In The Studio With 

Belgian trio Telex was one of the first to bring electronic pop to the European hit parade. Danny Turner chats to Dan Lacksman and Michel Moers about the band’s past and present

© Jean Christophe Guillaume

Formed in 1978 by vocalist Michel Moers, keyboard enthusiast Marc Moulin and sound engineer Dan Lacksman, Brussels-based Telex blended experimental electronic music with disco and pop through their stripped-down cover versions and selfdepreciative songwriting. The group’s success peaked in 1980 when, despite their misgivings, they were persuaded to take part in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Preferring to remain anonymous and shunning live performance, they teamed up with glam-rock synth poppers Sparks, remixed Depeche Mode and the Pet Shop Boys and released albums intermittently up to 2006. However, after the untimely death of Moulin two years later, Telex decided to call it a day. Thankfully, a final flurry of activity now sees them working with Mute Records to rework their back catalogue and release a 14-track compilation featuring unreleased tracks.

What were your musical backgrounds prior to forming Telex?

MM: “Marc was into jazz and fusion, I was into rock, folk and jazz and Dan more pop and electro music. He was the first one to play with synths and listen to that music, although Marc did have a Minimoog. We all had specific roles in the band. Marc was the keyboard player and composer, I was the singer and composer and Dan the sound wizard. We had opinions about each other’s actions, but the best thing was that there were three of us so there was always a majority for decisions we made.”

DL: “I was working as an assistant engineer and then a freelance engineer and was very interested by a new instrument called the synthesiser and managed to buy an EMS VCS3 just when Gershon Kingsley’s big hit Popcorn came out in 1969. Everybody was discovering the synthesiser and a lot of artists wanted to have some electronic sounds on their arrangements. After a few months I knew how to use it and thanks to my studio boss we did a master class demonstration and I began working as a synth programmer and specialist for Belgian productions, going from studio to studio.”

Kraftwerk’s ethos was futurism and the relationship between man and machine. Did you have a similar message for Telex?

MM: “The whole of the first album, Looking for Saint Tropez, was about communication – or lack of it – through the machines, but we never played the game of being robots. It was more about making pop music related to the cartoons that we were surrounded by in Belgium. When we began there was only Kraftwerk, so the influence was more related to the simplicity of their sound and the beginning of rhythmic electronic music. Other artists like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze were more temperamental-sounding.”

DL: “Kraftwerk were my influence and closer to what we wanted to do because they did everything electronically whereas even Yellow Magic Orchestra used real drums. Before Telex, I experimented a lot with modular synthesisers to make drum sounds and one of the first things Florian Schneider told me years later was that he was astonished we could do that using modular equipment because Kraftwerk only had a rhythm box that they used to take apart.”