David Stubbs - Mars by 1980: The Story of Electronic Music

In writing this book, I realised I was taking on an exciting but also invidious, some might even say impossible, task. I wanted to take in the full range of electronic music, rather than home in on one particular aspect, beginning with its very earliest manifestations at the turn of the twentieth century and its apparent global domination in the popular music of the twenty-first, with EDM challenging rocks long-held dominance as the default form of stadium music entertainment.

I wanted to take in its vast sweep, across a range of genres, create an account at once intimate and aerial in its perspective, at once personal and historical. Its not, however, intended to be exhaustive. This is not a directory. I can see now fans of particular electronic musicians, or even the musicians themselves, reaching for this book, heading immediately for the index and finding, to their dismay, no mention of their heroes (or themselves). I can hear the voices of anguish. Why no mention of Super Collider and their sinuous blend of fractal electronics and neo-soul vocals? Where is Todd Rundgren, whose synth-driven A Wizard, a True Star blazed a lightning trail through the 1970s? Why the omission of the brilliant Tod Dockstader and Arne Nordheim from the musique concrte list? Were they not French or female enough?

Or where is Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh, the Egyptian American composer born in 1921 who experimented with wire recorders in the early 1940s, composing music made from field recordings in Cairo that, albeit tentative in their technology and outcomes, pre-date Pierre Schaeffer by half a decade, and who died in 2017 having seen the electronic music he prefigured spread arterially throughout the body of modern music? Or Jean-Jacques Perrey, early adopter of the Ondioline, who used the techniques of musique concrte to splice together a gleefully de-solemnised, populist take on the genre, eventually going on to work with Luke Vibert on the album Moog Acid (2007), aged eighty? Of neither of these is there a single mention in the entire book.

How come no Jean-Michel Jarre, a more serious student of electronic music than his rather son et lumire style suggests? Or Vangelis, whose soundtrack for the 1981 film Chariots of Fire was, in retrospect, an inspired choice for a period film about the 1924 Olympics, where a lazier, safer choice would have been an opulent, Downton Abbey-style orchestral soundtrack?

Where are Space? Hot Butter? Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossips I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper? And how could you possibly write an entire book of this nature and completely ignore Kraftwerk? (Its all right, Kraftwerk are in here.)

No judgement is intended on those omitted. As I say, this is a personal and selective account that is more about aspects and angles, patterns and trails than encyclopaedic completism. Nor is it a techie account. Its more about the meanings and resonances of electronic music, how the shapes it has taken, the successes it has achieved and the failures it has suffered reflect the hopes, fears and loathing it has inspired in humanity. It refers outside of music into the realms of sport, TV, philosophy, the visual arts, non-electronic music, politics, national identity, race. But predominantly it refers to the music, made using the medium of electricity, but not guitar-based. Thats important. That such music feels less real, less organic, less heroic, more schematic and heartlessly methodical to those wary of it is one of the underlying themes of Mars by 1980.

The book stretches into the twenty-first century but, as the title implies, it alludes also to something that was lost in the twentieth century at some unspecified, pre-postmodern moment: an idealism about the future and all that it might contain, from socialism to space travel, dreams that now seem laughably antique or agonisingly extinct. Mark Fisher, my late friend and colleague, felt something along these lines. While not hoping to emulate his own cultural and philosophical investigations, there are smatterings here and there of his influence, not least in his abiding belief that the oppressive school of thought established in lieu of Mars circa 1980 that there is No Alternative to the prescriptions of capitalism and the free market is merely a rhetorical sleight of hand. Electronic music has been a carrier of malignant ideas, of date-stamped fictions and a means of disseminating mediocrity on an industrial scale in every gym, all the time, for a start. However, at its best, it has opened up great vistas of possibility as to what human beings can do with their invention and imagination, when unshackled from fear, custom and conservatism.

No alternative was the neo-liberal mantra; no future, as jeered by Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols in 1977, was the concurrent cry of despair that punk bequeathed, which, whether it meant to or not, helped scotch the flowery, futuristic dreams of a new Age of Aquarius as dreamt by the hippies. No future. Were still suffering the aftershock of that particular Song of Experience, the cynical refrain of the post-space age, of our postmodern times in which we are too clever, too afraid to speculate wildly on a better future of expanded horizons. This is the historical vantage point from which Mars by 1980 surveys over a hundred years of electronic music and theory and the context in which electronic music is made today. There are a thousand good reasons to give way to despair, but what is there to lose by attempting to rediscover in the electronic music of the past not merely a glow of nostalgia but the glow of possible dormant futures that have merely been deferred?

A further note: although the book proceeds broadly chronologically, its chapters are thematic in a way that militates against an orderly timeline. Theres a little bit of leaping about back and forth between the 1950s and 60s, 1970s and 90s, and back but we reach the twenty-first century in the end.

For their valuable assistance, guidance and illumination Id like to thank the following: Dave Watkins, Ian Bahrami, Lee Brackstone and all at Faber, as well as my agent, Kevin Pocklington; Jono Podmore, Simon Reynolds, Dan Hancox, Robin Rimbaud, all at The Wire magazine, where I worked for two years, a brief but packed era of immense discovery and exposure to new musics, and a chance to meet their creators; the commissioning editors of the late Melody Maker, Vox and Uncut, including Allan Jones and Jerry Thackray, who allowed me to meet childhood (and adult) heroes in the flesh; Neil Mason, Rudi Esch, Uwe Schtte, Mark Wernham and Push at Electronic Sound magazine; Luke Turner and John Doran at The Quietus; Clive Harris, Graham Dowdall and my partner, Roshi Nasehi.