My Top 20 Punk Keyboardists (Ranked)
# "The Fantasist" : Martin Rev (Suicide)
Interview Excerpt : Martin Rev speaks with L.A. Record (article published November 17, 2017) :
L.A. : As I understand it, you studied piano as a child?
Martin Rev : Yes. It’s something I had to learn. Everybody in the family played something. There was just four of us. My brother and I were given lessons. It was something we had to do. When I wanted to quit a year or two later—because it was getting in the way of my playing baseball and hanging out with my friends when the week was over—I was told, ‘You can’t quit. You’re 11, 12 now—you can’t make that decision until you’re 15.’ And to me that was like … forever, between 12 and 15.
L.A. : It’s all about the ratios! When you’re 12, three years is like a fourth of your life.
Martin Rev : It is! The amount of growth and everything physically … In less than a year I was already grateful and thanking them that they kept me doing that. My brother at the time was studying more popular music, and he was doing the boogie-woogie thing, and when I heard that—and I knew how to read that—I took that and just began playing. I started improvising, playing boogie-woogie stuff, figuring things out. And then taking songs that I was listening to all the time, all the rock stuff, and figuring those out. And now I was doing my own playing. And plus getting the facility—the fact I had learned all that and was still learning gave me even more facility. The only classical composer that I only kind of felt something for then—that I had to play—was Debussy.
L.A. : Also my favorite.
Martin Rev : And still is. Absolute? There’s a few. But he’s definitely still one I come back to.
L.A. : The Suite Bergamasque is transcendent in a way that music rarely is.
Martin Rev : It’s so modern. All the modern jazz guys too are so influenced … this harmonic innovation was very much in the forefront of Herbie and Bill Evans and, you know, Miles. That was the next stage. ‘Kind of Blue’ came out of … the way Debussy was voicing stuff just like that when he did it, and Ravel. I was playing maybe one piece out of the ‘Children’s Corner’ or something like that. But already it was so visual and descriptive. But I didn’t attach to it that much. I didn’t get up from a lesson and say, ‘I gotta hear Debussy!’ I would listen to Stravinksy and I remember the first time it came on the radio—I knew there was stuff there that I had to learn for myself. I had many times fell asleep—like in the middle of ‘Firebird’—because they’re so long. But I was starting very earnestly to hear what’s happening there. And it continued to this day. I just listen and study.
L.A. : I noticed a lot of the influence on Stigmata. I’m sure that’s an easy parallel to draw. And that leads me to my next question. In an older interview you mentioned Alan (Vega) used to wear a giant white cross around his neck, and of course you were on the album cover in a cross position. Tell me about Catholicism—how it has influenced you and how you internalize it as an ethos rather than an aesthetic.
Martin Rev : It was very different for Alan and myself. I didn’t have any real affinity for Catholicism at all. My first impression is of Catholicism is being horrified. Going to friends’ homes and seeing pictures of Jesus on the wall—crucifixion pictures. That was scary stuff. I didn’t know where that was coming from because I wasn’t brought up that way. So Stigmata, to me, was more of continuing the thread for me of the tradition of music and the musical history, which is like the history of art. You can’t separate it from the history of the church and the history of religious art or religious music. So much of the music that is totally the great music—not the great religious music, though it is great religious music … the church was the only institution to preserve and foster and promote music and art, so that became the place for hundreds of years—
L.A. : They were the bankrollers.
Martin Rev : Yeah, and the ones that gave you a wall to paint on, like Michelangelo. And when you painted, sure, you painted the scenes that they … you know. When you had a gig like that, when you had a gig for the church, you wrote for the masses and for the weekly services and all the different times of the day, different formats, weekend stuff, like what all the scutata is for. So that to me was always totally one with any study of music at all. Stigmata was just a reflection of that for me. The titles.
'Space Blue' - Suicide
A Word (Or Two) On The Piano ...
I started learning to play piano when I was about 4 or 5 years old. Most of the musicians in my family, of which there are many, are guitarists of some description. My mother plays guitar and saxophone, so she got me learning saxophone when I was about 11 or 12 years old. When I joined my first rock 'n' roll band in my teenage years, I wanted to play bass guitar, but I never learnt how to play the instrument properly or how to read guitar music; I just tried playing bass by ear (or coming up with basslines to fit songs I was working on). The piano is the instrument I feel closest to.
