Pod Insights ABC Rewind Fairlight CMI - the sound you've never heard of About this episode The Australian instrument that shaped the sound of the 1980s and forever changed how popular music was made. At the start of the 1980s the Fairlight caught the eye of synthesiser pioneers likes Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. By the end of the 1980s it had caught the ear of millions of people around the world, even if they didn't know it.
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0:33 Speaker 03 Hello, Hilary Harper here, jumping into the good ship Rewind and setting sail for the past. Today, the story of a very special musical instrument, a synthesizer that you've probably never heard of, but one you've listened to whether you realise it or not. The Fairlight Computer Music Instrument, or CMI, was so revolutionary that it changed how popular music sounded, right from its creation, back in the 1980s, through to the present day. Musician and journalist James Viver brings us the story of, and the soundtrack to, this remarkable Australian invention.
1:09 Speaker 04 Load biography disc.
1:12 Speaker 05 The best way for us to learn about the Fairlight is to use the instrument for what it was designed for: to make music. We're going to produce a song using the Fairlight, telling the story along the way. To get started, we need to go back to 1913.
1:32 Speaker 05 That's Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. So what does a pre-World War One Russian composer have to do with a 1980s synthesizer? Let's listen to the start again.
1:44 Speaker 05 That's the opening phrase of music. The Fairlight turned into a sample called Orc 2.
1:52 Speaker 05 And you might be thinking, "I know that sound from somewhere." You're probably right. That sample has been on a lot of records.
2:02 Speaker 05 Afrika Bambaataa was one of the first. Let's just listen again to make sure that you've got that. There's the sample there. Whether played up
2:15 Speaker 05 or down the scale.
2:19 Speaker 05 That sample has been used hundreds and hundreds of times.
2:24 Speaker 06 Michael Jackson.
2:29 Speaker 06 Madonna.
2:34 Speaker 06 Duran Duran.
2:39 Speaker 05 Clearly, we'd be in good company if we were to use Orc II in our Fairlight song. But before we get too far, let's meet the two old schoolmates who invented the Fairlight.
2:50 Speaker 00 Look, I was always a Stevie Wonder fan, you know, the moody blues.
2:54 Speaker 05 Kim Ryrie.
2:55 Speaker 00 I was into music, but I wasn't a musician. I was a frustrated musician and therefore I need a machine that can do it for me.
3:04 Speaker 05 And Peter Vogel.
3:05 Speaker 00 I had no idea who Stevie Wonder was, having never listened to any pop music in my life. I've never been much of a music listener.
3:15 Speaker 05 It's 1977, Sydney, and while Peter and Kim don't have the same taste in music, they do share a love for electrical engineering. They like working stuff out, solving problems, inventing.
3:29 Speaker 00 Peter and I both were tinkering with electronics from the time we could walk, and I liked pulling radios apart and trying to work out what was in them. Well, I was fascinated by electricity from age four, I'm told by my parents. I would find PowerPoints and stick things in to see what happened and progressed from there.
3:54 Speaker 05 Early synthesizers were enormous. They looked a bit like an old-fashioned telephone exchange, all patch cables, knobs and dials.
4:03 Speaker 00 I thought, well, I can't make natural sounds with this, you know, it all sounds electronic and so on, which was fine, but I really wanted to do acoustic sounds.
4:13 Speaker 05 Inspired by synthesizer pioneers Robert Moog and Wendy Carlos's piece Switched on Bach, Kim wanted to take things further, to be able to play a key on the keyboard and instead of hearing an electronic recreation of a piano, it was the sound of an actual piano. So he rang his old mate Peter to give him a hand.
4:36 Speaker 00 I said, you know, do you want to make the world's greatest synthesizer?
4:40 Speaker 05 Peter left his job repairing hi-fi and camera equipment and the pair set to work. Kim had worked on a synthesizer project before and knew that by adding a computer to control and save the settings of the synthesizer, it could change the game completely.
4:57 Speaker 00 I was captivated by the idea that you could create music from a purely electronic source.
5:04 Speaker 05 They built on microprocessor technology developed by Aussie inventor Tony First and his Quasar Synths. They got their family to invest and employed engineers and programmers.
