want to get all allegorical about it, then in some ways Sadcore represented the 'comedown' after the great big early-nineties-long ecstasy-fulled warehouse party of chart-hogging upbeat Balaeric anthemry, with the wailing divas, crowd noises, children's TV samples and blissed-out programming giving way to soul-searching and moody tonality. Their songs were the aural equivalent of a bloke catching an early Sunday morning bus home whilst still in his raving gear, with an expression that suggested he had 'seen' the philosophical burden of humanity in the middle of a mist of steam, dry ice and bleeping techno sounds. It needs a name, and Sadcore is as good a name as any.

And if you've still no idea what any of this is all about, here's a couple of defining examples of the genre. Yes, it is a genre now. Stop arguing.


Haddaway - Life


More widely celebrated for his equally existentally-probing debut hit What Is Love?, Haddaway really came to his own on this less well remembered follow-up smash, which explored his philosophical ponderings on the subject of 'life' (which, in case you were wondering, 'will never be the same' and 'keeps changing'), complete with allegorical video-based 'artificial intelligence' shenanigans. As if that wasn't enough, he then went on to score two more equally Diderot-riffing top ten hits - emotion-versus-logic ballad I Miss You, which he somehow contrived to perform on Top Of The Pops whilst apparently dressed as Duane Dibley, and mind expansion-endorsement Rock My Heart, perhaps best remembered for its opening syllable being approximately eight million decibels louder than the rest of the song.


Gloworm - Carry Me Home


Alternately bawled and murmured conjecture on the shifting and evolving nature of identity, relationships, vocation, domesticity and, erm, 'smog', the posited lateral response to all of these transitory societal strata being that the narrator should, for some reason, be carried home. The nearest that Sadcore has to a national anthem. Gloworm's only other hit, lest we forget, was I Lift My Cup, which with true zen pan-perceptualism strove to reiterate that he lifts it 'up'.


MC Sar & The Real McCoy - Another Night


A plea for openness and inter-gender discourse set to a not-particularly subtle rewrite of the theme from Van Der Valk, fronted by a man occupying a none-more-early-nineties facial middle ground between Kevin Day and The Bloke Out Of Therapy?. Note cunning deployment in video of those old Sadcore 'meaning'-depicting standbys, out-of-context silent movie footage and 'being on' a television. Best experienced as accompanied by a technical breakdown on long forgotten cable music channel The Box that somehow contrives to cause the upper and lower halves of his face to switch positions.

By the mid-nineties, it was all over bar the shouting - the actual literal shouting if we're taking latterday Sadcore standard Ecuador! by Sash into account - and Eurodance had curtailed its spiritual quest in favour of Whigfield trying to find increasingly ridiculous ways of sneaking filth past the censor's radar. Further along this upward trajectory lay The Party Animals... but that's another contrived fictitious genre.

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Pigeon Street Soul

It occurred to me recently that there isn't a proper genre name for early eighties UK pop-soul. You know, the sort that was festooned with synth drums, modal chord changes and 'squiggly' synths, as performed on Top Of The Pops by style-conscious vocalists in white gloves and 'cool' sunglasses with neon bits on them, while one of the backing band mimed on an instrument that wasn't actually audible on the record, and some balloons fell on them. Some sources out there seem to suggest 'jazz-funk' as a viable candidate, but that doesn't really nail down anything about its sound, style or indeed sunglasses, and could theoretically apply to anyone from Herbie Hancock to Level 42 via Curiosity Killed The Cat, Carmel and that band Ant Jones off Grange Hill had in that baffling Pop Pirates film. So it's time to do something about it.

Like all good genres, and indeed all bad ones, it needs a label that evokes the sound and the era in equal measure. Something that says both Roland synths and Latin percussion with a side order of what-time's-Tales-Of-The-Gold-Monkey-On?. Problem is, most of the immediately obvious suggestions just won't do. 'Post-Threads Soul' is at apocalyptic odds with the upbeat nature of the music, and conjures up worrying images of Jaki Graham scarpering from armed guards with a pilfered box of Prawn Cocktail flavour crisps. 'Deeleybopper Soul' really points more towards the zany Radio 1 DJs who introduced the records, and in any case it's probably illegal to mention them by now. Short-lived soft drink inspired 'Quatro Soul' almost nails it with the hint of sophistication and indeed suggestion of vague post-New Romantic influence, but would also allow bastard Five Star in through the back door, and that's not happening on my watch.

So the only sensible name left to give it is 'Pigeon Street Soul', in honour of a TV show that not only fits the timeframe perfectly, but also had a theme tune more or less cut from the same musical cloth. Arguably with slightly more sophisticated lyrics too. Incidentally, if anyone has a copy of the full-length version of the Pigeon Street theme as was very nearly released as a single by BBC Records And Tapes but then wasn't, please do get in touch.

Anyway, if we're inventing a genre, then we at least need to take a look at some of the key examples of it.


Imagination - Just An Illusion


Leee John, the man who inspired a million unfunny sketch show parody songs about how he'd 'forgotten half my trousers', and indeed a million unamused-for-different-reasons letters to Points Of View on much the same subject, with a handclap and slap bass-heavy ode to backing singers 'symbolically' appearing and then disappearing, and a video set in a Haunted House that, on closer inspection, seems small enough for him to have just jumped out of if he was that unnerved. Extra points for the none-more-genre-defining freeze-frame that lingers just slightly too long.


Junior - Mama Used To Say


Squiggly synth-dominated musical call-to-arms that was to Pigeon Street Soul what Purple Haze was to 1967, bafflingly illustrated here with Simon In The Land Of Chalk Drawings-inspired antics that caused much excitement to younger siblings when the video showed up on Top Of The Pops. All-conquering credentials more than confirmed by its subsequent retooling as the theme for TV-am's summer holidays stand-in for 'computer'-based Saturday Morning hoedown Data Run, Summer Run.


Linx - So This Is Romance


David Grant and company with their other hit, hitting all the right cultural touchstones with a bit of ‘prop’-based performance involving waving a letter around when it gets mentioned in the lyrics, the comic mugging to the camera of the other dinner-jacketed band members, and the bloke who has apparently been employed simply to stand at the back doing a weird stiff-legged hopping-from-one-foot-to-the-other dance that makes him appear constantly on the verge of falling over. And - AND - there's Simon Bates doing a trademark 'emotional' intro!


Joboxers - Just Got Lucky


New-fangled 'Boxerbeat' as touted by a band who dressed like they were looking to have a 'word' with Pogo Patterson at the end of an episode of Grange Hill, and a song that can have entire offices punching the air when it makes an unexpected appearance on Radio 2. Look out Pogo, they've got a 'cartie'!