electro pop top 10

WOW, was this a BRITISH broadcast? I guess you can't really do synthpop with an American accent or something. THPPT.

I guess 'the hurting' is kind of an electro pop record but I don't think the rest of TFF's legacy really backs up their presence on this list, esp. not their bigger hits. They were more like trad. popsters, not any special branch thereof.

OMD, Thompson Twins & The Communards should be replaced as well, because I don't enjoy them.

My suggestions in their place:

Thomas Dolby
Falco
Soft Cell
Yello

And possibly Missing Persons and/or Ultravox.

it was all to do w/ sales, tom. these things are pretty spurious, though, i agree - if tears for fears why not frankie gth?

because Frankie only had one big selling album, the second flopped completely.

surely the combined sales of relax, two tribes and the power of love would've been enough?

If we are talking revenue terms, remember singles are a fraction of the price tag of an album.

Regarding the guessing of what the positions 10 to 20 are, I would expect the likes of FGTH, Soft Cell, ABC, Heaven 17 to figure.

(the programme was presented by Marc Almond, but there was only a brief clip of Soft Cell)

yeah, I watched it before but its good to see it repeated.

the great thing abt it is that it doesn't matter who's there as long as the story is good.

the guy you really feel for was martin rushent of course.

I mostly dislike the pet shop boys (a couple of good singles I suppose). they are too kind of 'pop journo clever' for me (I'm not quite sure what this means but it fits).

The Thompson Twins were the most underrated electro pop act of the 80's. Lest we forget A-Ha as well. Morten Harket was the cutest boy in all creation.

It was 1979 and I was 9 years old and American and living in England for about nine months because, well, that's where my parents thought we should live that year. It was where I discovered pop music. My sister and I watched "Top of the Pops" every week, and I remember most of the songs we heard: something called "Roxanne" by someone called The Police, "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats, "Sunday Girl" by Blondie, "Cracking Up" by Nick Lowe. I even remember "A Little Bit of Soap" by Showaddywaddy. But the one I remember most was "Are Friends Electric" by Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army. I was amazed. Every week I waited to see if it would still be number one, and for an amazing four or five weeks, it was. I was sure this was what the future was going to sound like (and since I was reading Lord of the Rings at the time, I also somehow thought this was what the past sounded like too). I still have the 45. Amazing song. I brought it back home and played it in my 5th grade classroom on Fridays when our teacher let us bring in records. I remember the first time I put it on, my teacher (a pretty cool guy for an elementary school dusty upstate New York vineyard country) pulled me aside and said, "What is that? That's good." Yeah, it was.

I'm surprised to see OMD so high on this list? Were they really that popular?

i can't remember what are friends electric sounds like anymore, it's been replaced by the sugababes

Nightporter? Life in Tokyo? Gentlemen Take Polaroids? Visions of China? Ghosts? Quiet Life?

Sales schmales, was there any mention of Japan?

numan is the shit. all thing fair, he shoula been a touch futher up the list. my love for him is only made stronger by the likes of the sugababes and basement jaxx.

i remember that tears for fears were in the top 10 for something like 14 weeks. the must have shifted a but load of records to do that so thats probably why theyre higher than numan.

still prefer numan tho.

OMD had a few top 10 hits but crucially kept on having small hits right into the 90s, the cumulative effect got them in the chart even though they were mostly shocking.

Stephen Meritt was interviewed, that made it worth watching.

i madly, madly heart jesse fox's post upthread, honest
...even tho my own madness 'bout electro pop - a coupla exceptions,like numan's 'friends', er, excluded - was sorta healfhearted at best

phil : "the human league - someday all records
will be made this way...and they are !"

classic-o.

wasnt The Communards spot actually shared by them AND Bronski Beat as there wasnt much of an electropop sound in Communards records really...

stevem, I second that.

Good things about the prog:
Learning that the Thompson Twins also went through that 'semi_crusty postpunk earnestness => smoothie synthpop cash_in' transformation that the 80's aligned them to...
Martin Rushent talking about the HLeague like they were ignorant ungrateful street urchins.
Leo Sayer/Gary Numan's painful duet, + seeing Numan resorting to climbing over bouncy obstacles while covered in foam on 'Its A Knockout'.
Hearing some great songs which acted as a palliative during some shitey years.

Annoying things about the prog:
The warping of years into moments. (From 'Dare' to Jam & Lewis as if it were just like THAT...)
Questionable classifications: Communards? TFF? New Order? - I think all these had more than enough conventional instrumentation/sounds in them for it to be arguable as to whether they were 'electro pop': it's like saying that any band with a brass section is a 'brass band' - not true, even if the brass section carries alot of the melodies. (Besides, the modal shift from synthetix -> sampling through the first half of the 80's made that classification / distinction a lot more complicated/useless.)
Hearing some horrible songs which acted as a horrible soundtrack for some shitey years.