5:15 Speaker 00 We're talking about the late 70s here, so this was before home computers were a thing. So you couldn't just go down to the corner's computer shop and buy a keyboard or a monitor or a mouse. In fact, mouse didn't exist at that time. So every bit of the system had to be handmade and the development cost was extraordinary. So it wasn't till about 79 that we had the first prototype. Called it the computer musical instrument, not a synthesizer, because I didn't want it confused with an analog synthesizer.
5:51 Speaker 05 They were ready to bring their invention to the world, but there was one major problem:
5:58 Speaker 05 the price.
6:02 Speaker 05 Twenty-five thousand dollars, to be exact. In today's money, that's about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.
6:10 Speaker 00 Famously, there's many musicians now who say that they had to decide whether they were going to buy a house or whether they were going to buy a Fairlight. So we just didn't know who was going to buy it. We didn't know anything about business, let alone marketing.
6:25 Speaker 05 Thankfully, fellow co-founder Kim Riery had a next-door neighbour who, well, let's just say he knew a few people in the business.
6:33 Speaker 00 Now Bruce Jackson and I sort of had grown up together. Bruce had been living in America, working for a company who did the big outdoor concerts, like, what's his name, that guy? He was around for a while. Oh, that's right, Elvis.
6:52 Speaker 00 So Bruce did Elvis's sound.
6:57 Speaker 00 This to Bruce, his jaw dropped and he said, this is just extraordinary. I've got to introduce you to some people who would love to see this.
7:06 Speaker 05 So what was it that made Bruce Jackson's jaw drop? To really understand the Fairlight, who used it and why? We need to break down the instrument's different functions. Let's start with those realistic instrument sounds Kim and Peter set out to make. Just how realistic were they?
7:27 Speaker 04 Fairlight Computer Music Instrument. Disc one, Sound Library.
7:32 Speaker 06 The sounds at the time would have sounded very new. They would have sounded futuristic.
7:40 Speaker 05 Professor Samantha Bennett from the ANU School of Music is taking you through the Fairlight's library of sounds.
7:46 Speaker 06 You've got lots of patches called Horn 1, Horn 2, Horn M3. Trump, which actually is a trumpet, tubas, et cetera, et cetera. There's things like Rs and there's things like choirs. There's also sounds that are entitled Peter, who I assume is doing some recordings of themselves and then including those on the discs.
8:12 Speaker 05 So that's what it sounded like. Good enough for Elvis's sound man to make some introductions and back a synthesizer that had never left the workshop.
8:22 Speaker 05 So in 1979, Peter Vogel packed up the fragile Fairlight prototype, including the floppy disks, and flew to Los Angeles to meet a potential customer.
8:33 Speaker 00 I was a bit worried that because he couldn't see the screen that he would have trouble. But of course, he was very adept at dealing with this sort of thing. As soon as he played some of the sounds from our library, he was hooked. He just lit up, said, okay, I'll buy it.
8:54 Speaker 05 That first customer was Stevie Wonder.
8:57 Speaker 00 I had no idea that he was famous.
9:00 Speaker 05 I mean, Stevie Wonder.
9:01 Speaker 00 I had no idea that he was capable of writing a cheque for that amount of money.
9:05 Speaker 05 An amazing start.
9:06 Speaker 00 He said, "I'm going to be touring soon. I'd love to use it on the tour", which turned out to be Wembley Stadium. I was completely chuffed because I just was a huge fan of Stevie Wonder.
9:21 Speaker 05 Early Fairlight customers were musicians known for their experimentation with synthesizers: Herbie Hancock, Fleetwood Mac, and Peter Gabriel.
9:33 Speaker 01 This is a modified Swanee whistle, and the rhythm of the repeat really excited me, and I've written a song around the rhythm, thinking of a rhythm that wouldn't go against it.
9:43 Speaker 00 Ended up spending about a week there, sort of showing him how the thing worked. He was just like a kid in a candy shop, grinning for that whole week.
9:58 Speaker 05 But for some 1980s musicians, the Fairlight was too realistic.
10:04 Speaker 00 We did do some sessions where we'd ask musicians to come in and play notes, and understandably, a lot of them were quite anxious about doing it. So, for instance, especially brass players, I remember, they'd come into a session and you'd ask them to just play a few notes and they'd freak out and sort of say, "Oh no, I'm not doing this. I'm out of here", you know. Obviously, we didn't have the same sort of control over a classical instrument as a real brass player has, but they didn't necessarily know that.
