Season 292 - 80's Synth Pop

The last time I did this for a season it was a rough draft I was still noodling. This time it is much more finished. it is more of a piano song, but the original did have synth accompaniment.

 
Here's our entry for 292. It took us a couple of nights and a day to record all this and do the stop-motion, but it was worth it! We had fun. Hope you guys enjoy it as well!
Talking Loud and Clear by Orchestral Manouvres in the Dark from 1984.

 
Third and final one for this season from me. Visage were a studio band but produced a couple of excellent albums in the early eighties. Two of their members from the classic, early eighties lineup, Midge Ure and Billy Currie later joined Ultravox to make their classic lineup.

I had to do at least one with a bit of synth in it. The intro was courtesy of a midi sequencer in my PC and the little bit of instrumental in the middle was from a Casio digital horn using the built in sounds rather then sending out to a midi synth. The uke was acoustic, though. All good fun.
 
Did you miss me? Never fear- Mister Blue is here to stay with you.
I love playing this song. Regretfully no American audience has recognized it.

Sorry for the sound quality...As this is folk music, this folk plays it whenever and where ever the urge strikes ;)
 
Here's a country(ish) original about 80s synth pop. My parents gave me a Casio VL-5 for Christmas when I was 19 or so. I still have it, but I can't get it to power up anymore. In college, I used to patch it into my room-mate's stereo and make the walls vibrate. People would come running down the hall to see who was playing an organ. It had a great organ sound that sounded quite tinny on the built-in speaker but sounded flat-out AWESOME through big speakers. The VL-1 was the first of the VL-Tone series, and was quite primitive compared to the VL-5 (for one thing, the VL-1 didn't have an organ sound). These VL sounds were made with an android app that emulates the original VL-1.



Back in '85 I met this girl
The most bodacious babe in the whole wide world
She said she only liked musicians, did I play?
Well, I tried to learn to play a cheap guitar
But I never really got that far
And that guitar didn't impress her, anyway

I tried to play some Lynyrd Skynyrd
But Free Bird didn't seem to thrill 'er
And she asked, "Lynyrd Skynyrd? Who's he?"
She said, "Let me hear some Mr. Mr.
You can keep your Twisted Sister
I wanna hear stuff that's got a lot of keys!"

So I traded that guitar for a little keyboard
There wasn't much that I could afford
But she just wanted to hear a synthesizer moan
I thought I should try to accomodate her
So I could maybe, you know, date her
And I got me a little Casio VL-Tone

And I played...

So I learned a few little keyboard riffs
And how to tell a sweep from a chiff
From that day on I never was alone
She loved all my 'lectronic noodles
But she wanted to play her own synthetic toodles
And one day she showed up with a Stylophone

And she played...

Well I learned all about the Art of Noise,
Berlin, 'Til Tuesday and Pet Shop Boys
Johnny Hates Jazz, Icehouse and Thompson Twins
Erasure, Eurythmics, Yazoo and Devo
But she wanted me to play some Pseudo Echo
And that was the day I knew it had to end

These days I mostly play the ukuelele
I strum and sing a few songs daily
Been a long time since I played a VL-Tone
Now many years have gone by
But sometimes I get little tear in my eye
When I remember that girl who played the Stylophone

And we played...
 
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Glad that is here ^, hoping someone threw some Alphaville at this too because I am running short on time.
I never really understood why Joy Division was so iconic...other than my friends who were like 8 when Ian Curtis tragically hung himself and needed that tragedy to be more edgy, but really the best part of Joy Division was the base. I remember my dad getting a subwoofer in like 1984, when they were doubling as coffee tables (it was 26" or something ridiculous), and he asked me what the song with the most bass I could think of was...and love tore our suburban existence apart at an extremely high volume and scared the hell out of our dogs. But I digress- the bass went on, as did other elements of JD to form a truly iconic band. Like a phoenix from the ashes really, and I cannot think of any other instance where a band so quickly and ably changed it's entire sound by adding one person.
Yeah- I always liked Joy Division, but I loved NEW ORDER. At the time I had heard nothing else like it, and to me it was the soundtrack of that seventh grade transition from toad...to bigger toad. Low-Life, Brotherhood, and Substance came out right when I needed them to, and those are the songs I sing at stoplights because I never liked Journey...and I sing them so everyone can hear them, and I look like a damn fool. Which brings us to this.
 
My wife took off this morning to visit a friend who just had a baby, and took the camera with her. I put extra batteries in with the camera. So I had to use my phone to record the video. I was going to use my Yamaha keyboard for the synth bits, and then realized that I didn't have enough batteries to run the keyboard, since they were with the camera. So I had to use an android app that I've been playing around with lately. None of this audio is from my phone. It records utterly atrocious audio. Probably has some syncing problems, but that just makes it look more 80s! Recorded and mixed with Audacity, which I also used to add simulated stereo and a little echo on the main vocal & uke track. For said track I used the Blue Snowball mic. The phone was patched straight into the computer for the synth stuff.

I'm pretty sure these guys were a one-hit wonder. I have this album, but I have a valid reason. I read in Keyboard Magazine way back then that they used a Casio CZ-1000 synth (among others). I had (have, but it's another one that doesn't work too well anymore) a CZ-101, which is just a miniaturized version of the 1000. So I bought the album to see what they had been able to do with it.

 
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292-?

I was listening to my 80 mp3s and found so many more cool songs. Well I got to this one but don't see time for many more.

 
I was going to skip this one, but I willingly submitted to peer pressure from Decaturcomp. 'Til Tuesday did a fantastic third album that hardly anyone ever heard, including several great brokenhearted pop songs. This was the single, called "(Believed You Were) Lucky". Don't listen with young kids, because I kept the f-bomb from the album version.

Eisley gets to be in the thumbnail today because it's International Rabbit Day.

 
I've done a couple of Thomas Dolby songs in past seasons. I realized the song I most wanted to do by him this week was a song he wrote for Lene Lovich when he was playing keyboards for her. I saw Dolby play this in concert on the "Flat Earth" tour.

 
New Toy!
I did t remember that he wrote that one. I had Lena's 12 inch single of it though. Hadn't heard it I decades.and could still si g this Ali g with you. Great job. Loved the lead break.
 
New Toy!
I did t remember that he wrote that one. I had Lena's 12 inch single of it though. Hadn't heard it I decades.and could still si g this Ali g with you. Great job. Loved the lead break.

I've got it as a four song EP. I'm not sure that Lene was always a synth act, but she was when Dolby played for her. I figured this way I'd be playing both a a Lene Lovich song and a Thomas Dolby song this week.
 
Here's one I've always loved. I think that - minus the 80's frills, it translates to uke pretty well. Isn't that the test of a good song?

 
Well it's just about 9am here in the UK so still a good few hours to go til midnight Hawaii time if anyone wants to get a few more 80s synth gems in. Have enjoyed catching up and it's all ther on the playlist.
 
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