"I had many encounters with Lou Reed over the years, and he was always charming and polite. I just never ran into his infamous dark side, so I can’t attest to its actuality. Lou was one of a handful of originals. I don’t think that the conditions that created him will again be approximated, let alone duplicated.
When I was 17 years old in 1967, my friends and I were fascinated by the Velvets’ first amazing album. A close friend of mine worked for Warhol. One night he arrived at my house in Brooklyn and told my friends and me that the band who was supposed to open for the Velvets in NYC had cancelled, and would we like to replace them.
We got on the subway with our guitars and went to a venue on the Upper West Side called the Gymnasium. Maureen Tucker let us use her drums, turn them right side up even, and we used the Velvets' amps. We played our little blues rock set, and at the end someone came over and said “Oh, Andy [Warhol] thought you were terrific.”
There were maybe 30 people there. The Velvets came on and were just powerful. They used the echo-y acoustics of the place to their advantage. This was a moment that shaped my musical life, and I tell the story frequently.
What else? I was really fond of Metal Machine Music and went through a period of constantly playing it. Lou’s music is a perfect mix of light and dark, and it will stay with us."
- Chris Stein, The Hollywood Reporter
Harpsichord
Claviochord
'True Love' - Jilted John (keyboardist Graham Fellows)
By considering the piano's role within punk, I feel I'm able to concentrate on the roots of the movement. The punk movement in New York drew from a number of creative sources. The psychedelic side of keyboards runs from experimental composers active in New York in the first half of the 20th century, through experimental bands like the Velvet Underground and Silver Apples. The more tuneful, melodic side leans heavily on the traditions of Tin Pan Alley songwriters, especially the in-house songwriters active within the Brill Building, an office building located at 1619 Broadway on 49th Street in Manhattan.
This New York stream rose to international prominence in the 1950s but you can trace its creative seams back to the jazz age. For young punks living and working in New York, songwriting teams like Burt Bacharach & Hal David, Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, Neil Sedaka & Howard Greenfield, Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich, Howard Greenfield & Helen Miller, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, Gerry Goffin & Carole King, Peter Anders & Vini Poncia, Carole Bayer Sager & Toni Wine, and Neil Sedaka & Carole Bayer Sager made significant contributions to the state's rapidly evolving musical landscape. Sager went on to form songwriting partnerships with Melissa Manchester and Marvin Hamlisch in the 1970s and Neil Diamond in the 1980s.
Individual songwriting talents like Mort Shuman, Bobby Darin, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond, Doris Troy, Lou Reed and volatile house producer Phil Spector further embellished the sounds emanating from the streets of New York. The "girl group" phenomenon of the 1960s owes a great deal to the Brill Building's musical complex, something that wasn't lost upon the punks of New York.
'In 1966, Seymour Stein and record producer Richard Gottehrer founded Sire Productions, which led to the formation of Sire Records, the label under which he signed pioneer artists such as the Ramones and Talking Heads in 1975, the Pretenders in 1980 and Madonna in 1982. Other acts signed by Sire include The Replacements, Depeche Mode, The Smiths, The Cure, Ice-T, The Undertones and Echo & the Bunnymen. Stein did not fire Depeche Mode despite poor sales of their first three albums in the US; it was their fourth album that brought them American success.'
- Wikipedia
Hammond Organ
Moog Synthesizer
'Cuckoo Clock' - Rachel Sweet ("The Girl With The Synthesizer") & Lene Lovich (with "Flying Scotsman" Peter Nardini on keys)
The one punk scene that ran concurrent to that of New York was in Ohio, but Ohio risked losing much of its creative talent to the east coast where opportunity beckoned. What's noticeable about the use of keyboards in Ohio's cities is that they became reflective of the state's decaying industrial landscape. This is one of the things that makes punk music so interesting; the musical contrasts created by tradition, culture, experience, history and geography.
Casio Keyboard
'Button Up' - The Bloods (with keyboardists Adele Bertei & Annie Toone)
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20) Tom Verlaine (Neon Boys / Television)
'Change may be the only constant in Tom Verlaine's musical odyssey. He began with classical music, then moved on to jazz, playing piano and saxophone before focusing on the guitar. He even adapted the breathing style he learned while playing sax into the pauses that are a signature of his guitar work.'
