Martyn Ware playing Being Boiled on original synths!

So, here’s a quick post for you before I head off to California on business for a week (yeah, I know… get me, eh?).

Last night, I attended a performance by the BBC Concert Orchestra as part of a year long season at the Southbank Centre, entotled “The Rest is Noise”, exploring the music of the 20th century. The performance I saw was, as you may have guessed, covering the 1980’s.

Presented by Paul Morley, one of the founding members of the Art of Noise, the orchestra performed a number of pieces that related that most wonderful of decades. Featuring works by Andrew Poppy, reinterpretations by another AoN founder member, Anne Dudley, and others such as Michael Nyman, the performance was wonderfully evocative, deliciously ironic and highly entertaining.

If you’re in the UK, it’s on iPlayer for a week…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03k0cnw

However, before the show, the Southbank Centre had invited friend of this blog, Martyn Ware, along with Peter Howell of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, to give a brief talk on the use of synthesizers in the music of the 80’s. Martyn brought along his Roland System 100 and Korg 700S, the original machines on which he and Ian Craig Marsh had written many early Human League songs, such as ‘Being Boiled’. At the end of the talk, Martyn gave us an impromptu approximation of that aforementioned song, along with some impromptu humour, to an enthusiastic crowd.

So, here it is, filmed by me on my iPhone, sat in the front row…