An overview of the genre

In this chapter, we are adopting the term synthpop to deal with an era (around 1979-84) and style of music known by several other names. A more widely employed term in pop historiography has been ‘New Romantic’, but this is too narrowly focused on clothing and fashion, and was, as is ever the case, disowned by almost all those supposedly part of the musical ‘movement’. The term New Romantic is more usefully employed to describe the club scene, subculture and fashion associated with certain elements of early 1980s’ music in Britain. Other terms used to describe this genre included ‘futurist’ and ‘peacock punk’ (see Rimmer 2003). As well as its evident connections to early twentieth-century art and radical values, futurist carried more elitist connotations. It is certainly ironic that the Italian-in-origin futurist art movement was a reaction to the alleged sentimentalism of the original Romantics (see Lista 2001). Dave Gahan commented that Depeche Mode

The term ‘New Pop’ was also used to describe many of the bands studied in this chapter. However, while ‘futurist’ was seen to be a kind of technological punk, ‘New Pop’ was often defined according to its opposition to more seemingly credible genres such as punk. As former Smash Hits journalist Dave Rimmer suggests:

The term ‘new musick’ (most associated with the journalist Jon Savage) was also used to describe some of the music examined below. However, whereas our term synthpop crosses the high/low cultural divide, Savage specifically developed the term ‘new musick’ to describe a post-punk move into experimentation, avant-gardism and a more synthetic and mythically European sound (noted as early as November 1977 - see Savage 1977).