That’s true, I think A-HA are a really important band and yes, they are not in the scope of the book but if they could have been, I would have been delighted to include them because their canon is quite ambitious and wide-ranging. When I started senior school, some of those punks were in my school, they were actually kids… in my perception, they weren’t that and were completely ‘other’! I looked at all the NME, Sounds, Melody Maker, Record Mirror, Smash Hits, The Face, New Sounds New Styles from 1978 to 1983, everything I could lay my hands on that was music or popular culture related. There are a huge number of quotes from the music magazines and these were cringeworthy to read because the critics were cruel to pretty much all of the bands featured in this book. Although most of my work outside the book was largely unaffected by lockdown, when everything went quiet it did give me extra time to start working on the book.

The book concludes with a section entitled REACTION which goes on to complete the synthpop story, where bands have been clearly documented as being influenced by the likes of Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Gary Numan etc. Indeed, that elements of UK electronic pop eventually found their way into the sound of artists as different as ZZ Top and Herbie Hancock shows just how wide-ranging the impact of the music was.The British Library were brilliant in that they re-opened as soon as they could, and although their hours were very limited to start with, I was gradually able to catch-up. The SPANDAU BALLET versus DURAN DURAN thing has been well documented, but what about SOFT CELL versus DEPECHE MODE? I love music equally across the genres and, although my tastes are definitely weighted towards electronic artists, at any one time I’m just as likely to be listening to Buddy Holly as I am to Orbital!

I’m not great on contemporary electronic music, the things I hear about, I tend to hear about from ELECTRICITYCLUB.I did not read Record Mirror at the time, so I now discover from the book that I would have found the writing of Sunie there equally engaging and stimulating had I been aware of it. A scroll of chronological, interwoven but often disparate stories featuring every purveyor of synthpop you can possibly think of … a must-read. That book was more pictures than writing but taking on the project made me realise that writing and publishing a book was something I could actually do and I actively started to think about ideas for another one. I really hope that people who already know a lot about this subject will find things in the book which they didn’t already know, and I hope that people who go into it not knowing so much will discover new music that they will enjoy, but my biggest hope is that I haven’t disappoined anyone by missing out anything crucial to them, or by interpreting or reporting any of the facts wrongly.

It blurs and like we talked about earlier, lots more things were interesting in different directions and also taking some of this electronic sensibility into it. As for a concerts wish list, I never saw the Eurythmics so I think they would be top of the list for me. SL: The foreword in your book was written by Vince Clarke who has been a living legend in the music industry over the last 40 years.The final stage of the narrative outlines the worldwide popularity of more than a few of the acts that emerged from that era.