10:39 Speaker 05 So, we've heard some of the inbuilt instruments we could use to produce our Fairlight song, but we could do with an example, a well-known track that makes use of the Fairlight's library sounds.
10:53 Speaker 06 Probably the most well-known Fairlight sound is "The Sarah". It's often called "The Sarah Effect 2", and that was named after a woman called Sarah Cohen. So, it's basically her voice and sampled and synthesized. It's quite breathy.
11:18 Speaker 06 One of the most well-known examples of the Sarah effect is on "Shout!" by Tears for Fears.
11:33 Speaker 06 And you can hear it pretty much throughout.
11:45 Speaker 05 Okay, so we have some sounds to play with, but we are far from it being a proper song. For that, we need to learn about another part of the Fairlight's technology.
11:56 Speaker 04 Fairlight Computer Music Instrument, Disc 2, Page R Sequencer.
12:03 Speaker 05 What's a music sequencer? Well, traditionally, compositions were written down on paper. That sheet music was then given to musicians to play. But the Fairlight's computer could do all that for you. The Fairlight could play itself. Co-founder Peter Vogel explains how the sequencer, named Page R, works.
12:25 Speaker 00 The R stood for rhythm. And the idea was that Page R would be where you just put in the name of the note and how long you wanted to play it for. And then the next note and how long you wanted to play for. And then you could loop around inside that. And you could play several of these at the same time and so on.
12:46 Speaker 05 This classical sounding piece, that's all being played by the Fairlight sequencer, taken from one of the demo discs used to show it off to musicians.
12:56 Speaker 00 Well, this was the first time that musicians could compose music without having to learn the instrument. So if someone wanted to write a piece that required a number of different instruments or an orchestral piece or something, they could sit down, write the whole thing in, and then have the machine play it for them. It was like owning their own orchestra.
13:20 Speaker 05 Back to our Fairlight composition. We have the sounds from the library and, as we've just heard, the machine can play the instrument for us. Some drums.
13:32 Speaker 05 A little of the Sarah voice effect.
13:39 Speaker 05 Keys.
13:44 Speaker 05 And we're starting to get somewhere.
13:47 Speaker 05 Once programmed, the Fairlight was always in tune. Always kept perfect musical time. And it was never late, never needed a break, and never complained. It didn't sound as good as a real band, but it did have a sort of unique quality. For record producers always chasing the next hit, this combination was irresistible.
14:13 Speaker 05 You have a guy playing a bass guitar. It's not necessary that he plays the bass guitar. We can, we can basically, we can do anything with sound. You do anything with sound? Yes, we can do anything with sound. We can do anything. We can do anything with. With sound, with sound, with sound. Yes, yes, yes. That's Trevor Horn. In the 1980s, the Fairlight was the engine room of his studio. He used it for his bands, Yes and Art of Noise. And when he produced records for Grace Jones, Spandau Ballet, and The Pet Shop Boys.
14:49 Speaker 00 And in fact, you know, a lot of his compositions are actually based around the Fairlight.
15:05 Speaker 00 And if you listen to any of the records, especially coming up from Britain in the mid 80s, you can actually hear, you know, the sound. It's a bit clunky by today's standards.
15:18 Speaker 05 Peter Wilk used to work at the Fairlight Company as an engineer. He's showing me how producers like Trevor Horn used the Fairlight sequencer.
15:26 Speaker 00 If you knew you had a particularly, you know, fantastic drum sound or a great vocal sample, you know, you could just use it again. So for example, you could sample a vocal take.
15:42 Speaker 00 That, of course, is Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes to Hollywood. You could do some choruses like that or some ad-libs or whatever. Put them in the Fairlight and then get them to trigger at the point that you needed them to sound.
15:58 Speaker 00 If you think of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, they have a very distinctive sound. It's got a rhythmic pulse.
16:08 Speaker 05 Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was a huge hit. But this is not how it sounded to begin with. It actually sounded like this.
16:26 Speaker 05 Producer Trevor Horn wasn't happy. At the 11th hour, while the band wasn't even in the studio, he used the Fairlight to completely change the song.
16:37 Speaker 05 It took care of the bassline.
16:40 Speaker 05 He used the Page R computer sequencer to trigger drum sounds
16:47 Speaker 05 and play other synthesizers he had in the studio.
