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All The Young Droids: Junkshop Synth Pop 1978– 1985 NIGHT SCHOOL 8/10
These electronic baubles from the archive are definitely the droids you are looking for THE post-punk era, when newly affordable electronic instruments and DIY recording methods fuelled a paradigm shift in embryonic machine-pop, has long been canonised as a golden age for futuristic music. But All The Young Droids seeks to excavate a less celebrated lost era, where unsung bedsit chancers, low-budget new-wavers, Casiotone Kraftwerk clones and sub-Human Leaguers dabbled in this new analogue sound laboratory, often creating charmingly kitsch oddities and accidental arty-party bangers. After all, as the album’s press notes remind us, electro-pop was still widely dismissed as an uncool novelty fad in the late 1970s, and synthesisers routinely derided by serious rock critics as an “emasculating” affront to Proper Rock.