Systems of Romance
| Systems of Romance | |||||
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| Ultravox studio album | |||||
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Publication |
1978 |
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| Label (s) | Island Records | ||||
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Format (s) |
CD, LP |
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Title (number) |
10 |
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running time |
36:09 |
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| occupation |
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Ultravox, Conny Plank and Dave Hutchins |
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Studio (s) |
Conny's Studio , near Cologne |
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Systems of Romance is the third studio album by the British band Ultravox .
It was released on Island Records on September 8, 1978 , and was the final album with founding member, singer, lyricist and front man John Foxx . At the same time, it was the first album without the guitarist Stevie Shears, who had been excluded from the band after the first two albums due to musical differences and joined the group Cowboys International in 1980 . Shears was replaced on guitar by Robin Simon. Although the album did not have a commercial breakthrough, Systems of Romance had a significant influence on New Wave , especially on its synth-pop style and the New Romantic movement . Due to the lack of success of Systems of Romance , the band lost their record deal with Iceland in early 1979, and Foxx and Simon left the band as a result. It was only with the entry of Midge Ure in April 1979 and the fourth album Vienna , released on Chrysalis Records , that commercial success came from 1980, which artists such as Gary Numan , strongly influenced by Systems of Romance , had already achieved in 1979.
History of origin
On the album Ha! -Ha! -Ha! the band already integrated in some songs like The Man Who This Every Day and Hiroshima Mon Amour the synthesizer sounds of Billy Currie more and more in the sound, moving from punk rock and glam rock away to a new sound as it appears on systems of romance to was heard and which would later be described as synth pop . After the second studio album, the band did without the exclamation mark in the band name. After the tour for Ha! -Ha! -Ha! and the upcoming recordings for a third studio album, guaranteed in the record deal with Island Records, Ultravox parted ways with guitarist Steve Shears, whose style the other members found more and more as a limiting factor for the type of arrangements. The band chose Robin Simon, although he was younger than the others and relatively inexperienced, but whose style suited the compositions better.
As usual in the band, the songs recorded for the studio album were composed beforehand and some of them were performed live. Only the arrangements and the sound were recorded in the studio. For Systems of Romance , the only exception was Dislocation . The first compositions no longer show any rhythms generated by acoustic drums or a rhythm machine, but were created on Currie's ARP, which Cann used rhythmically like drums for the recording of the album.
The two previous albums were produced by Steve Lillywhite; Nevertheless, the band decided on Conny Plank as a producer:
“Conny loved and understood British psychedelic and German electronic music. These were two areas we were keen to merge. No-one else really understood and encompassed all this as fully as Conny did at that time. "
“Conny loved and understood British psychedelia and German electronic music. These were two areas that we sought to merge. Nobody else understood and grasped all of this as completely as Conny at that time. "
instrumentation
On this album, Cann initiated the support of the percussion with rhythm machines ( Roland TR-77). He had this early and therefore very fragile rhythm machine after the recordings for Ha! -Ha! -Ha! and integrated into the songs on the tour for the previous album. Ultravox was one of the first British bands to use electronic percussion. The bass drum for Just for a Moment is neither an acoustic drum kit nor a rhythm device , but Currie's ARP Odyssey, which Cann operates rhythmically like a drum kit. When editing the sound effects for Just for a Moment , the sound for the rhythm for Dislocation was found. Since some tracks of the 24-track tape for Just for a Moment were still unused, Conny Plank , who had one of the first SSL mixing consoles in his studio , helped to create the rhythm for Dislocation by repeatedly overlaying the free tracks with Effects devices recorded changed tracks from Dislocation and both songs were recorded on a single 24-track tape. The result was so satisfactory for the band that the band chose Dislocation as the B-side for the fourth single Slow Motion . The single was released on August 4, 1978 about a month before the album. With Cann, however, the band continued to use a human drummer who mastered the motor skills known from Krautrock , but changed the drum sound with a guitar distortion and thus helped to shape the drum sound of the 1980s. The first bass lines, like that of Slow Motion , were also generated electronically on the album; Cross used an EMS synth for this . The use of tape loops in the rhythm of Dislocation and Just for a Moment were the first fruits of studio experiments with sound effects. Since studio time was expensive for the band, which had not been commercially successful at that time, and they could only experiment with such sound effects to a limited extent in the studio, it would be two years before this form of electronically generated rhythms would become a trademark of Ultravox alongside the ARP.
Later synth pop bands such as The Human League or Depeche Mode no longer used acoustic drums at all, only rhythm machines. Ultravox also stayed true to a typical rock instrument when using the guitar, even if the use of the guitar was limited to short riffs and the compositions had few of the guitar solos typical of rock music. Robin Simon plays a key role in this.