- National Public Radio
'Kingdom Come' - Tom Verlaine
19) Pat Irwin (8-Eyed Spy / The Raybeats)
"A founding member of The Raybeats and 8 Eyed Spy, Pat Irwin had his roots in jazz and the avant garde, studying with John Cage and befriending the likes of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in Paris. But once he moved to New York City and played CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, his musical path took a punk turn and, for nearly 20 years, he traveled the world as a member of the B-52s. Now, he continues to pursue a number of eclectic projects."
- Valerie Simadis, Please Kill Me
'Piranha Salad' - The Raybeats
18) Harvey Gold (Tin Huey)
"In his 1978 Village Voice article which launched the idea something called “The Akron Sound” existed, critic Robert Christgau wrote “Tin Huey’s music is also impure … with influences like Robert Wyatt, Ornette Coleman, Henry Cow, and Faust (the group, not the hero) … they’re Akron esoterics”. He later went on to write in the same article, “But where most groups use difficult keys and meters to get closer to Atlantis, or transubstantiation, Tin Huey seemed to be seeking the eternal secret of the whoopee cushion.” And while Christgau has fun listing the influences he most certainly heard, alongside them I also hear Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and The Stooges. In fact the Hueys tell a story a little too long for here about meeting Beefheart when they were recording their only major record release in 1979 that makes it pretty clear he and Zappa had some influence on them. Others have also heard the Soft Machine, which isn’t as obvious for me but I can buy it. But with all those possible influences running around, I’d still describe Tin Huey as staggeringly different.
And while every member of the band was extremely talented in their own right, Christgau focused on saxophonist Ralph Carney, the uncle of The Black Keys' Pat Carney and future longtime saxophonist for Tom Waits. He also singled out Chris Butler, who would go on to lead the Waitresses (Christmas Wrapping, Square Pegs and I Know What Boys Like).
Their recorded output was spotty; a number of EPs, one full length album in 1979, and a few compilations of outtakes which certainly come off as full length albums as nothing about them says cuts not good enough to make a regular release.
They are the poster child for a band just a bit too off kilter, that never planned to be anything but non-commercial, to ever find lasting success from a commercial viewpoint. As Christgau said they were using difficult keys and meters to discover the eternal secret of the whoopee cushion, not exactly a recipe for big sales numbers. It also seems their live eccentricities didn’t always translate in the recording studios. Which often happens with a lot of great live acts."
- Calvin Rydbom, Toppermost
'Squirm You Worm' - Tin Huey
17) Dave Greenfield (The Initials / The Blue Maxi / Rusty Butler / Credo / The Stranglers)
"David Paul Greenfield was born in Brighton, where his father worked as a printer. A schoolfriend taught him how to play guitar and he then began studying piano. Having finished school he became a jobbing musician – one of his first experiences of the music business was playing guitar in a band that performed on US military bases in Germany.
Greenfield served his musical apprenticeship in such late-1960s bands as The Initials and The Blue Maxi before graduating to prog-rock bands Rusty Butler and Credo in the early 1970s. None of these bands experienced any success and when, in August 1975, he answered the advertisement for keyboardist needed for a Chiddingfold band called The Guildford Stranglers – a band formed in 1974 by 36-year-old drummer Jet Black who, having made money through a fleet of ice cream vans, decided to give music another go – Greenfield might have assumed that his day jobs (working in his father’s print workshop and as a piano tuner) would continue.
Yet The Stranglers – as they soon became known – had, in Hugh Cornwell and Jean-Jacques Burnel, a guitarist and bassist (both sang) who possessed considerable presence and songwriting skills. By late 1975 the band had developed a following on the pub rock circuit that encompassed Greater London and, when punk rock exploded in autumn 1976, The Stranglers were quick to capitalise on it and were signed to United Artists.
Already considerably older than their largely teenage contemporaries, The Stranglers stood out as punk misfits – Greenfield and Black both sported unfashionable facial hair (and keyboards were a no-no in a scene based around fast, three-chord guitar thrash) – but their energy, aggression and surly attitude fitted perfectly."
