Top 10 albums that defined 80s synth-pop

The synthesizer was a luxury for a long time. In the sixties it took up a whole studio wall and cost as much as a car. Then it got smaller, it got cheaper, and by the early eighties even a broke band could get one. Kraftwerk had already shown what it could do. The rest of the decade belonged to drum machines and one good chorus. These are the ten albums 80s synth-pop stands on. You should not be missing a single one of them at home.

Two Swiss guys who never even pretended to be musicians. Boris Blank never studied music and glued his tracks together from thousands of sounds he had recorded into his own archive. Next to him Dieter Meier did not sing, he just talked, as if he were whispering something in your ear.

You know Oh Yeah even if you have never heard of Yello. Those two words show up whenever something expensive or naughty is about to happen on screen, starting with Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Vicious Games and Desire prove the album is more than one joke.

Fun fact:Meier was a professional poker player, played golf for Switzerland and wrote short stories. He came into the studio as a visual artist who had found a new material.

Vince Clarke wrote the first hits for Depeche Mode and then walked out at the peak. He did not want fame, he wanted to write songs. He put an ad in the paper and Alison Moyet answered, a schoolmate from Basildon with the voice of a blues singer.

That combination should not have worked. His machines are cold, her voice is not. Only You, Don't Go and Situation still sound like a manual on how to turn that into pop. Yazoo lasted two albums and split at the top, then Clarke founded Erasure.

Fun fact: A year later the Flying Pickets covered Only You a cappella and took it to the UK Christmas number one. Clarke did not have to lift a finger and had the best Christmas of his career.

Marian Gold and his two bandmates wanted music that sounds like a European film. That is why their debut is not only danceable, it is also sad and a little grandiose. Even the band name comes from a film, one by Jean-Luc Godard.

Big in Japan and Sounds Like a Melody are summer hits, but what holds Alphaville together is the title track. Forever Young is slow and sentimental, and that is exactly why twenty years later it started playing at proms and at funerals all over the world.

Fun fact:Big in Japan is not about fame. It is about a couple hooked on heroin around Berlin's Zoo station, telling themselves that one day they will be somewhere else.

When Ian Curtis died, Joy Division ceased to exist overnight. The three remaining members could have kept playing the same thing. Instead they bought a sequencer and a drum machine and learned to run them live, even though it kept crashing on stage at first.

This is the first album that is entirely theirs. Age of Consent and Your Silent Face sound like grief you can dance to. That same year Blue Monday came out separately, a twelve inch that married the disco floor to rock and became the best selling 12 inch single of all time.

Fun fact:Peter Saville designed the Blue Monday sleeve as a die-cut floppy disk. It cost more to make than the single earned, so every copy sold lost money for Factory Records.

Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart had been a couple and a band, and both fell apart. What was left were debts and an eight track machine in a small studio above a factory. They had nothing to lose, so they stopped worrying about good taste.

That famous riff is not a guitar and not a bass, it is a synthesizer. Sweet Dreams, Love Is a Stranger and Here Comes the Rain Again made them a global duo within a year. Lennox cut her hair short, dyed it orange and put on a man's suit.

Fun fact: In the Sweet Dreams video a cow walks through the boardroom. They put it there so the clip would not look like an ordinary pop video, and it worked.

Three Norwegians moved to London, slept in the rehearsal room and saved money on food. They had one song nobody was betting on. They recorded it three times, it flopped twice, and only the third version got the video that changed everything.

Magne Furuholmen wrote the Take On Me keyboard riff when he was fifteen and played it on a Roland Juno-60. Morten Harket added a falsetto you cannot forget. The Sun Always Shines on T.V. and Hunting High and Low then proved this was not a one hit band.

Fun fact: The animated video was made by drawing straight onto individual film frames. It took four months, won six MTV awards and pushed the song to number one in the US.

Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith had known each other since they were thirteen and both grew up without a father. The first Tears for Fears album was built on therapy and anger. On the second one they decided it should sound huge, so they added live drums, guitar solos and orchestral layers.

Shout is not a song about yelling at someone, it is about refusing to stay quiet. Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Head Over Heels then conquered America and turned two guys from Bath into a stadium band.

Fun fact:Everybody Wants to Rule the World was written last and Orzabal did not want it on the album at first, it felt too lightweight to him. Today it is their most played song. The album title comes from a film about a patient who felt safe only in her therapist's big chair.

Neil Tennant wrote for the music magazine Smash Hits and met Chris Lowe by chance in an electronics shop. They found out they wanted the same thing. Dance music with lyrics about money, class and a London that was turning into a hard place in the eighties.

It's a Sin is the most dramatic pop single of the decade and Tennant uses it to settle a score with his catholic school. Rent is the coldest ballad ever written about being kept by someone. They sang What Have I Done to Deserve This? with Dusty Springfield and put her back in the spotlight.

Fun fact: On the cover Tennant is yawning. It was not boredom, it was exactly the mockery of pop pretence that Pet Shop Boys built a career on.

Kraftwerk from Düsseldorf made music about things nobody was singing about. Data, numbers and the idea that one day we would all have a computer at home. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider built their own instruments in the Kling Klang studio, because shop bought gear was not enough for them.

Computer Love has the melody Coldplay officially asked to borrow twenty years later for their song Talk. The rhythm of Numbers was taken apart by American producers who built electro and hip hop on top of it. If you want to see where it started, put on The Man-Machine from 1978 as well.

Fun fact: They recorded Pocket Calculator in English, German, French and Japanese. Live, the band played it on real pocket calculators and toy keyboards they carried on stage in briefcases.

Depeche Mode started out as a sweet band for teenagers with hits written by Vince Clarke. When he left, Martin Gore took over the writing and started pulling the sound into the dark. The sixth album is the moment a pop band turned into something bigger and heavier.

Never Let Me Down Again opens the album with a riff that sounds like an avalanche, and they still play it live as an anthem. Strangelove and Behind the Wheel added elegance and tension. Meanwhile the voice of Dave Gahan grew into the register audiences still expect from him.

Fun fact: The title was meant as a joke, the band assumed they would never be for the masses. The tour ended at the Rose Bowl stadium in California in front of more than sixty thousand people. The recording came out as the film 101, because it was the hundred and first show of the tour.

Synth-pop never disappeared, it only moved. The classics keep coming back as remastered reissues on vinyl and CD, and synthwave keeps returning to the same sound. If you want to dig deeper, put on Human League, Soft Cell, Gary Numan, Ultravox and Simple Minds. The pioneers are Jean-Michel Jarre, Giorgio Moroder, Tangerine Dream and Vangelis.

You can build that sound at home today. Have a look at synthesizers and at analogue reissues of the classics from Roland, Korg and Behringer. A groovebox handles the rhythm, and a pocket synth is enough on the road. Play the records on a turntable, tune it with headphones and finish it off with merch. The previous part of the series is about nu metal.