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“It’s A Sin” — Pet Shop Boys
Back in the 1980s synth-driven pop was often looked down on. It seemed so temporary, so disposable, so fleeting.
A couple of blokes with synthesizers just didn’t seem like serious competition for the swaggering guitar players with shaggy perms and spandex suits who strutted their stuff on the stage and played “proper music”…with guitars.
At first, we didn’t imagine this new technological approach to music-making would last to the end of the decade, never mind still be going strong over 30 years later.
How wrong we were.
The Pet Shop Boys, and their synth-driven brethren, were at the forefront of a movement which introduced a lot more science into the activity of music-making, something we had previously thought was at least 99% art. (And the other 1% came down to knowing how to play just a handful of chords on a guitar or a piano.)
Yet you can trace the genesis of the modern music scene…overrun with beats and samples…right back to those early days of using computers instead of musicians to create music.
They were computers with an interface that looked like the sort of keyboard you would find on a piano, rather than the sort of keyboard I’m using to type this article, but computers nonetheless.