- Garth Cartwright, The Independent
'No More Heroes' - The Stranglers
16) Steve Nieve (The Attractions / Perils Of Plastic / Madness)
"I’d answered an advertisement for a keyboardist for ‘a rocking pop combo on Stiff Records’. I knew a bit about Stiff Records, but that was about it. The audition was the first time I met Elvis Costello, and they were just there in this rehearsal room. I think he had a couple of members of The Rumour in there with him and we played through two or three songs, and I said, ‘Do you mind if I hang around? I’d like to hear the other guys.’ I ended up sitting in the back of the room, listening to these two or three songs over and over with different people playing them, and for some reason there was a large keg of cider at the back of the room which I managed to get through. So at the end of the evening I was feeling rather jolly, and then I went out for dinner with them. I seem to remember that even at that point he was constantly talking about music. The whole evening was spent talking about music, which was great. I lost track of time and nearly missed the last train back to the deep dark suburbs of Dartford.
My tastes in music were not really the same as his at all, but it wasn’t really about that; it was more about how passionate he was about it. In those days we used to make up cassettes with our favourite bits of music for playing in the car. It’s different nowadays – everyone’s got those headphones on. So you would share things. It was good for that."
- Steve Nieve, MOJO
'Radio Radio' - Elvis Costello And The Attractions
15) Ronald Ardito (The Shirts / The Shake Society) & Arthur La Monica (The Shirts) & John Piccolo (The Shirts / Chemical Wedding)
'Annie Golden's career has taken her from punk rock (she fronted the Shirts in the ’70s) to musical theater (she was the oiginal Squeaky Fromme in Assassins) to rich character acting on TV (she plays the mute Norma Romanot on Orange Is the New Black). Her no-b*llshit mien works wonders in combination with the thrilling soulful babydoll power of her voice.'
- Time Out
'I'm Not One Of Those' - The Shirts
14) Marty Jourard (The Motels)
"It was my good fortune to grow up in Gainesville, Florida, a town with a lot of bands and live music. During the '60s and early '70s this small university town in North Florida was an amazingly rich musical environment. Two future members of the Eagles grew up there (Bernie Leadon and Don Felder); Tom Petty was born and raised in Gainesville, Steve Stills attended the University of Florida ... there are many great musicians from Gainesville. Live music flourished in this university town, thanks in large part to the hippie scene of the late '60s coupled with a large University of Florida entertainment budget. Many famous acts in varied musical genres played this sleepy Southern town. I can recall seeing and hearing Peter Paul and Mary back in the early 1960s, Donovan, the Doobie Brothers, Ravi Shankar, Janis Joplin, the Beach Boys ...
I joined my first band when I was 15 (1970) as the bass player. We did tunes by Creedence Clearwater, Hendrix, the Doors, the Rascals, Steppenwolf, Cream, the Beatles. These were not oldies, they were the current hits! I played in various rock bands throughout Florida and the South on and off from 1970 to 1976. Our circuit went from Tampa and Macon and Atlanta to Athens and even Tuscaloosa. There were plenty of places to play. This environment was conducive to further playing of music, and we did.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1976 I attended U.S.C. (University of Southern California), where I majored in music. I began playing at recording sessions and gigs in the L.A. area before joining the Motels on keyboard and saxophone in 1978."
- Marty Jourard, 'Knowledge Is Power'
'Apocalypso' - The Motels
13) Roman Jugg (Victimize / The Damned) & Rat Scabies (London SS / The Damned / The Germans / The Gin Goblins / Professor And The Madmen / One Thousand Motels / The Sinclairs) & Captain Sensible (Johnny Moped / The Damned)
“I saw The Damned for the first time at Leeds Polytechnic. They were playing first on the bill on the fated Anarchy in the UK tour on December 6th 1976, along with the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. The Damned were totally irreverent and delightfully assholic; they made me think of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They were messy and fast and loud. It was great. Dave Vanian was acting as much as he was singing."
