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October 1985: after two flops (UK #137 and #127), Norwegian trio a-ha reworked the track a third time with Alan Tarney. #1 US, #2 UK, #1 in 17 countries, 7M copies. Steve Barron's £100,000 video - 3,020 rotoscoped frames and six MTV awards. Morten Harket's A5 made the track immortal.
December 1983: Roland ships the TR-909 - a hybrid of analogue synthesis and digital samples. 10,000 units in 18 months and the line is killed as a loss. Ten years later a used unit costs ten times the new price: Frankie Knuckles, Larry Heard, Derrick May pick them up. Roland's flop became the pillar of house and techno.
October 1983: Trevor Horn at ZTT Records drops FGTH's debut. Three months - 30,000 copies. January 1984: BBC Radio 1 bans it; by March - UK #1 for 5 weeks and 2M copies in a year. Eight weeks at Sarm West with Fairlight CMI and Synclavier built a record the band itself couldn't reproduce live.
March 1983: a 12-inch single with no title or band name on the sleeve. Oberheim DMX, Moog Source, MC-4 sequencer. By 1988 - a million copies, the best-selling 12-inch in UK history; Factory lost 10p per sleeve.
December 1980: Steve Strange assembles a supergroup of Ultravox and Magazine members, brings in a Parisian model to count in French, and cuts “Fade to Grey” in three months. UK #8 but #1 in Germany, Switzerland and Austria - 1.2M copies and the start of New Romantic.
March 1983: a song about balloons mistaken for a missile strike. #2 Billboard in German, #1 UK in English. The first German-language song in the US top 10 since 1961; 5 million copies by 1984.
September 1984: German duo Alphaville release a ballad about fear of nuclear war. At release - #10 Germany, #65 US. Forty years on - 20M streams a month, lifted by Jay-Z, Stranger Things and Bob Dylan. A 60s chord progression dressed in 80s synths.
October 1986: an unknown model from Lorraine cuts a single in six weeks for 180,000 francs at CBE Studio. A year later - #1 in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Norway, Sweden and Israel. 5M copies by 1989, 480M streams by 2024. Built on a JX-8P, DX7 and Fairlight CMI.
September 1982: Peter Schilling releases the German answer to Bowie's “Space Oddity”. Four months later - #1 in Germany for seven weeks; a year on, #14 US and #1 Canada. Cut at Union Studios Munich on a Prophet-5. The track hit the Cold War nerve; Bowie heard it on BBC Radio 1.
December 1984: Virgin Germany releases a single by an unknown Sandra Lauer. By April 1985 - #1 in five European countries, seven weeks at the top of the German chart, 2.5M copies. Michael Cretu rebuilt a rejected Arabesque recording, made Sandra do 23 takes and set the chorus in C Mixolydian.
July 1977: Donna Summer at Musicland. 36 hours of tracking, 6,000 Deutschmarks, the whole backing built on one Moog Modular. Brian Eno will hear it in Berlin and tell Bowie: “The next fifteen years are going to sound like this”. The first all-electronic disco #1.
May 1983, NAMM in Chicago: Yamaha unveils the DX7. In four years it sells 200,000 units - more than the Jupiter-8 and OB-Xa combined. Chowning's FM synthesis turned out near-impossible to programme; the E.PIANO 1 preset went onto half the decade's hits. A $1,995 box rewrote the sound of an era.
September 1981: Roland unveils the eight-voice Jupiter-8 at the LA NAMM show. In the three years before discontinuation, the instrument rewrites European pop's palette and becomes the spine of Milan Italo-disco studios. $5,295, 58 knobs, no MIDI - 8 voices, two oscillators each, five waveforms.
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Explore the magic and energy of '80s and '90s retro music - its history, genres, sonic innovations, and lasting influence on culture today.
Italo Disco, Italo-Disco or Italodisco? Establish a clear editorial spelling and the boundary with Eurodisco and Eurodance, then build an arrangement without parodying the 1980s.
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