“He invented 'New Guitar' - before him no-one played or sounded like that - now everyone does. Forget them all, from Edge onwards - they all owe it to Robin. He was the first to use echo, distortion, flanging, delay, sustain etc as an integral part of his sound, not as an effect. "
“He invented 'New Guitar' - nobody played or sounded like that before him - now everyone does it. Forget everyone who came to Edge - they all owe it to Robin. He was the first to use echo, distortion, flanger, delay, sustain, etc. as an integral part of his sound and not as an effect. "
Track list
- Slow Motion - 3:29
- I Can't Stay Long - 4:16
- Someone Else's Clothes - 4:25
- Blue Light - 3:09
- Some of Them - 2:29
- Quiet Men - 4:08
- Dislocation - 2:55
- Maximum Acceleration - 3:53
- When You Walk Through Me - 4:15
- Just for a moment - 3:10
A digitally remastered edition of the album published by Island Records in 2006 also contains the tracks
- Cross Fade - 2:53
- Quiet Men (Full Version) - 3:55
Publications and chart successes
About a month before the album was released, the single Slow Motion was released on August 4, 1978. The album itself followed on September 8, 1978. On October 13, Quiet Men was released another single. Neither the singles nor the album were initially able to make it into the charts. After the success of the follow-up album Vienna, Island re-released Slow Motion . In the second attempt, the single rose to number 35 in the British charts on March 28, 1981, reached its highest position at number 33 in the second week and stayed in the charts for a total of four weeks. About 20,000 copies of the album were sold.
tour
After five concerts in London's Marquee Club from August 19 to 23, 1978, the band performed at the Reading Festival in front of around 70,000 spectators. After the album was released, Ultravox went on tour on September 15, 1978, initially with 26 concerts in Great Britain, followed by 15 concerts in Germany. After two more concerts in December at the Lyceum in London and at the Marquee Club, the band lost their record deal with Iceland at the turn of the year and began a self-financed US tour with ten concerts in February 1979, which took place on March 15, 1979 at Whiskey a Go-Go in Hollywood ended with the exit of Foxx, who was tired of the arguments within the band and wanted to start a solo career.
The setlist at these concerts included songs from all three released albums, including a. The Man Who Dies Every Day , Slow Motion , Hiroshima Mon Amour , The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned , Just For a Moment , Quiet Men , Young Savage , ROckwrok and My Sex . At the Reading Festival they appeared as a special guest on the first day of the festival and played Quiet Men , I Can't Stay Long , Young Savage , ROckwrok and Slow Motion . On the US tour in 1979, new tracks were also played: Radio Beach , Touch and Go and He's a Liquid , the latter two of which Foxx released on his first solo album Metamatic in 1980 .
reception
Similar to the previous Ultravox albums ! and Ha! -Ha! -Ha! the contemporary reviews of the music press were mixed. Sounds spoke of "synthesizer-controlled sound images". The Musikexpress called the band the "foster fathers of today's synthesizer bands" (meaning the bands of the 1980s). However, there is also negative press, especially in the UK. The album was not a commercial success.
What makes the album significant, however, is the reception of other contemporary musicians. Gary Numan calls Systems of Romance his "greatest single influence". Numan, who calls himself the "Godfather of Electropop", celebrated his first chart successes in 1979 with The Pleasure Principle . Midge Ure, who would later become the band's lead singer, “loved the album”. Ure was experimenting with synthesizers at the time Systems of Romance was released and would later have chart successes with Visage and Ultravox. John Foxx also borrowed from this album in 1981 for his album The Garden by titling the second track with Systems of Romance . Foxx goes to the founder of Minimal Electro .
Simon Reynolds says in his book Rip It Up And Start Again : “What made Ultravox the forerunners of the synth pop wave of the eighties was its European aura and the chilled imagery of dehumanization and decadence that singer and lyricist John Foxx created. "
Dave Thompson writes about Systems of Romance at Allmusic : "An album so full of rich melodies smeared with melancholy, attractive synthesizers, splashes of electro-pop and highly danceable rhythms that it was without question a template for the later New Romantics."
Individual evidence
- Christian Graf and Burghard Rausch: Rock Music Lexicon . Europe / Vol. 2, Lake Zombies. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-596-12388-7 , pp. 751-1515 .
- Simon Reynolds: Rip It Up And Start Again . Hannibal Verlag, Höfen 2007, ISBN 978-3-85445-270-6 , Chapter 17 Electric Dreams: Synthiepop .
- Robin Eggar: Midge Ure, If I Was… The Autobiography . Virgin Books, 2005, ISBN 0-7535-1077-4 (British English, 288 pages).
- ↑ Slow Motion in the British Charts
- ↑ Steve Malins: Linernotes for the remastered edition of the 2006 album.
- ^ 1978 Reading Rock Festival. Retrieved September 30, 2010 .
- ^ Press quoted from Graf, Rausch , pp. 1375/1376
- ^ Gary Numan - Interview. In: Contactmusic.com. 2006, accessed September 24, 2010 .
- ↑ See Reynolds, p. 338
- ↑ See review at Allmusic
Web links
- Systems of Romance at Allmusic (English)
- Systems of Romance lyrics on LyricWiki