- Hugo Burnham, 'Happy Talk'
'Under The Floor Again' - The Damned
12) Matthieu Hartley (Lockjaw / The Magspies / The Cure)
"As famous for their depressing dirges as for singer-guitarist Robert Smith's deathly visage, the Cure rode the post-punk wave during the late 1970s and early 1980s as leading architects of goth rock. By the time the genre hit its stride in the mid-'80s, the band had moved on to more mainstream pastures; but their second album Seventeen Seconds, and especially the single 'A Forest', were the definitive goth recordings. Hey, even co-producer/engineer Mike Hedges sported eyeliner back in the spring of 1980.
Around the time that the Seventeen Seconds sessions began in late 1979, bassist Michael Dempsey left to join the Associates and was replaced by Simon Gallup, while keyboard player Matthieu Hartley was added to a line-up that also included Smith and drummer Laurence 'Lol' Tolhurst, fleshing out the group's sound and enabling it to be more experimental and ... well, downright gloomy. This, after all, is what lyricist Robert Smith was after: creating a consistently dark and evocative mood by way of sparse musical arrangements and plaintive vocals buried deep within the reverb-laden mix."
- Richard Buskin, Sound On Sound
'A Forest' - The Cure
11) Paul Weller (The Jam / The Style Council)
"With things still to say musically, Paul Weller has no intention of hanging up his guitars or putting away the keyboards."
- Janet Christie, The Scotsman
'Music For The Last Couple' - The Jam
10) Jennifer Miro (The Nuns)
"January 14, 1978. A teenage vampiress emerges from the shadows of the Winterland Ballroom stage floor. A chiseled film noir blonde with a crystalline glaze. She begins to perform a sardonic cabaret number on her electric piano that magnetizes the jagged sea of safety-pinned punk rockers in her midst.
Jennifer Miro was the Ice Queen of punk rock’s Golden Age, a criminally overlooked vanguard of first-wave California punk as the frontwoman of The Nuns. She was also instrumental in the proliferation of Gothic/S&M imagery into the subcultural underground. The Nuns had been dressing in black and unleashing deranged provocations on audiences in San Francisco dives with odes to hard drugs, suicide, mind control, and kinky sex with the sadistic anthems “Savage” and “You Like To Bleed” as early as 1976 — a time when Miro proclaimed, “there was no punk rock. We were the first punk rock band in California.”
- Sarah Schimek, 'The Mesmerism Of Mistress Jennifer Miro'
'It's A Dream' - The Nuns
09) John Crawford (Farenheit / Berlin) & David Diamond (Berlin) & Jo Julian (Berlin) & Matt Reid (Berlin) & Dan Wyman (Berlin)
"It doesn't feel like 40 years. I had no idea we'd get to play this long. It's kind of like a marriage; You hope it will be forever, but you don't know. I'm just proud of what we did -- and what we're doing."
- Terri Nunn, Billboard
'A Matter Of Time' - Berlin
08) Dan Klayman (The Waitresses / Swollen Monkeys)
"!"
- Dan Klayman, Life In Ohio
'Quit' - The Waitresses
07) Bernard Sumner (Joy Division / New Order / Electronic / Bad Lieutenant)
"Kevin Cummins' monochrome stills helped Joy Division establish an otherworldly aura, but behind the scenes, Factory's inimitable way of finding itself in sitcom-like situations was making itself known. "We turned up at the rehearsal studio in Salford and Terry [Mason], our roadie, had organised a benefit screening for striking miners," Bernard Sumner chortles. "There was a picket line outside our rehearsal room. 'We've come to see the porno film,' they said. I was like, 'What porno film?' Terry had forgotten we were rehearsing and he'd laid out chairs like a cinema. Terry said, 'I thought we were rehearsing tomorrow.'
So we were backing the miners, but it was a strange way of doing it. Minutes later, Ian Curtis turned up with a female journalist from Paris. So there he is, 'Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Luc Godard, Nietzsche...' the usual stuff, and he walks into the room and he's like, 'What's going on? Oh God, we've got a journalist here! We're supposed to be doing an interview! It's not like this all the time! This is a one-off!'"
Paris might have appreciated the Pennine sound, but in London the press took little notice of the Manchester scene until Ian Curtis hanged himself in 1980. As Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks mentions in John Robb's The North Will Rise Again: Manchester Music City 1976-1996, "Manchester was like the animals in New Zealand - they got on with developing because they were left alone."
