We’ve no shame in admitting we’re all mega Kraftwerk-nerds here at MusicRadar (would you have suspected anything less?) and yet, as Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware speculated in an interview with us back in 2020, just how many other potential creative geniuses could have achieved similar heights to Düsseldorf’s finest – but were unable to realise their potential due to a lack of funds?
“Everybody goes on about how brilliant Kraftwerk were. Yes, but they were only brilliant because they were rich!” Said Ware back in our interview.
Martyn (a Kraftwerk fan, we might add) then went on to clarify his point; “If you’ve got a studio that’s wall-to-wall synths and Bob Moog is custom-building stuff for you… yes, you still need a good idea, but the chances of you turning that idea into a great album have been greatly increased.”
One of the founder members of the original Human League line-up alongside Ian Craig Marsh and vocalist Philip Oakey, Ware’s pioneering synth-work on the 1978 single Being Boiled and LPs Reproduction and Travelogue influenced a generation of budding synth-poppers. A short-while later, Ware had quit the League alongside Ian, setting to work with vocalist Glenn Gregory to create a new vehicle; Heaven 17. The rest is history…
But years before that, and though the allure of the synth on young Martyn was strong, getting his hands on this exciting new music tech was incredibly difficult…
“When I was a teenager, living in a two-up-two-down in Sheffield, with an outside toilet, my chances of owning a Moog [the cost of the original Moog Modular system ran into tens of thousands of dollars] were zero. Less than zero. Wasn’t going to happen.”
A fascination with prog, and with Bowie, Roxy Music and the new (well-funded) electronic sounds coming from Germany kept him determined to get his hands on a synth of his own.
“There was one other important stage in the development of the band: an interview Brian Eno did with the NME,” Martyn recalled. “The basic thrust of his argument was that rock ’n’ roll was dead, and all you needed to make music was a synth, a mic and a tape machine. Me, Ian and [Human League vocalist] Phil [Oakey] all read that interview, and we all believed him.”
Eventually acquiring some half-decent (for the time) tech, Martyn, Ian and Phil created that first single in their humble studio…
“[We had] my Korg-700, Ian’s [Roland] System 100, a [Shure] SM58 mic and a Sony two-track tape machine that, luckily, had bounce facility. No computer, no MIDI, no sync of any kind. The only sequencing we had was the System 100, so all the basic rhythms came from that, and everything else worked around it. Everything was played live and bounced down to make room for the next bit of music,” Martyn told us.
“We had a lot of grand ideas for that song, but we soon realised that there were built-in limitations because you could only bounce-down four or five times before you began to lose quality. People always talk about the ‘wonderful minimalism’ of Being Boiled, but that wasn’t anything that came from us. It was simply because the equipment didn’t allow us to add anything else.”
