Bright Sparks Behind The Scenes - The Brits

[Music] look martin and john from strictly electronics are friends of ours and they're just a right laugh so we don't need any excuse at all to go and see them so with the bright sparks thing it was the perfect opportunity for us to sit down with particularly john bradley who's you know related to the originator of the melotron and uh every time we go there he he's found some other little nugget of information about the history that we kind of constantly piecing things together so yeah for us uh it was a no-brainer but also if you think we're obsessive about the melotron jared from my monster is doubly obsessive and that was brilliant because actually in bright sparks that gives him the opportunity to kind of let rip and let rippy did [Music] peter zinofiev's place in electronic music history is absolutely assured really fascinating character and it transpires that he lived in cambridge or lives in cambridge and the underworld studio is not far from there so i can't i was kind of like we could kill two birds with one stone here we could go to peter interview him and then i could take the chamberlain rhythm mate amp drum machine thing down to carl and carl can put his guitar through it and talk about you know how what how he feels about it and that was really fascinating in fact we drove up to peter's it was a really scorching hot day and i'm i've got a very old 1972 citroen ds and i thought this is perfect opportunity because actually ems used to use a ds um safari they called it it was like the estate version as their company car for lugging all their gear around so i was like yeah we'll drive up and we'll take this up and it'll be a nice surprise for peter and we'll take him and his wife around the block in it a couple of times i hadn't used the car for a while and unfortunately the mice had got into some of the cooling ducks and kind of chewed away the internal foam and we're on the motorway and chris my partner said it's a bit hot in here if you've got any air con i'm like get out of here you know some 1972 car for god's sake just opened the vent and of course he did that whereupon the entire car was just filled with black foam as we're driving up the motorway honestly as a wind-up it couldn't have been better if only i'd have planned it [Music] ems [Music] electronic dream plan adrian wagner chris huggett now chris's story has been told a few times particularly as he was responsible for like the akai s 1000 stuff pretty much everything that novation has done and chris is an absolute legend adrian had always been very quiet after the demise of edp and in fact i'd only spoken to him because a million years ago chris and i did this little fat boy midi controller and we deliberately did the livery in black and yellow as a kind of homage to the wasp and the edp kind of line uh and adrian obviously thought the same because he called me up one day and asked me whether that was the case and i was like yeah yeah and we had this amazing two-hour conversation so for bright sparks i was like it would be brilliant to get adrian to tell his story because you know we know chris's story and that's been told a few times uh so i called adrian and it was sad really because he wasn't well he was in a wheelchair uh and he just said i don't want this to be how people remember me and you have to respect that but what he did do is he put us in touch with one of his closest friends which transpires it was a mutual friend a guy called fred gardner and fred myself chris mccloud and another friend jeff bolt we regularly go out to lunch with chris huggett and chris and i are just like sponges as they're all talking about the old edp days and what's happened to who and how this happened and how that came about and stuff like that and it's a real privilege to be in that position so for fred to be able to talk with real enthusiasm because obviously fred's had kind of subsequent careers since outside the music industry so he looks back on the edp days as his real halcyon days and i think that enthusiasm really comes across so yeah for me that was a real cool ken freeman so a million years ago when chris and me were kids there was a big hit called gonna make you a star by david essex and it had this synth line in it that was a total ear worm and even as a kid it fascinated me because it was like what is the instrument that makes that noise and then when chris and i kind of got together work wise it transpired he wanted to know the same thing and we're so nerdy about these things we were like well you know was it ken's prototype string machine that he used in war of the worlds we knew that ken had played on the track was it a prototype cs80 no it can't have been because it was too early what was it what was it so we were lucky enough to get ahold of ken and ken came and talked us through the entire you know how he created the first string machine which was really about listening to records and trying to use his engineering expertise to capture the sound that he heard on those vinyl records and that in itself was fascinating and ken you know it's a proper musical icon tripods holby city his prs is something else man and then so we do the interview and then right at the end of it you know chris and i know which question we're going to ask him which was so what did you use on going to make you a star then and he kind of rolled his eyes and said what do you really want to know yeah yeah yeah we've been waiting decades for this oh it was an arp 2600 no double checked i mean troubleshoot you get one this one yeah when we went on two we used an odyssey i played it in in here we just uh triple tracked it we've been desperate to know what made that sound since about 1975. that's obliged free man [Music] you

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Length: 7min 40sec (460 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021