Tubeway+army

As the Seventies faded into the Eighties, Top of the Pops approached its 1000th episode, MTV launched in America, and kids across Britain were falling in love with pop music away from the TV, through a small little box called a Walkman. Through their headphones came new, strange sounds: mechanical, but organic and alive. The synthesiser was the sound of tomorrow, today, and it was thrilling.

Named after a lyric from Magazine’s ground-breaking hit, ‘Shot By Both Sides’, TO THE OUTSIDE OF EVERYTHING tells a musical story of how the UK’s post-punk scene evolved from the spirit of 1977 and the arrival of key labels such as Fast, Rough Trade, Zoo, Factory and Cherry Red.

The new romanticism emerged in the UK music scene in the early '80s when boys looked like girls and girls looked like boys. The New Romantics, features tracks from Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, the Human League and Heaven 17 amongst many others - this 3 CD offering will be a hit with all those who lived through the time.

The legendary Old Grey Whistle Test returns with the third in the series - this album delivers what the fans have been asking for. All Live tracks, CD1 and CD2 feature tracks from the original classic show including Van Morrison, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elton John and the mighty Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. All original and all live - CD3 features tracks from the Old Grey Whistle Test's 40th anniversary BBC Radio 2 show as produced and presented by Bob Harris himself in 2011. All the artists featured on CD3 performed on the original show at some point.

In the late seventies, every other episode of Tomorrow’s World seemed to feature the futuristic ‘synthesiser’, a mass of patchboards, knobs and wires which was all set to make orchestras redundant around the world. But the singles chart was largely immune to the synth - with the honourable exceptions of Hot Butter’s Popcorn and Kraftwerk's Autobahn - until the watershed year of 1979. Then, Tubeway Army’s Are Friends Electric stormed to number one with its blend of bleak sci-fi, European cine-drama, and the heavy, ominous noise coming from machines labelled Roland, Arp and Moog…

Synth Pop reads like a who’s who of the late 70s and early 80s, featuring 53 of the most recognisable and iconic songs of the era. The collection kicks off with Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics and picks up the pace pretty fast. You know you’re on to a winning collection when Don’t You Want Me by The Human League, Cars by Gary Numan and Tainted Love by Soft Cell are sequenced one after the other. There are so many highlights over the 53 tracks that it’s really hard to single out specific songs for mention…

Some would say that German EBM (electronic body music) act Die Krupps jumped the shark when they made the very literal transition between adding metal textures to their dark, gothic electro pop (ie, banging pipes with spanners) and actually using heavy metal as an active audio ingredient…