the first bit of electronic music that i heard which grabbed me would have been popcorn by gershon kingsley, as accompanied by the bbc schools and colleges programming in the late ’70s early ’80s,

i would watch these engineering and science programmes whilst eating my ground rice pudding and marvel at this modern world we were entering… now i think about it though, i guess my first contact with electronic music would have been delia derbyshire’s rub of the doctor who theme, which used to have me behind auntie avril’s sofa in conniptions on a regular basis.. if you don’t know delia please get to know her

so time’s ticking away and between the airfix kits and the strange magazines i found in the garage, my dad came home one day with a bunch of 10p records he got from cheapo superstore ‘fred hartley’, he mainly went there to buy remaindered copies of the aforementioned mags but this time he scored an lp called ‘the in sound from way out’ by jean jacques perry and our friend gershon kingsley, of popcorn fame, this lp was a comedy spectacular which me an my brother played to death, he even took it into school to play in morning assembly…

After a few years at secondary school a boy called darryl (darryl now makes music under the guise of translunar) turned me on to kraftwerk, and another boy called ian turned me on to tangerine dream, luckily i wasn’t smoking dope by this point otherwise i woulda been lost, ‘white eagle’ still sounds great,

all the hip kids were grooving away to gary numan and omd, which i was certainly feeling but i hit the roof when i heard i heard the album logic by logic system, while kraftwerk were certainly creating amazing sounds, their music has always felt very traditional to me, this album really sounds like music from the future, even now

Hideke Matsutake worked for Yellow Magic Orchestra, only worked for ‘em mind.. funny thing about YMO, everyone bangs on about them being an electronic band but i reckon they were really a jazz fusion outfit, Matsutake was the electronics geezer, did all the synth programming and what have you for tomita and ymo, deep matsutake business in the links (Logic System – Logic zip of lp on esnips) useful bio here and official pages here, really deep overview here.

me and ian started our own tangerine dream type effort, called network 23, at least that’s what i called it, you’ll be pleased to know that there are no surviving recordings of the noises we used to make, but about this time things were starting to hot up in the land of vynil.. amazing new sounds were coming over from the states, some kid at our school had rellies in the states and one day the common room exploded as the 12″ of the mighty ‘Break Dance Electric Boogie’ blew us to bits, and we all tried to do backspins and crash windmills on the outrageously uneven parquet floor… which is a whole ‘nother story..