Ben writes: "Well now. Two Fairlight series IIs, some Simmons drums and a Stepp DG1 digital guitar (played by the late, great Alan Murphy I think). Who else, but Kate Bush?" Here she is, miming on 'Wogan' in 1986, doing 'Experiment IV'. Amazing to think this was broadcast at 6:30 on BBC1 to an audience of millions. And yes, that is a very young Nigel Kennedy perched on her desk.
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MT reader 'Synthetic' was at the NAB show in Las Vegas a couple of weeks back and saw this incredible signed Fairlight CMI keyboard, which will be auctioned for the human rights charity Witness later in the year. The names read like the guest list for the Music Thing summer barbecue: Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Jean Michel Jarre, Jan Hammer, Daryl Hall and, bizarrely but wonderfully, Billy Gibbons. Visually, it's strangely reminiscent of this...
This [YouTube] video for 'Magnetic Fields 2' by Jean Michel Jarre is simply astonishing. It opens with JMJ (looking even more like Laurence Lewellyn Bowen than usual). He's sitting in an igloo, serenading an Eskimo gentleman with what seems to be a Fairlight with the top cover taken off. The Eskimo is busy gutting a fish, and is surprised to find a big transistor embedded in the fish's flesh. Suddenly, JMJ is transported to a forest, where he meets some women wearing white robes, and finds a giant matching transistor. Equally suddently, he's transported inside his synth, carrying a spinning compass, which quickly turns into some French interpretative dance dudes. A little later, he meets an African man standing in the desert next to a gigantic bit of audio cable. Could someone else watch this, and reassure me that I'm not having an enormous mental breakdown? Thanks.
Apologies for yet more YouTube stuff, but I'm watching this now, because pretty soon it will have all evaporated.
Isn't it refreshing when national stereotypes come true? While English -speaking synthy websites are filled with a chiptune controversy, a new DJ control surface and a 1940s electronic pioneer, the French do it differently. The Groovy Babes special on Oldschool-Sound.com is a lengthy flash slideshow which collects every picture they can find of (mainly) attractive women with synths, ranging from #1 MT pinup Cynthia Webster (left) to Kate Bush suggestively fondling her Fairlight (centre) to... well, I really don't know what that picure on the right is. It's very mildly NSFW, including a strange picture of a '60s topless girl group and what looks like a '70s Playboy shoot featuring a Moog Prodigy. (via Matrix Synth, which has recently moved to: matrixsynth.blogspot.com, and is still updated every, like, six minutes with an unstoppable stream of cool things)
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In honour of this Fairlight Series III turning up on Austrailan Ebay (currently £814, but it will go up), I've declared this Fairlight Week, a celebration of the biggest, most expensive, cleverest and most over-the-top vintage synth of all.
