Music in the Plastic Age

Punk rock was not quite the revolution some people might think it was. I mean culturally maybe it was, but not musically. The music wasn’t that different to what you might’ve encountered in dozens of dingy pubs and clubs across the land in the 1970s. Okay, maybe punk was faster and less proficient. There were more curse words. The audience dressed less conservatively. And for some reason people chose to spit a lot. (The pandemic would’ve loved 1977).

The musical revolution came some months or years later. In the slipstream. The revolution was new wave and independent record labels. It was electronic music and dub. This golden era spanned the decades. From the late 70s to 1982. From the disintegration of the Labour government to the emerging stranglehold of Thatcherism. From the death of the hippies to the birth of the yuppie.

This was the era of music I grew up in. There was so much happening it was hard to keep up. Much of it I only came to discover or fully appreciate many years later. Signifiers of change were bands like Buzzcocks who self-financed their debut ep. Small record labels gave a break to bands that the mainstream might never have supported. Rough Trade. Factory. Fast. Postcard. Cherry Red. The list of independent labels was ever growing.

While there’s rarely anything completely original in music, bands were soon pushing themselves forwards against the limitations of the punk sound. Magazine added keyboards and saxophone and existentialism. The Pop Group mixed dub and paranoia. The Gang of Four were militants. Cabaret Voltaire had electronics and dadaism. The Human League embraced science fiction.

It was a weird palette. The era feels very grey in many ways – personified by those pictures of Joy Division standing in various derelict or industrial locations in their native Manchester. But the music was often colourful compared to the limited shadings of punk – more like the splashes of colour on the blurred sleeve to Cabaret Voltaire’s classic Red Mecca album. Adventurous. Taking influences from different places and putting them into new forms.

The best music from that era still sounds fresh and interesting today. Red Mecca. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s self-titled debut. Y by The Pop Group. Cut by The Slits. The Birthday Party’s Junkyard. The sprawling three disc Sandinista from The Clash. And dozens of other better or lesser known works of the era. It felt like a heady time for creativity.

One of the reasons for this was a shift in economics. For years music had been the domain of the rich kids. Public schoolboys that had the freedom to do whatever they wanted. Rolling Stones came from that background. There were Genesis and plenty of others in the prog rock scene. Bands from a less well off background were at the mercy of the record industry itself, often dictating what they recorded or how it was packaged.

Punk had brought about some autonomy to the scene. It was possible to record and release your own music. Recording equipment was easier to source. Synthesisers and drum machines and other types of technology became more readily available – bands were no longer automatically drawn to the standard rock format of guitars and bass and drums. The world was also shrinking, so the accessibility of other types of music widened people’s influences. From Jamaican reggae and dub (often arriving alongside the immigrants that helped kickstart the country in the 1950s and 60s), to the post war sounds coming out of Germany. All these things fed into the mix that made the music of the time so interesting, innovative and exciting.

Music was part of a culture that had a clear run at people’s leisure time back then – alongside films, sport and TV. There were far less distractions than we have today, where podcasts, streaming services, video games, YouTube, social media and more have fragmented everything into micro-scenes.

To understand what the plastic age was and where it came from, it’s instructive to study a few specific bands from the era. Perhaps the best place to start is with Joy Division and their successors New Order.

Warsaw began life as a generic Manchester punk band, their music unremarkable. Changing their name to Joy Division they had already recorded a completely forgettable album for RCA. It was never officially released and soon after that they hooked up with Factory Records and their in house producer Martin Hannett. If George Martin was the fifth Beatle, Hannett assumed a similar role for Joy Division. His production, his use of reverb and delays, was central to what made the band’s two albums sound so striking (and, latterly, so timeless).

He might’ve also been partly responsible for the many years of sub-Joy Division clones that clogged up the indie charts after Ian Curtis’ untimely suicide, but that’s not strictly his responsibility. New Order’s debut album also often sounds like one of those sub-Joy Division clones and Hannett produced that. More interesting were the singles and eps they released around the same time. Warm sounding electronics and synthesisers give tracks like Cries & Whispers, Procession and others a hazy glow that still stands up when listened to all these decades later.

But the plastic age was coming. New Order divorced themselves from Hannett and ushered in this new age, first with Temptation and then with their landmark single Blue Monday. The warmth was gone, the sound was brittle, clunky, but insistent. Blue Monday was undoubtedly a great record and an important one, but it took an age to record. The main sequencer part was programmed using binary code. It was as much a work of the studio as the work of a band.

This was the thing about the plastic age. Digital technology was in its infancy. It didn’t sound great, because the bit rate was limited. There weren’t enough 1s and 0s to go around back then. And it was complicated technology to work with. Let’s go back to my favourites, The Associates. Sulk was their masterpiece and it didn’t take them long to record. No longer than other albums of the time.

