Fabulously Flamboyant Fridays: Synth Pop Part Three – Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Greetings pop pickers and welcome to another edition of Fabulously Flamboyant Fridays – our occasional Campari and soda drenched probe into the rainbow and glitter world of artistes who are quite simply fabulous, darling.

This week, to cleanse our palates of the hideously hirsute and entirely un-flamboyant content of my previous missive, we’ll be continuing our short series of articles taking a look at the halcyon days of synth pop and using my alcohol-fuelled ramblings as an excuse to post a number of fabulously flamboyant videos. And so, without further ado, laydees and gentlebodies, Fabulously Flamboyant Fridays proudly present the campest little genre in town: synth pop – part three. Not ‘arf!

This week, we’ll begin to probe synth pop’s glory years. A period when the genre crawled out of the damp and murky underpass, ditched the moody monochrome (well, some of it), morphed into mainstream pop and started to strut its funky – and very often cheesy – stuff. More specifically, this week’s episode will take a look at some of the bands who took a damn good spanking, but simply refused to lie down. Bands who lost key members, who seemed to have been dealt a mortal blow, but who picked themselves up, dusted themselves down, and went on to bigger and better things.

First out of the poptastic traps were Basildon’s finest bad boys, Depeche Mode. Formed in 1980, the band were initially pushed along by the very talented and extremely ambitious Mr. Vince Clarke. Their first three singles, Dreaming of Me, New Life and Just Can’t Get Enough all charted, as did their debut album, Speak & Spell. The music press, by and large, were not hugely impressed with this brand new, bright and shiny, primary colour version of synth pop, but the punters lapped it up and Depeche Mode became very popular in double quick time. Unfortunately for the band, trouble was a-brewing. Vince Clarke, who at the time was the band’s primary songwriter, main synth boffin and senior knob-twiddler, decided that after all their hard work to make the band such a huge success, he wasn’t actually all that keen on the results. To the surprise and dismay of his bandmates, he upped sticks, buggered of for pastures new and started all over again. To be fair to young Vince, he did do rather well for himself – first teaming up with Alison Moyet to form Yazoo and then with Andy Bell to form Erasure, neither of which seemed to suffer from any noticeable lack of success.

However, with the loss of Clarke, Depeche Mode really did seem to be dead in the water. They were pretty much written off by the music industry and the UK’s music press were quick to write the band’s musical obituary. The band themselves, however, had other ideas. Vocalist Martin Gore seriously upped his game. He grabbed the band by the scuff of its neck, took on the role of primary songwriter and over the next few years patiently guided Depeche Mode to truly impressive and quite frankly massive international success. In the US, they would land themselves multiple platinum albums and would sell concert tickets by the truckload. The post-Clarke version of the band started out on the US club circuit, playing to just a couple of hundred punters a night; but they quickly graduated to concert halls, then to large arenas and finally to the massively lucrative US sports stadium circuit. At their peak, Depeche Mode were regularly packing out open-air stadiums and playing to 60-70 thousand fans a night. Them boys from Basildon done good, guv’nor – and in international terms were probably the UK’s most successful synth pop export.

But Depeche Mode were not the only band to benefit from the loss of a key member. The Human League were genuine synth pop pioneers in the UK and were many a pundit’s tip for the top. Unfortunately, they were simply failing to deliver on their substantial early promise. It really should have worked: they had major label support, they were already in place and ready to rock when the synth pop boom began, they had great publicity and media coverage, prestigious sessions for the BBC’s John Peel Show, high profile tours supporting Iggy Pop and Siouxsie & the Banshees – and even David Bowie was a fan, reputedly calling them “the future of pop music”. Unfortunately, Joe public remained stubbornly unconvinced and, as a result, their record company was beginning to get restless. Worse, fault-lines within the band began to open and childhood chums Phil Oakey and Martin Ware, who were the driving force behind the band, were now no longer seeing eye-to-eye. Ware was keen on the band’s original and pioneering electronic sound, while Oakey fancied a crack at the lucrative poptastic end of the market. Ware’s patience finally ran out. He grabbed fellow founding member Craig March, jumped ship, started a new band called Heaven 17, and went on to do very well indeed.

Oakey now appeared to be up the proverbial creek without a viable method of propulsion. The band had effectively ceased to exist, but there were still a great many contractual obligations to fulfil. Steely-eyed concert promoters and record company executives turned their cold gaze upon the gutted remnants of the band and began to consult fiendishly complex contractual clauses of the type usually written in teeny-tiny small print. M’learned friends began to sniff the air and Oakey, with quite possibly a sinking of heart and a loosening of bowl, realised he was now solely and personally responsible for all Human League debts, financial commitments and performance/recording obligations.