- Lee Gale, GQ
'Glass' - Joy Division
06) Kate Pierson (The B-52's / The Shake Society)
"My grandmother owned the house we lived in in Weehawken, New Jersey. She lived upstairs, and as soon as I woke up I would go up there, and she’d play the piano. She sang this song, “Tra-la-la, tweedlee dee dee, it gives me a thrill.” I don’t remember much from when I was 5, but I specifically remember her playing that. It’s almost like a vision of her, angelic, playing “Mockin’ Bird Hill.” She was singing dramatically, and that made me think, I want to be a singer."
- Kate Pierson, Pitchfork
'Cake' - The B-52's
05) Allen Ravenstine (Pere Ubu / Red Crayola)
"When Pere Ubu appeared in 1975, punk barely existed in New York or the UK, much less in their native Cleveland. But there were a bunch of misfits and freaks who dared to make insane, unhinged music, including a certain building owner and tinkerer who took the unusual tact of not playing notes per se. Original Ubu member Allen Ravenstine didn't so much 'play' his homemade EML synthesizer as much as he coaxed bizarre noise out of it and placed these sounds in unlikely places within each of Ubu's songs. As such, his contribution was much like a great dub producer, adding in all kinds of strange sound effects to enhance and distort the music. Or maybe think of him as the aural equivalent of a horror film, inserting all kinds of unexpected and thrilling bits into songs."
- Jason Gross, Perfect Sound Forever
'Go' - Pere Ubu
04) Richard Sohl (Patti Smith Group)
"Richard Sohl passed into the great beyond, and he was always our perfect piano player. So when the right person comes along … we don’t just want someone to put organ pads underneath the songs. We want someone who will help us move forward creatively, in the same way that Richard did. You know when it was just me, Richard and Patti (Smith), there was a real immediacy to the work we did. Richard was the right person."
- Lenny Kaye, Rock And Roll Paradise
'Piss Factory' - Patti Smith Group
03) Bob Casale (Devo / Jihad Jerry & the Evildoers) & Gerald Casale (Devo / Jihad Jerry & the Evildoers) & Bob Mothersbaugh (Devo / Jihad Jerry & the Evildoers) & Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo / Jihad Jerry & the Evildoers)
"I had a couple of friends who were jock football players, and they went over to Vietnam and they came back and they thought they were going to work in the rubber factories, like their dads and their grandads. But while they were in Vietnam fighting for capitalism, the capitalist structure of Akron, Ohio was making a fast getaway to Malaysia and Brazil for cheap labour, and leaving those guys behind. So they came back and they had nothing to do, and they'd learned how to kill people and smoke pot when they were in Vietnam. And they decided: 'We want to start a band, but none of us play an instrument.' So they were using their unemployment cheques, and doing whatever jobs they could, and putting money together and putting together a band, and they asked me if I wanted to play keyboards in their band. And all I had to do to do that was agree to write music. I said 'That sounds pretty good,' and they said 'We can go get you a keyboard if you want, what kind?' So we drove to Buffalo, New York, where Moog used to be, and I remember walking into this barn that had been converted into a warehouse. I remember seeing a rack that was about 30 feet high that had Minimoogs stacked up. It seemed so futuristic.
The Minimoog kind of became my M16 rifle. That's the synth that, to this day, you could blindfold me and say 'All right, we want a white‑noise puffball with one sine wave wiggling at about 90bpm through the middle of it,' and I could sit there and dial it in. I learned it that well. I was very aware of what was going on with synthesizers, and looked at them lustfully. They were very expensive, and just the fact that I even had a Minimoog was awesome, a really big deal. It wasn't like buying a plug‑in.
To me, that was what I was looking for. By the time that Devo started, Jerry and I had met in college already and collaborated on some visual things, and we were there at the protests at Kent, and they shot kids at one of the protests [four students protesting against the Vietnam war were killed by the National Guard at Kent State University, in an infamous incident that inspired the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song 'Ohio'], and they shut the school down for about four months. We were talking about the world and what we saw going on around us, and decided we were observing de‑evolution, not evolution.”
