Somewhere in Sheffield it is 1981. Devo and OMD are fighting over the pick and mix in Woolworths. Shopkeeper is playing Pac-Man while swigging Tizer. It’s raining. Everyone has to be home for tea.
I Swallowed a Synthesizer is the latest offering from Shopkeeper, the alter ego of The Voltz frontman Richie. It ploughs a path less furrowed in the modern age: all eight-bit energy, synth drums and eccentric lyrics. It wanders into view like a half-remembered transmission from post-punk subversives Crawling Chaos (look them up). Burbling beats and vocoder vocals hang together like Erasure in a blender, but with considerably less cheese.
But this isn’t quite nostalgia. It’s a view back on those times from the days-of-future-past, when the future still seemed like somewhere worth going. Seen from the hilltop of the present, the past looks suspiciously like a haven: summer evenings stretched on forever, the world seemed bigger, and the Radio 1 Top 40 rundown was the most important couple of hours of the week. Now these sounds come bursting out of the future that never happened, swirl around for three minutes, then disappear beneath the weight of history.
‘I Swallowed a Synthesizer’ is an anthem for a simpler time, before social media and algorithms started telling everyone what they ought to listen to. When being alternative wasn’t a category in a drop-down menu but a question of how hard you kicked against the grain.
Because if you’re going to call yourself alternative, you’d better come with receipts showing exactly what you’re the alternative to.
I Swallowed A Synthesizer is out now on all streaming platforms.
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