Bundling work as dissimilar as DIY noise experiments and club-hungry bubble-gum pop, synth-pop has just one commonality, its UK origins. As punk lost its rebellious flare in the late 1970s, English musicians began to search for a sound that would honestly communicate the modern experience and all its post-Industrial-age anxieties, and they found their answer in experimental German electronic music.

Kraftwerk and bands like Cluster, Faust, Neu! and Tangerine Dream inspired UK punks to put down their guitars and start playing around with synthesizers. Synthesizers were orphan instruments; with no history to lean back on, they promised a clean palette with which to paint the future. Combining their own emotional, popular sensibilities with newly discovered German electronic music, UK electronic artists created a fundamentally new sound that would in time dominate the mainstream.

At the heart of synth-pop and all its variants is a challenge to convention and a desire to create something new, an innovative sensibility that has forever kept me curious. The below 5 tracks are some of my favourite discoveries that fall outside of the usual suspects.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Of All The Things We've Made

Five years into their now 40-year career, 'Of All The Things We've Made' was meant to be the final song Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) ever produced. While the band had sold millions of records and achieved mainstream success, they'd fallen short of their aspirations and accidentally become a pop-group. 'Of All Things We've Made' was written as their epitaph, one last song to farewell their audience. It's a stunning, minimalist synth ballad that squeezes your chest and makes you sensitive to the passing of time.

The Human League - Morale.../You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'

Before The Human League became the highly successful pop group of 'Don't You Want Me' fame, they were an experimental outfit who explored the melodic, emotional potential of electronic instruments. In their debut album, Reproduction, The Human League translated the world as they saw it, a cold, synthetic place of concrete, fumes and artificial relationships, into a sound that honestly represented the modern experience. Couched in this album of oddities is a cover of The Righteous Brothers' pop classic, 'You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'', a haunting, slow-moving electronic track that forces you to withdraw from the world and assess your life beyond the noise.

Robert Görl – Mit Dir

In a list of synthpop oddities, it would be careless to exclude Robert Görl’s ‘Mit Dir’. Görl is one half of 1978- electronic body music (EBM) duo, the Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (DAF), a German band formed to fight American cultural imperialism in the wake of WWII. Regarded as the Godfathers of Techno by John Peel and Giorgio Moroder, DAF harnessed harsh, pulverising synths and imperative German phonetics to reclaim the German martial identity after the disgrace of the Third Reich, transforming it into a dirty, forbidden pleasure. Despite being at the height of their popularity, 1983 saw the duo disband for the first time, at which point Görl produced ‘Mir Dir,’ the most peculiar minimal techno single that ever was.

Cabaret Voltaire - Just Fascination

Seeking to reflect the realities of a world affected by war, religious disunity and Thatcherism, Cabaret Voltaire is an experimental electronic outfit born to shock and provoke. Establishing an entirely new expressive sound in response to the restrictive conventions and ambitions of popular music, the band engineered noise from DIY synthesisers, tapes and sequences. Over the decade from 1978 to 1988, Cabaret Voltaire developed a canon of work that sits at the heart of both Industrial and Techno music. Their 1983 single, 'Just Fascination', captures the band's transition from their idiosyncratic, oftentimes abrasive sound of the late 70s, to the incredibly digestible technopop that steered them through the rest of the 80s.

Blue Russel - I Wanna Fly Away

Re-issued by my favourite record label, Dark Entries, Blue Russel's 1984 'I Wanna Fly Away' is the ultimate Italo-disco gem. Anyone who has ever kicked-on in my room after hours would have heard the euphoria of this track announce itself with bubbling arpeggiated synths and English-as-a-second-language vocals. It's a track that makes you leap all over the place and tilt your head repeatedly in a manner best displayed in A Night at the Roxbury.

Words by Max Shand.

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