Night School / School Daze

V/a

All The Young Droids - Junkshop Synth Pop 1978-1985

Night School / School Daze

***NOW ON GREEN VINYL!!! All The Young Droids: Junkshop Synth pop 1978-1985 is a new Double Vinyl / Double CD compilation that charts the underbelly of the epoch-defining sound of the synthesiser in 80s popular music. Compiled by curator Phil King , the music here connects the dots between DIY synth enthusiasts grappling with new, cheap synthesisers at the tail-end of punk and wannabe, jobbing songwriters enthral to the new music pioneered by Gary Numan, Depeche Mode and Daniel Miller’s Mute Records. Featuring rare tracks of auto-didactic progressive pop music, proto-techno punk, shoot-for-the-stars-land-in-the-gutter chart flops and heralded, underground synth classics, School Daze paints a picture of beautiful failure. Complete with extensive sleeve notes written by King and never before seen imagery, all 24 tracks were remastered by RPM in-house engineer Simon Murphy, many from vinyl copies due to lost master tapes. The story told on All The Young Droids is one of the dawning opportunity presented by both the emergence to the market of cheaper analog synthesisers and the distribution networks plus indie labels that exploded with the advent of punk music in 1976. While the music that sprouted out all over the globe in the wake of these factors was decried as fake, plastic, a refutation of punk’s guitar-led revolution, it’s telling that much of the music on All The Young Droids.. was created in bedrooms, ramshackle studios and home-made set ups with often borrowed equipment. In the era of record labels jumping to capitalise on the success of The...

North, Ian / John Howard

All The Young Droids: Junk Shop Sampler

Night School / School Daze

To celebrate the release of All The Young Droids: Junkshop Synthpop 1979 - 1985, Night School is releasing a double A 7" through its archive label School Daze. All The Young Droids is an overview of the post-punk synth explosion curated by Phil King, when alongside chart superstars like Depeche Mode, Soft Cell et. al a whole generation of musicians embraced new technologies that democracized pop music. This includes established artists who hoped to jumpstart their careers with drum machines and upstarts inspired to release DIY 7" records by the first waves of synth stars. Ian North of power pop pre-punkers Milk N Cookies bought his first synth after supporting Magazine on tour while still in his group Neo. When guitarist Robin Simon was poached for the end days of Magazine and John Foxx-period Ultravox, North then returned to New York after his visa expired and recorded his synth pop album ‘My Girlfriend’s Dead’ album in his apartment in Brooklyn – which was released in 1980 – and from which ‘We’re Not Lonely’ is taken. Credited to John Howard and Cal Mylar on the single 'I-Tune-Into-You (I-2NE-IN-2-U)' on CBS in 1980 - which is featured on All The Young Droids, 'We Can See' is a previously unreleased song from the same recording session. Cal Mylar was actually an imaginary character thought up by John Howard - who had previously released an album on CBS in 1975 called 'Kid In In A Big World' (which got rave reviews on its reissue...