16:58 Speaker 05 And the result was an 80s anthem.
17:04 Speaker 05 There's one more part of the Fairlight we need to learn about, one that could put the finishing touches on the production of our Fairlight song.
17:12 Speaker 04 Fairlight Computer Music Instrument, Disc 3, Sampler.
17:16 Speaker 05 Remember that second of Stravinsky that we heard earlier? The Orc 2?
17:22 Speaker 05 That was one of the first samples ever taken from another record, and it came as standard with every Fairlight sound library.
17:30 Speaker 05 It was created using the Fairlight's inbuilt digital sampler, the first of its kind anywhere. Why is this important?
17:42 Speaker 05 Take this track from James Brown. Funky drummer.
17:48 Speaker 05 That drum hook.
17:51 Speaker 05 Has been sampled seventeen hundred times. That means it's on seventeen hundred different records. And that's just one sample.
18:03 Speaker 05 James Brown's back catalogue has been sampled more than fourteen thousand times and counting.
18:12 Speaker 05 Making him the most sampled artist of all time. The Fairlight may not have been the digital sampler that was used on all those records, but it was the first one ever created.
18:25 Speaker 06 The lineage of those sounds can be traced back to the Fairlight CMI. When we're producing music today,
18:36 Speaker 06 we're using samples to build or to compose a song all the time.
18:44 Speaker 06 So for example, the art of noise in Close to the Edit, there is a small sample of a girl just singing "Hey".
18:55 Speaker 06 And that sample was used by the prodigy's firestarter.
19:05 Speaker 05 Almost every hip-hop record ever made uses sampling.
19:15 Speaker 06 So it's not about that if the Fairlight didn't exist, it would have made the 80s sound different. It would have made all of contemporary electronic music sound different. Potentially nonexistent.
19:33 Speaker 05 But the Fairlight's inventors never intended for the instrument's sampling capability to forever alter the music industry.
19:40 Speaker 00 Because sampling hadn't existed before, no one had turned their minds as to who might own the copyright in a quarter of a second sample out of a whole album. But it certainly became the whole phenomenon of sampling that we know in this century. We had our customers sending us sounds that they'd sampled, and we included them in the sound library as well. It was pretty much anything that sounded interesting, we threw it in there.
20:15 Speaker 00 We thin the size. People like Peter Gabriel, he would go out recording sounds in junkyards, smashing TV screens and things like that. TV smash. Take one, one, two, three, four.
20:36 Speaker 00 I think we did it. And he would just let us have those samples. He would just give us his own sound library and let us distribute it to all our users.
20:45 Speaker 05 Fairlight engineer Peter Wilk steps us through how the sampler works.
20:50 Speaker 00 You could literally just stick a microphone to the back and, you know, say,
20:57 Speaker 00 immediately come back on the keyboard.
21:00 Speaker 00 And you could play that polyphonically.
21:04 Speaker 00 You know, within, you know, like one minute.
21:10 Speaker 00 You could, you could see the capabilities of the sampling. Latterly, you know, especially when the later model came out in 1985, where one could sample for much longer, people then started to use them in different ways. By that time, one could actually sample in, say, a whole line or a whole breakbeat or, you know, like a whole vocal line that might be 30 seconds long.
21:35 Speaker 00 Him and Peter, they actually thought this was cheating. And yet it became arguably the sort of like the biggest seller of the entire system.
21:46 Speaker 06 Some of the first recordings that were made with the Fairlight were of artists breaking things and smashing stuff up. A classic example of one of those is the great
22:00 Speaker 06 glass smash that's about two minutes in on Kate Bush's Babushka.
22:08 Speaker 05 So far, we've built in the drums, main chords,
22:14 Speaker 05 and a keyboard melody into our Fairlight track.
22:18 Speaker 05 Now let's use the Fairlight sampler to add in some vocal elements. Here's a choir on backing vocals.
22:26 Speaker 05 And this vocal sample.
22:31 Speaker 05 We're not quite off to the Grammys yet, but not bad for a 40-year-old synthesizer.
22:39 Speaker 05 And we'll put our track to use in a minute.
22:43 Speaker 05 As the 80s went on, music made using the Fairlight was everywhere.
22:47 Speaker 06 It soundtrack a generation of music.