- Mark Mothersbaugh, Sound On Sound
Devo - 'The Day My Baby Gave Me A Surprize'
'Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh has a studio on Sunset Strip called Mutato Muzika where he and his team of composers knock out an impressive amount of soundtracks for Hollywood films, TV shows and adverts, and the games industry; ‘The Lego Movie’ for one, and most of Wes Anderson’s films also. The building is painted lime green and is circular. It was built for a cosmetic surgeon called Dr. Richard Alan Franklyn in 1967, and he named it ‘The Beauty Pavillion’. Franklyn wrote a couple of books about his trade, one was called ‘Developing Bosom Beauty’.
It’s been Mothersbaugh’s studio for over 20 years now, and serves as Devo’s HQ, so as you expect, it’s a regular Aladdin’s Cave for synth freaks in there. A place where a vintage Minimoog is the least exotic item on display is somewhere you want to see, right?
There’s a Synthi AKS, a Synthi A, an Oberheim 2-Voice, a Nimbus (a what? It looks positively Edwardian), and some interconnected keyboards that might have come from the leisure lounge on the Starship Enterprise.'
- Electronic Sound
'Gates Of Steel ' - Devo
02) Dave Formula (Magazine / Visage)
"Since I joined Magazine in late December 1978 it was just a whirlwind really. We never stopped from one day to another; recording, touring, recording etc. It was non-stop until we moved out of Manchester. What triggered a memory about that period was I watched the Joy Division documentary after the film 'Control' came out. It was those views of Manchester. It was looking like it was still in the 1940's and even some of the city centre shots looked like it was from another era. If you could go back [in time] you'd be surprised how grey and doomy it was. Now it's changed so much, physically.
I'd known Martin Hannett for three years before I joined the band and it was Martin that got me the job with Magazine. He was a very nice man but a lot of the things you read about Martin, especially those reports of the Martin Hannett-Joy Division interplay were, as far as we can all see and I was talking to Howard Devoto about this last week, a little bit exaggerated shall we say. He was a character if that's what we call him, but I don't think he was quite the Martin that came over in some of those reports. I don't know. Maybe he changed a lot. I last saw him in 1982 or something like that, though I did used to speak to him quite a lot."
- Dave Formula, Penny Black Music
Magazine - 'Believe That I Understand'
"The SS30 was renowned as one of the most sophisticated of the 1970's string machines and the selling price at the time reflected this. It wasn't produced in large numbers and therefore has something of a cult following among collectors and connoisseurs of this period.
It is a remarkably versatile string machine, as the recorded examples below will demonstrate, with the ability to transform a track, when used as a full section, or as individual instruments: the cellos are particularly effective, solo, when used in staccato fashion. All in all, it records beautifully!"
- Dave Formula assesses some of his chosen instruments, Feed The Enemy
'You Never Knew Me' - Magazine
01) Jimmy Destri (86 Proof / Milk 'N' Cookies / Blondie / Knickers)
"I'm from a musical family. My uncle - my mother's youngest brother - was the drummer for a late 50s early 60s rock band called Joey Dee & the Starlighters who had a hit record in America. They were on the Dick Clark show and I saw my Uncle Joe on TV and said, "That's what I want to do!" He was a one-hit wonder, had one song then went into construction and every time I said I wanted to go into music he said, "Don't do it!" But I disobeyed and here I am."
- Jimmy Destri, Blondie.net
Blondie - 'Poets Problem'
"I was asked to play on David Bowie's album, but I couldn't. We're too close. We're too good friends. As a friend, an artist and a writer myself, I wouldn't take direction. I wouldn't be treated like a studio musician. I told him to get a piano player to play certain things. I'm not that good of a piano player anyway."
- Jimmy Destri, Classic Bands
'Angels On The Balcony' - Blondie
'Blondie started out in the 1970s New York punk and new wave scene, but they soon became known for fearless musical experimentation. In 1980 Call Me saw them working with iconic Italian disco producer Giorgio Moroder, while their classic reggae cover The Tide Is High also topped the charts. In the same year, Rapture became the first US No.1 single to feature rap, with lyrics namechecking hip-hop pioneers Fab 5 Freddy and Grandmaster Flash. Their genre-bending 2017 album Pollinator shows Blondie are still musical innovators.'
- The British Broadcasting Corporation
'Picture This'
