1962. Telstar by The Tornados.

Okay, even I wasn’t born in 1962. But imagine what this must have sounded like the year before The Beatles released ‘Twist and Shout’ and four long, amazing years before the Fab Four invented the Chemical Brothers’ entire career with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Telstar was the work of eccentric genius Joe Meek, written to mark the start of the space age, named after the first communications satellite to send TV pictures across the Atlantic ocean. I discovered this song as a child, listening to old reel-to-reel tapes of Pick of the Pops that my eldest brother probably recorded. Alan Freeman was introducing it.

1963. Doctor Who theme written by Ron Grainer and performed by Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

What can I say? Delia Derbyshire was a genius. Some of her other work makes the Aphex Twin look pedestrian. She was doing this stuff in the 1960s with tape loops and primitive machines. Respect is overdue.

1972. Popcorn by Hot Butter.

I was five years old when this novelty record was a hit, and I now discover the most famous version by Hot Butter is actually a pretty cheesy cover. The original I now discover was a rather beautiful, gentle thing written and recorded by Gershon Kingsley – he’s an amazing man, amazing life, amazing music. Look him up. Buy his music. Right the wrongs of pop history – I’ve put some of his music in the Spotify playlist.
But I was five, and Hot Butter’s version sounded perky and fun and it sounded like the future – and that’s what we want from electronic music more than anything, right?

1974. Autobahn by Kraftwerk.

I probably haven’t listened to this properly for thirty years. I still don’t, at the time of writing, own a copy. But listen to something like Silver Sands by Stereolab, and then listen to Autobahn thirty-six years earlier, and you can see who the greatest pioneers of modern electronic music are.
I first heard this visiting my eldest brother, played on a beautiful space age plexiglass and chrome turntable, amplified by the huge Fisher quadrophonic tuner-amp which now sits in my kitchen, and then out into the room through Tannoy loudspeakers that were each the size of an up-ended chest freezer.

1976. The Planet Suite by Tomita.

It wasn’t just the Sex Pistols who got banned in the 1976. Japanese composer and analogue synthesizer nut Isao Tomita recorded an electronic version of Holst’s Planet Suite – only to have the Holst estate force the record company RCA to withdraw every damn copy of the thing, which they regarded as disrespectful to the great man’s work. But my brother had somehow got a copy, and when we were done listening to Kraftwerk, we’d put this on.
If you want to know what ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ would sound like actually in space, sung by robots – then this is the record for you. It’s mad, scary, beautiful, dramatic, hilarious. And Tomita’s version of ‘Jupiter’ should be the combined Japanese-English national anthem.

1976. Oxygène part IV by Jean Michel Jarre.

Okay, everyone knows this. It was a hit single. Unlike any of the previous pieces of music I’ve mentioned, I actually owned the album, and played it to death on my parents’ Sanyo music centre, Sennheiser HD414 headphones clamped to my head. Lost in music. Caught in a trap. There was no turning back. I was lost in synths.

1977. I Feel Love by Donna Summer & Giorgio Moroder.

I almost forgot this, and I’m ashamed to say that it was only Donna Summer’s recent death that reminded me of it. I remember hearing Tom Browne introducing this on a Sunday night on what was then the Top Twenty, on Radios 1 AND 2. This didn’t just sound like the future, this sounded like nothing I had ever heard or imagined. It was fast, incessant, and I entered a trance-like state when I heard it. It was long – but somehow not long enough. And it still sounds as amazing today as it did when I was ten years old. Donna Summer’s soaring vocals perfectly counterpoint the mechanical bassline and beat. A perfect pop record. And a dance record.

