Being addicted to British television has its perks. In addition to off-color sitcoms and Welsh cartoons, the BBC has a very nice way with music documentaries. Synth Britannia is a well-researched, extremely interesting piece about how a once marginalized and underground genre of music came to be the defining style of a decade. It’s difficult to imagine PBS devoting the same kind of attention and care to these acts’ American counterparts, mainly (I suppose) because production costs would far outweigh interest in the subject.

I got into synthpop and post-punk at the same time I got into goth and New Wave, but never made many of the distinctions or connections that this film makes. Partly due to the fact that I picked up the thread after much of this music had lost its appeal to mainstream audiences, (we’re talking mid-Nineties here) I was simply ignorant of how hard many of the musicians I loved had struggled just to get heard. Britain in the 1970s was a bleak place, deep in a recession with cities transformed by urban planning from bustling neighborhoods into concrete mazes. The future had slowly receded from a shining beacon of a new society into a grey, desolate present full of right angles and industrial noise.

Into this inhospitable environment came a group of young people inspired by the energy of punk and the future shock novels of J.G. Ballard, tired of the excesses of 70s schlock rock and disco, and ready to use any technology possible to find a new method of expression. As John Foxx, lead singer of Ultravox states in the film: “I wasn’t angry about it anymore, I just wanted to make music for it”. It took the better part of a decade for synthpop and New Wave to break through to the mainstream, after which it lost much of its darkness and intensity to the commercialism and self-centered energy of the Eighties.

Synth Britannia does a great job of presenting the economic and societal issues underpinning the music, as well as introducing some of the most influential (if not necessarily famous) artists involved in the movement. However, the music is presented in clips and as background, so I thought I would compile most of the artists featured (and a few others) into a soundtrack of sorts. I hope that you enjoy this introduction to British synthesized and electronic music.

You can watch the film here.

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1. Throbbing Gristle – Hot on the Heels of Love
2. Cabaret Voltaire – No Escape
3. The Normal – Warm Leatherette
4. John Foxx – Underpass
5. Robert Rental – Double Heart
6. Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – Electricity
7. Fad Gadget – Back To Nature
8. Joy Division – Atmosphere
9. The Human League – Marianne
10. Gary Numan – M.E.
11. New Order – Chosen Time
12. The Flying Lizards – TV
13. Die Doraus und die Marinas – Tulpen und Narzissen
14. Visage – Fade To Grey
15. Silicon Teens – Sun Flight
16. Depeche Mode – Dreaming of Me
17. Yazoo – Only You
18. Heaven 17 – Let Me Go
19. Ultravox – Vienna