Originally Posted by shackfan:
“Great thread! I love all sorts of music, but i always go back to 1981 as my favourite year. Not ony the obvious Soft cell and human league, who i saw at hammersmith palais i think in december that year, but also japan, the associates, modern eon, felt, b-movie, dramatis and loads more.”
There is a great quality bootleg of Japan playing the Palais in 1981, sourced from a Radio 1 broadcast. You can probably hear yourself screaming between the songs..
Japan's Richard Barbieri is hugely under-rated for his contribution to synth sound programming. Some of his sounds and textures still sound fresh and unique today, although ironically he didn't actually play keyboards on a lot of the recordings, as the drummer's timing was better, so he did it! - This was in the days when interfacing and sequencing keyboards was often a painful process, and MIDI was just a bright hope on the horizon..
With bands like Human League, Japan, Gary Numan etc, I think the big attraction for many fans was the sense of anticipation regarding the totally new sounds that they were coming up with. The mainstream media tended to concentrate more on the look and image, which to be fair they did cultivate with the hair and make-up etc.
As digital synths took over, sounds became more "life-like" and generic (mainly because early digital synths were a nightmare to program) - people stuck to the presets, which is why you hear so many DX7 bell, bass and brass presets on mid-80s stuff. Also, musicians were intrigued with manipulating sampled sounds rather than synthesised sounds for a while.
I think Vince Clark started the pendulum swinging back again when Erasure did those Abba covers using analogue synths.