1979. The Long March by Vangelis.

Vangelis is probably best remembered for his music for the film Chariots of Fire, but this tune has haunted me for years. Someone used to play it almost every day very early on Radio 2 – whoever had the pre-breakfast show gig back in 1979. I remember lying on my parents bed, listening to this haunting sad tune marching out of a small white plastic clock radio which had an LCD display. LCDs were cool in 1979. You could say this was the first LCD soundsystem. (I’ll get me coat).
It’s been bugging me for years trying to work out what this tune was, still stuck in my head. I was pretty sure it was Vangelis, but I couldn’t locate the track. Then today I typed ‘Vangelis march’ into Google and found a (frankly horrible) vocal version on YouTube that was the B-side of the single. I feel bad saying I hate the vocal version – it’s London primary school children singing to raise money for UNICEF. But they ruined a beautiful tune. And the reason I could never find it until today – everyone (Amazon, iTunes, Spotify) has the tune wrongly listed as being called ‘Chung Kuo’ – so if you want to download it, it’s ‘Chung Kuo’ you need to buy – and the iTunes sample is useless as the melody starts 1 minute and 43 seconds into the track.

1979. Reproduction by The Human League.

I’d like to pretend that this was what I was listening to in 1979, but I discovered this album a few years later, by working backwards through the Heaven 17 catalogue. On their first two albums the Human League actually were Heaven 17 only with Phil Oakey on vocals instead of Glenn Gregory. When the band split and Phil Oakey left the guys who wrote the music to form Heaven 17, the smart money was on Heaven 17 having all the hits. Whoops.
I’m not sure I will ever be able to explain why, but this is absolutely my favourite album in the whole history of recorded music. I like it more than Revolver by the Beatles. I prefer it to Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. It’s even better than Twenty Wombling Greats. (Incidentally that was the second album I ever bought. Sgt Pepper was my first). All I can say is that it sounded like nothing recorded before, or since (and with good reason, I hear you cry). It’s medieval, almost. It’s mournful. It’s sixth form poetry. One song turns into a cover of the Righteous Brothers’ 1965 hit ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’. It’s a work of genius.

1980. Messages by OMD.

I never owned this until a few weeks ago, when Radcliffe & Maconie played it on 6music, I remembered this haunting tune and downloaded it on the spot. I don’t much care for OMD, but this is a genius bit of songwriting. Of course it’s also possible my addled brain was confusing it with…

1981. Lawn Chairs by Our Daughter’s Wedding.

Yes, the opening does sound exactly like Messages by OMD, doesn’t it? Our Daughters Wedding were American and sank without trace. I was on holiday, stuck on my own in a crappy hotel room in some godforsaken seaside resort and heard this on an evening local radio show and I taped it. Yes, that’s how sad I was: aged 14 I took my Philips cassette recorder and Panasonic portable radio on holiday with me. I played this song back incessantly, playing air keyboard. So kill me.

1981. New Life by Depeche Mode.

What is Depeche Mode without Vince Clarke? Like the Beatles without Lennon and McCartney, that’s what. I taped this off what was by now the Top 40. Lots of air synth in my bedroom to this. Perfect pop – and genius songwriting. As OMD’s Andy McCluskey once pointed out, the machines don’t write hits. You still need to do that yourself.

1982. Six Simple Synthesizers by Man Parrish.

Oh I love this song so much. It was pretty much the only music my first girlfriend and I had in common. She liked Supertramp and Genesis and I was all into The Smiths, Lloyd Cole and New Order. I can’t even remember how or when I discovered this album (it would have been in around 1985), but it’s lyrically and musically a perfect bit of synthpop. Man Parrish is another neglected genius of synth.
One large computer putting out a pulse
It can play Stavinsky, Brahms or Bach or Holst
…and eight little faders help you mix it down.

1999. Spare Parts Express by Orbital.

Bit of a jump in time. Was there no synthpop between 1982 and 1999? Not for me there wasn’t. I went all indie and NME C86. Acid House passed me by, I could see the appeal in 808 State, but none of it really meant anything to me. Until Orbital. There was something about Orbital. I can still remember the utter joy when I heard Spare Parts Express for the first time, hearing sounds and half-recognising them, and then realising where they were from: the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s original theme tune to John Craven’s Newsround. The Hartnoll brothers would later pull a similar trick with their cover of the Doctor Who theme – I still think the BBC should have used Orbital’s version over Murray Gold’s (he dropped the middle eight, FFS). For one thing, it was truer to the original.