22:52 Speaker 04 If you were in the UK or Europe,
22:57 Speaker 04 if you were in Australia,
23:00 Speaker 04 or if you were in the United States in the 80s, you would have turned on mainstream radio and heard the Fairlight within five minutes.
23:14 Speaker 05 But later models were as much as $100,000. So if you'd forked out all that money for your Fairlight, you had to sell a lot of records to pay it off.
23:23 Speaker 06 Combined record sales of albums that featured the Fairlight's CMI would run into the hundreds of millions.
23:32 Speaker 05 So with all this success, Kim and Peter must have been having a great time, lapping up all that fame and all that fortune. No, really never, because it was always just such a drama trying to keep things going.
23:48 Speaker 05 It's, you know, it's just, I mean, it sounds like fun and it was fun, but it was also pretty stressful for Peter and I. You know, you've got 100 mouths to feed every month. And in those days, there was no internet. So if we've got to get a new software release to a guy over on tour somewhere, for instance, Jean-Michel Jarre bought one. We would be using a modem on a telephone transmitting at 9,600 bits per second.
24:20 Speaker 05 So it would take hours. And if it dropped out at any point, which was very likely to happen, you had to start again. There was, it was like an absolute nightmare.
24:32 Speaker 05 And by the late 1980s, larger manufacturers had caught up to the Fairlight.
24:37 Speaker 06 You had Emu's emulator, the emulator 2.
24:42 Speaker 06 Yamaha had released their DX7, the new corgs were coming out. These all contained amazing sounding pre-programmed samples at a tenth of the price of a Fairlight CMI. And so it put the Fairlight out of business very quickly, almost as quickly as it came into business.
25:06 Speaker 05 And the financial landscape changed too. That's what, you know, caused the problem when the recession hit in 88 because we just didn't have, you know, emergency funds to carry us through that.
25:21 Speaker 06 Peter and I were both, neither of us were that interested in making money. It was just never on the agenda, which is really a bad thing if you're trying to run a business. I think the fact that not many people know about the Fairlight and not know of its existence is a reflection on how the Fairlight was prohibitively expensive. And so that confined its use to very few, very wealthy, very commercially successful recording artists. And so it's not really surprising that the Fairlight isn't a household name.
25:59 Speaker 05 But the original Fairlight instrument is making a comeback.
26:03 Speaker 00 They are so popular, they literally fly out the door. And in fact, I only half jokingly say I could sell one of them every week.
26:10 Speaker 05 Today, Peter Wilk restores Fairlights and sells them to people all over the world.
26:15 Speaker 00 I've always seen how wonderful these machines are and how loved they are. And so there was, there's always a fondness there. The Fairlight's on a journey, you know, it's come this far. Some of them are 40 years old now. And hopefully after being restored, you know, they'll have another few decades of life.
26:33 Speaker 05 Peter and Kim were never driven by fame or that fussed by fortune. Their fascination was with the technology, the engineering. That's what made them dismantle clocks and radios as kids and it's what brought them together to create the Fairlights.
26:49 Speaker 05 Here seems like a good spot to put our song in. So how do they feel about what they achieved? What do they see as their legacy? My neighbour here came over one day with a Peter Gabriel album in his hand. And he said, hey, Peter, you've been involved in electronic music, haven't you? And I said, yes. And he said, well, here's a coincidence. There's some guy, another guy called Peter Vogel, who's got a credit on this record. And I just said, oh, that is a coincidence, isn't it?
27:26 Speaker 05 So I think that it left its fingerprint on the musical history of the eighties that may not have happened if it weren't for us. But I'll leave that to others to judge.
27:41 Speaker 03 I really wish every time someone went to play on a keyboard, they'd say, oh, I'm just going to go and play on the Fairlight, like you'd call a Hoover a vacuum cleaner.
27:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, no, I don't think we're quite up there.
27:55 Speaker 03 As far as the world is concerned, we're no Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, that's for sure. That's because wealth is a very important part of success in most people's eyes. And that's the bit we didn't quite get right.
28:25 Speaker 03 The Fairlight CMI, the sound you've never heard of, was produced by James Viver. The supervising producer was Michelle Rayner. Sound design and original music was also created by James using, yep, you guessed it, the Fairlight CMI app. The sound engineer was John Jacobs. And this documentary took out the top gong in the music category of the 2024 Pre-Italia Audio Competition. This has been Rewind, an ABC Radio National production.
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