Yes, male voices just don’t grab me that much anymore on synth based music because it was done to death back in the day… Jenny: Definitely, yeah, I think female voices always sound better generally on pop and electronic music, I enjoy a lot of rock music, men on that is fine, but the more women, the better as far as I’m concerned! One of the things that struck me most about LADYTRON was girls were singing lead vocals on synthy stuff and it wasn’t a blokey thing anymore… Ricardo: I said to THE CUBAN BOYS’ manager that there was going to be this big synth revival coming but he poo-pooed it and laughed at me… he went on to manage LA ROUX, leaving us in his wake! But what I always hated about them, which was something I hated about all synth acts of the 21st Century is that when THE CUBAN BOYS were kicking around, we tried to get people interested in SPRAY we said to people that there was going to be this big synth revival but nobody listened to us or took us seriously… I was irate that other synth acts made it big in the mid-noughties other than SPRAY, one of them was LA ROUX! *laughs* Ricardo: Of all the modern synth acts that aren’t EDM, LADYTRON seemed to be the most melodic and threw in the most over-the-top production gimmicks and things, people at the time seemed to think themselves too cool to use certain sounds whereas LADYTRON were happy to do what sounded great, that’s what I always liked about them. LADYTRON used MS20s too and started around the same time as SPRAY back in 2000, ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK has always credited them as being the first of the newer wave of synthesizer bands, as opposed to electronic dance acts… I like Neil Arthur’s solo songs as well, I love ‘I Love I Hate’ which is fantastic. I always thought they had a great sense of rhythm and got World music into synthpop in a more authentic way than most people. You can’t imagine them being someone’s favourite band.
Ricardo: I’ve always liked BLANCMANGE without ever being a big fan of them, they’re one of those bands, a bit like CHINA CRISIS. The first card is a Korg MS20, as used by BLANCMANGE on ‘Feel Me’…
Over a game of Vintage Synth Trumps, Ricardo Autobahn and Jenny McLaren chatted to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK about dragging seemingly incongruous songs from yesteryear kicking and screaming into the SPRAY Universe and how electronic acts covering DEPECHE MODE is not a particularly good idea… So far, there have been reinterpretations of THE DETROIT SPINNERS, BLINK182 and KISS as well as ‘Diamond Lights’, the surprise 1987 hit by England footballers Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle! Since the start of 2022, the sister / brother pairing have been releasing a cover version per month to build a new collection of work. SPRAY would not return until 2016’s ‘Enforced Fun’ and since then, they have been regularly releasing albums with the most recent being 2021’s ‘Ambiguous Poems About Death’. It was left to LA ROUX to cash-in on the synthpop revival with a No1 single in ‘Bulletproof’ in 2009 and a Grammy for ‘Best Dance Recording’.
Finding a home at US label Ninthwave Records, just about the only record company in the world at the time interested in anything synthy that even HEAVEN 17 signed to them for the release of ‘Before/After’ in 2005, as it turned out, no-one was interested in either SPRAY or HEAVEN 17. However, their main project was SPRAY, set up to ride on an anticipated resurgence in synthpop with two albums ‘Living In Neon’ and ‘Children Of A Laser God’ issued respectively in 20.
Intelligentsia’ aka ‘The Hamster Dance’ and took on Cliff Richard’s ‘The Millennium Prayer’ in the race to be the 1999 Christmas No1, only to lose… Ricardo Autobahn and Jenny McLaren first terrorised the mainstream as members of THE CUBAN BOYS who topped John Peel’s Festive 50 with ‘Cognoscenti vs. Sibling duo SPRAY continue their adventures in the subversion of pop with their new ‘Untitled Covers Project’.
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