Happily for this tale, our hero was undaunted. He grabbed a top notch professional gun-for-hire to look after the synths and the programming, persuaded two 17 year old school girls to get up on stage to sing and dance, and set about fulfilling the band’s extensive live commitments. Unfortunately, things did not get off to a good start. Audiences were expecting to see the original Human League and not, as one sneering critic put it, Phil Oakey and his dancing girls. Nevertheless, they ploughed on, took the flak (and there was a lot of it) and finished the tour. With their live obligations fulfilled, Oakey headed back to the studio to get stuck in to the band’s recording obligations, and against all the odds produced what turned out to be the biggest seller of the band’s career: the whoppingly successful, hugely influential, multi-platinum monster of an album that was Dare.

At last – at long last – The Human League had finally fulfilled their considerable potential. Dare was a massive international success. It picked up numerous gongs and awards, has been cited as an influence by many musicians, still regularly appears on polls and lists of “the greatest albums of all time” and spawned a string of internationally successful hit singles, including the biggest of their career – Don’t You Want Me? A run of hugely successful international tours and albums would follow, and the sneering quickly stopped, because Phil and his dancing girls were now bona fide, international stars.

By the early 1980s, Ultravox were another band who seemed to have hit the buffers. They had been around since 1976, had released a number of singles and albums which, for the most part, troubled neither chart nor till. I remember seeing the band live in about 1978. Clearly their frontman, John Foxx, had both talent and charisma, but the band really did seem to lack any cohesive style or musical identity. By the end of the decade the band seemed to have reached the same conclusion, and when John Foxx jumped ship for a successful JG Ballard-inspired solo career, most assumed that would pretty much be it for the good ship Ultravox and all who sailed in her. The band’s label, Island Records, dropped their albums from its back-catalogue, members drifted off to perform with artists such as Visage and Tubeway Army, and Ultravox, it would seem, was pretty much done and dusted.

However, Billy Currie (multi-instrumentalist and founder member) wasn’t quite ready to give up on the band. While collaborating with Midge Ure on material for Visage, Currie persuaded Ure that there was life in the old dog yet, and they subsequently began to compile new material for a possible Ultravox revival. Ure had recently been one of rock music’s more unlikely substitutes – coming off the bench, mid tour, to replace legendary guitarist Gary Moore in Thin Lizzy. Anyone even vaguely aware of the late Gary Moore’s plank-spanking abilities will understand that this is the very definition of being chucked in at the deep end – with lead weights in your pockets for good measure. He was then – being a versatile cove – asked to fill in for the band’s keyboard player as well. After this bruising experience with Thin Lizzy, Ure was match-fit and ready for a new challenge, particularly one where he could exert a touch more musical control than had been the case during his time with Thin Lizzy. As a result, he accepted Currie’s offer and duly signed on with Ultravox.

With most of the material needed for a new album written and rehearsed, and with Midge Ure now in place as the full-time replacement for John Foxx, Chrysalis records stumped up a new contract and the revamped Ultravox headed back into the recording studio. They emerged a few months later with an absolute corker of an album and a single that would deliver massive international success, transforming the fortunes of a band most had completely written off just a few months earlier. The album and single were both called Vienna, and they both sold in what can best be described as substantial international quantities.

Vienna was a hit everywhere and Ultravox of course went on to have a cracking career. But I’m afraid Midge Ure would go on to seriously blot his copybook by co-writing the hideous Band Aid single, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, with the deeply tedious Bob Geldof. I am however generously willing to forgive him this transgression, because his heart was in the right place and it’s still a masterpiece of taste, subtlety and sophistication when compared to its appalling US counterpart, We Are The World (video omitted on grounds of taste and decency).

Anyway, that’s yer lot for this week’s episode of Fabulously Flamboyant Fridays. In the next part of this series we’ll take a look at one of the defining phenomena of the oeuvre – the curious domination of the synth pop genre by duos. However, we’ll wrap things up for tonight with a final piece of Ultravox trivia. The track Vienna was an absolute monster hit in the UK, but never actually managed to reach No.1 on the singles chart. So we’ll sign off for tonight with the musical phenomenon that did. The artist and track that kept Ultravox and Vienna off the number one spot: the musical genius that is Joe Dolce, performing his meisterwerk, Shaddap You Face.