You talked about wanting to go back to original sources and that’s where most of your material comes from but you did have access to some of the artists you were writing about didn’t you? I looked at all the NME, Sounds, Melody Maker, Record Mirror, Smash Hits, The Face, New Sounds New Styles from 1978 to 1983, everything I could lay my hands on that was music or popular culture related. On the other side of the Atlantic, Devo were making similar waves in America, whilst all over the UK pockets of creativity were being born in Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Basildon and Leeds with bands adopting the DIY spirit, finding vacant spaces in which to record their music and get it out to a receptive audience desperate to hear new music. This book will no doubt be an indispensable reference for any music lover; it contains many webs of meaning that emerge from the curiously understudied history of electro-pop. Like you said, the 80s came with a bad rep at that point in time and imploded quite messily with lots of non-credible aspects emerging and dominating it.

Rex, Roxy Music, and Alice Cooper, who similarly paved the way for the future stars of electronic music by appending their retro-futurist sound with Moogs and mellotrons. SL: Richard, you have been the leader of the international Erasure fan club (EIS) and the webmaster of Erasure’s homepage for several years.Howard Jones came in with a different take on the form and actually, I loved Howard Jones so from my point of view, my love of electronic pop did continue. That’s an impossible question to answer, particularly after having recently revisited so much of the music as I wrote about it.

I’d invested so much of my myself and spent so much of my money in my teens in their music, that it wasn’t such a big jump to continuing that support of them 10-15-20 years later. Talk Talk (entered the charts in 1982), Aneka, Kim Wilde, Toyah, Hazel O'Connor, Grace Jones, Madonna, Blondie. It turns out that those electronic elements run through a huge amount of my favourite music but I hadn’t really noticed it before. The author provides a straightforward narrative history of synth with a brief potted history of the relevant musical antecedents. Evans’ other choice in framing the narrative is to let the voices from that era speak for themselves.It’s very good, he has done some extraordinary things and has been involved in some amazing projects, so I’m very much enjoying it. It became something quite successful and partly that was because the whole 80s rediscovery hadn’t happened. My book has the sub-title ‘Inventing Electronic Pop’ and I’ve chosen to define ‘pop’ as ‘popular’ so in my telling of the story there’s no career without an audience. A thorough, well-executed delight for fans of the electronic music genre and puts together all the pieces of information together.

Inevitably we are reminded on Bowie’s 1972 performance on Top of the Pops where he performed Starman and pointed directly into the camera into millions of homes. The time period is broadened somewhat in the prologue and the conclusion so that Evans can contextualize the beginnings and the aftermath of that time in electronic pop, but otherwise, the focus is on those six significant and intense years. Vince Clarke decides he wants to put this band together who would be a bit like THE CURE, and when Vince starts to put together the bones of what becomes DEPECHE MODE, it seems he’s incapable of writing songs like THE CURE; his aesthetic and musical vibe is entirely pop so he churned out what people termed “bubblegum”. SL: The foreword in your book was written by Vince Clarke who has been a living legend in the music industry over the last 40 years. Some of the artwork from the period the book covers is just as iconic as the music (and sometimes more so), so although the book isn’t really about the visual side of what was going on it was often difficult to disconnect one from the other.In 1982 I think, she changed papers and went to the short-lived Noise magazine and then Record Mirror… hopefully, that was in recognition of her being a leading light in this particular movement.

There aren't many books about this genre of music available, but even if there was loads then it would be difficult to better this book. In fact, ‘Being Boiled’ was my key one and an early version of the book had the subtitle ‘From Being Boiled To Blue Monday’; I thought that sounded quite snappy and explained what the book covered. I was drawn to this weighty book initially by its title, taken from an Ultravox classic, which I am glad it did as I got into the likes of Heaven 17, Human League, OMD, Tubeway Army/Gary Numan and Kraftwerk (discovering them during this time period) back then. They were a brand new thing being judged entirely on their first forays into electronic music, it’s a very different way of looking at the music and the people who made it. He was interested enough to start his Electronic Party nights at the Clarendon in Hammersmith, putting on people like FAD GADGET.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I think that it’s fascinating that so many of the pioneers of this story are still making new music, and also that the music they are making is every bit as innovative and interesting as it ever was, and sometimes more so. As Evans occasionally broadens his chronological focus, he also occasionally expands his geographic range – for example, the work of UK musicians such as Gary Numan and Duran Duran cannot be fully explained without acknowledging the influence of Kraftwerk. This is a real doorstop of a book, clocking in at 500 pages, so it initially appeared that it would be quite a daunting slog to get through it.