Various

All The Young Droids: Junkshop Synth Pop 1978-1985 is a new compilation that charts the underbelly of the epoch-defining sound of the synthesizer in '80s popular music. Compiled by curator Phil King, the music here connects the dots between DIY synth enthusiasts grappling with new, cheap synthesizers at the tail-end of punk and wannabe, jobbing songwriters enthrall to the new music pioneered by Gary Numan, Depeche Mode and Daniel Miller's Mute Records. Featuring rare tracks of auto-didactic progressive pop music, proto-techno punk, shoot-for-the-stars-land-in-the-gutter chart flops and heralded, underground synth classics, School Daze paints a picture of beautiful failure. Complete with extensive sleeve notes written by King and never before seen imagery, all 24 tracks were remastered by RPM in-house engineer Simon Murphy, many from vinyl copies due to lost master tapes. The story told on All The Young Droids is one of the dawning opportunities presented by both the emergence to the market of cheaper analog synthesizers and the distribution networks plus indie labels that exploded with the advent of punk music in 1976. While the music that sprouted out all over the globe in the wake of these factors was decried as fake, plastic, a refutation of punk's guitar-led revolution, it's telling that much of the music on All The Young Droids was created in bedrooms, ramshackle studios and home-made set ups with often borrowed equipment. In the era of record labels jumping to capitalize on the success of The Sex Pistols, The Clash (both on major labels, of course) these artists struggled to stand out from a new gold-rush with next to no budget or PR team. With radio and labels desperate for the new Yahoo, what resulted was a testament to necessity being the mother of invention.