In 2020, we thankfully celebrate the geek rather than shun them, so with his background as one of the great synth-pop icons, does Jones consider himself a bit of a gear dork?
“I think there are a lot of people more knowledgeable and gear-nerdy than me,” he laughs. “In terms of my passions, it’s the song, the melodies and the lyrics, and that is what I really enjoy getting right. But then give me any kind of synth and I will have loads of fun trying to get good sounds out of it.”
But after a 35-year relationship with the technology, there must be some kind of synth spark going on, right?
“Yeah, you’re right, that is a long time,” he admits cheerfully. “I don’t know – I guess for a start it’s the fact that you can do a lot more with synths now than you could in the early days. Now it’s like: ‘where do you start?’ because there are infinite possibilities.
“I still have an amazing set of original gear at home and I’ve got the [newer] software equivalents, but it is still all at the service of the song. You go with what is going to bring out the emotion of what you are writing about – that is my writing ethos.”