Electro-Punk 1

In the early 80's, people were getting inspired to create electronic music from listening to bands like Kraftwerk, OMD, The Normal, Gary Numan and a host of others beginning to release their music, however, most people couldn't afford a synthesizer.  In 1981 Casio released the first mini-synth, the VL-Tone. I remember it being somewhat affordable, somewhere between $50-$100, and not much more than a glorified children's toy, but at least you could own a synth, because most decent synths cost around a $1000 at the time.

A whole DIY culture started to grow and create music using Casio synths and maybe a real synthesizer you could borrow from the rich kid on the block. Underground electronic music started to sound like this Portion Control song, where they categorized themselves as Electro-Punk:

The term that is used now to describe this music is Minimal Wave, which I've only heard recently and did not exist at the time. It was just bands creating underground DIY music and releasing cassette tapes by themselves or from very small record labels. It wasn't even purely electronic, because you just used whatever instruments you had. Echo And The Bunnymen, a few years earlier (1979), fell into this category, because they used a drum machine; just think how different their music would be if they didn't find Pete de Freitas (in 1980, and one of the best all-time drummers) and the technology was there to provide them with a really good drum machine to stay in that direction. Here's a glimpse with their first single released in '79:

One of the best examples of the music from this era is a band called Solid Space. I learned about this band from a British friend of mine who was heavy into the cassette culture. This was released in 1982:

The reason I started to think about this stuff is that I want to create a decent playlist at 8tracks for this music (this might take a little work acquiring the Mp3s, if even available) and I recently heard a song at Soundcloud, where the verses sounded a lot like the Portion Control song, in melody only, because this song is sung in Spanish and I would think it highly unlikely that this band would be familiar with early Portion Control. The song also veers off in the chorus and bridge, so I attribute the similarity to time-lapsed synchronicity or musical entanglement in the Jungian collective unconscious.

https://soundcloud.com/plastic-pinks/ella-me-mira

Susan's Strange

In February of 1980, Columbia Records released the first Psychedelic Furs album. As I remember it Tower Records was selling the album for half-off what they would normally sell their new releases, I think around $4.99, when new releases were going for $8.99/$9.99 at the time. Initially I was offended that my music was only worth half of the big market acts, but hey, I was getting a deal, and I thought the music was great, so that's all that mattered. This is the US album cover I remember (pretty plain and cheap-looking):

I guess big label Columbia was trying to promote their "new wave"acts, so people would be enticed to buy this strange music. The Furs were one of the first bands, if not the first, to be played on mainstream AOR FM radio. The Clash was the first band I remember hearing on AM with "Train in Vain", about the same time in 1980.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album-oriented_rock

Now, progressive, underground, and college-radio FM stations had been playing Punk/New Wave for years, but mainstream FM AOR, in the US (most of the airwaves, along with AM), wouldn't touch the stuff, so this was ground-breaking. In fact 1980 was a banner year with other "new wave" acts like U2 and Teardrop Explodes making it to mainstream FM radio.

There are two songs that differ from the US and UK releases. Actually, one (Blacks/Radio) was deleted, and two (Soap Commercial, Susan's Strange) were added. Martin Hannett of Factory/Joy Division fame (although at the time Joy Division was virtually unknown in the US), produced the two songs for the US version. Hannett was obsessed with drum sounds (isn't every producer/engineer?) and a little of that obsession can be heard in these tracks:

I really like the music in "Soap Commercial", but the lyrics are a little lacking for me, however, I really liked "Susan's Strange", maybe because I knew a couple of strange Susans at the time.