The follow up to Sulk, Perhaps, took years to make. It had multiple producers. It sounded flat, even on the better tracks (and there did remain some spark of what had made the band in their earlier incarnation so great). Play the two albums back to back and it’s chalk and cheese. Sulk bursts out of the speakers, it’s jittery and urgent and fifteen different things are going off at once. Perhaps mostly just plods. On some of the tracks the rhythm kind of grumbles away at you. It’s dispiriting. You can hear the effort that’s gone into making it and that is never a good thing.

But digital technology was the future and everyone wanted a piece of it – especially those bands that had an electronic component to their sound. New Order. Cabaret Voltaire. The Human League. Even – obviously – Kraftwerk.

The hip producers became people like Martin Rushent (the man behind The Human League’s Dare) and Trevor Horn. When analogue was still in vogue, you might conjure up an electronic rhythm track by pushing a few buttons on a Roland drum machine of one variety or another. In the digital age you’d need a boffin to spend four weeks creating a single snare drum sound. Albums suddenly took ages to record. The creative process of a band playing together was ceded to a different and more technical (often more clinical) regime.

There are some great pre and post digital albums. Dare itself sounds great, as does the instrumental remix album Love & Dancing. Cabaret Voltaire, signed to a major label for the first time, entered the digital age with their classic album The Crackdown. Kraftwerk gifted us Computer World, which managed to blend the lushness of their best albums with this new technology. (It was also a future blueprint for hip hop, but that’s a different story).

The Sulk/ Perhaps comparison can be applied to other bands. Listen to Soul Mining by The The and then hear the colder-sounding follow up Infected. Or Thomas Leer’s work with Robert Rental or on his own debut solo album and then compare it to the airbrushed sounds of The Scale of Ten. Soft Cell’s best songs were their earliest recordings, squelchy and tactile (much like the subject matter of many of Marc Almond’s lyrics). By the end of their original run they almost sounded like a different band – although in this case, ditching the core synth pop elements meant they sidestepped some of the worst failings of the plastic age and came out of it all with their dignity intact.

Depeche Mode fared marginally better. The warm innocence of A Broken Frame was still there musically in the more grown up Construction Time Again. Digital clatter marred their next few records, but by Violator the warmth had made its comeback. (After that they gradually became more like a rock band, I lost interest in their work and it moved beyond the purview of this piece).

ZTT was the breakout 80s label that Trevor Horn co-founded and worked for. They had The Art of Noise, who made headway with their early use of sampling technology. Germany’s Propaganda made some interesting records. But the label was defined by their signing of Liverpool’s Frankie Goes To Hollywood. This was the marquee case of producer power in the 80s. Relax and Two Tribes were great singles, but they weren’t really the product of the band themselves. When it came to releasing an album - Welcome To The Pleasuredome - the record was far too long and far too full of itself, almost entirely the product of the producer (Trevor Horn) and a bunch of session musicians, rather than the band itself. This made it perhaps the ultimate symbol of the plastic age - the aural equivalent of being trapped for several hours in a roomful of coked up city traders. I paid for a record and instead they sold me a headache.

It wasn’t only the technology that created the plastic age. Lots of less tech-reliant bands lost their way in the middle of the 80s. Culture Club. ABC. Blondie. There’s probably a dozen more you can add to the list. The music industry had embraced glamour, but it was a glamour that was mostly surface dressing and there was little or no substance behind it. The music industry was still raking in lots of cash and the advent of videos and CDs just added more income streams to their money train. Excess was everywhere and it was dragging down both the music and the bands that made it.

But thankfully, as is the way in life, all things must pass.

Time ultimately proved to be the greatest healer. Digital technology got better – the extra depth, more 1s and 0s, made things sound less brittle. It also became more user friendly, which gave control back to the masses and took away its exclusivity from the boffins and the producers. Dance music happened. The second summer of love. People rediscovered the warmth of analogue. Roland’s TB-303 was the squelch that underpinned the acid house scene. 808s, 909s and (my favourite) the 606 were providing the beat. Records were made in bedrooms, overnight, for minimal cost, where previously they’d been laboured over for years at a time in highly expensive top of the range studios. Cocaine ceded dominance to ecstasy.  Even Thatcherism waned eventually.

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A Select Playlist of Songs From Before and During The Plastic Age:

Thomas Leer - Private Plane

Robert Rental - ACC

Eric Random - Dow Chemical Co.

Soft Cell - Metro MRX 

The The - 3 Orange Kisses From Kazan 

Silicon Teens - Sun Flight

New Order - Cries and Whispers

Depeche Mode -  Two Minute Warning

Cabaret Voltaire - Just Fascination

Art of Noise - Moments in Love