Ultravox

God.

Cue up the Ultravox.

This is great.

What are you talking about? Midge, fire it up.

This means nothing to me.

You remember that when the Dodgers clinched and they get that first round by.

You remember Ultravox and the streets of Vienna.

Was Carlo even born when this song came out? Of course not.

And Kraftwerk are sort of looked at at that point, I think, as godfathers of a movement which was really quite raw, really new.

I've done a radio show previously on 1981, being the year that synth pop broke and, you know, albums by Duran Duran, Spanner Ballet, Soft Cell, Ultravox, Heaven 17, The Eurythmics, Depeche Mode, OMD, The Human League.

Loads of albums came out in this genre at that point.

But in that era, those bands and those artists had this kind of quite raw, quite cold, quite rudimentary, quite like punk sounding feel to a lot of the synths.

uh i've seen reviews going out it's only 35 minutes long and they kind of bemoan that that's an admission that like obviously we've run out of ideas but computer world the album before that was only 34 minutes long trans europe express is only seven minutes longer than this it doesn't make any sense to me but anyway i think the delay really hurt this album uh particularly as it was sort of you know it was there's a bit of a disastrous thing where it was released as electric cafe when the title was always meant to be techno pop which is a better name because that is what this is like and i get like you know how some people don't really like when original artists that have inspired a genre are kind of copy bands that they have inspired but sometimes i think it just works and for me when i went through the entire craftwork discography this was the album probably due to my taste that really stood out to me and it's the first craftwork album that is created fully on digital equipment so it's definitely got a bit of a smoother sound to it and maybe that will have put like their earlier more hardcore fans off but hey This is pop music.

Give me all the gloss that you can.

And I think because it does have so much relatability to that Gary Newman, Ultravox, Human League feel, the stuff that I love and the fact that, you know, they were trying to make actual pop songs here.

um and you know they had just had a shock number one a couple of years before with the model but i don't really feel like they're jumping on the bandwagon i think they're just going like yeah we can we can do this as well and i listened to it and i was like yeah i like this doesn't feel like a cynical thing to me it's kind of it still sounds like craft work but i feel like they got bangers as well so i love this record i love it and i think it is my favorite craftwork album even though it's almost like their black album but just you know it got to number 58 rather than getting to number one um so i'm really interested in how you feel about it mel and what you think about it and uh and and where you stand on it all so uh let me know

Oh, there you go.

You brought it back to Mid-Year and Ultravox.

I like what you did there.

Um-

Uh, you've, Brad Williams, co-host of Stuck in the '80s, you have one hour at the JFK show and one hour at the Wembley show.

How are you gonna spend them?

What if my watch breaks and I stay an extra 10 minutes? Um, I am gonna go to, I, I'm gonna go to Wembley to see as much of the Sting, U2, Ultravox band of acts as I can.

And if I have to step out of the stadium to save a few minutes, maybe I can make it through Paul Young and Wham! Like, that, I, I, and I, I'm, I'm with them on the U2 thing.