2012. Genesis by Grimes.

I know nothing about Grimes. The artwork for the album is horrible. But the synths and the voice – a great combination. I love this song. First time I thought it, I thought ‘there’s someone keeping the flame of synthpop alive, and kicking it on a bit into something new’.

2012. Night & Day by Hot Chip.

Seeing Hot Chip perform this on Later with Jools Holland is what got me started on this essay in the first place, trying to explain to a friend and myself quite why certain synth sounds affect me on such a fundamentally low level, why I can spend hours noodling with the free ARP Odyssey plugins I found for GarageBand – when really, truly, I like folk music as much as I like anything.
Hot Chip had always left me cold, but I had to watch this over and over, just like when I taped ‘Lawn Chairs’ when I was 14 and played it to death. Who would have thought they would be so good live? I have got to see them live. Which is a very un-synthpop thing.

My boys made a cool Lego case for the Raspberry Pi – it has holes for the USB, HDMI, ethernet and power leads – and the coolest rotating Raspberry Pi logo on top. It’s not perfect but it does the job and was built with scant resources and negotiation with little sister to get some plates out of her house that she had made.

On day 7 I discovered that to get the audio to work you need to type
sudo modprobe snd_bcm2835
at the command line before running startx. You seem to need to do this every time you start the RasPi up. Odd.

I installed VLC and played an MP3 (‘My First Love’ by The Paper Aeroplanes, of course) and even played a simple bit of video. Sound came out of the TV via HMDI and while not CD quality, it was just fine.

Green Con was where the main World Service English language network was put on air. The announcer sat on this side, and the Studio Manager sat on the other side of the glass on the right (now a TV studio) with an identical desk and they put live studios on air and played out pre-recorded programmes on tape. I used to love doing Green con. I was being paid to listen to the radio, something I did anyway. Then they got rid of the SM and the announcers played tapes and CDs and digital things themselves. And then they got rid of the announcers and it was all automated, just like the Human League predicted in 1980 in their song WXJL Tonight.

All the networks had colours, and when they ran out of colours they had ‘bars’ added, so there was ‘brown’ (Arabic) and ‘brown bars’ (I forget what that was). Green was English. They then ran out of colours again and went for textures, so there was ‘velvet bars’. (I may have made that last one up.)

I saw this one coming… I was once the SM sitting on the other side of the glass playing the programme tapes. The announcer was sat here. It was the John Peel Show, the last record was ‘Voodoo Chile’ by Jimi Hendrix. The announcer in question wasn’t quite au fait with any kind of music post-Mozart, and as I suspected he would he do, he back-announced the programme with the immortal words “that was Mr Jimi Hendrix, with Voodoo Chilly.”

Once the pips (GTS – Greenwich Time Signal) failed to appear and the announcer – I think it was Michael Powles – improvised by hitting the lamp with his pen in time with the pips. Genius.

It’s nice when it stops.

On day 5 I realised that although I had a 4GB SD card, I was only using 2GB of it, as I wrote a 2GB disk image to it. I made a live CD of Gparted which I booted a laptop from, and used that to make my EXT4 Linux partition on my RasPi SD card as big as possible, Works a treat and I now have 2.2GB free disk space – which suggests I only had 0.2 GB free before. No wonder it fell over when I started installing more software!

I’m back up and running now. And itching to try putting XBMC on a RasPi to make a very cheap media centre – I could have one in the back of every TV.

I’ve realised the version of Raspberry Pi Debian Squeeze I’d been using was out-of-date. There are two problems with the Mac OS X script for making RasPi SD cards called RasPiWrite:

• It downloads out-of-date images (certainly for Debian)
• There’s a bug in it which means that the option to use your own disk image you’ve downloaded doesn’t work. I wasted ages on this before I twigged.

I even tried editing the Python script of RasPiWrite to force it to use a current image, but I couldn’t get it to work.

So, if you have a Mac as far as I can see, at the moment you have 2 options to make your RasPi SD card:

• Use the slightly scary command line instructions here: http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup
  You need to be really careful with this though, because if you type the wrong thing in you can wipe your hard drive. Oopsy. And beware that ‘/dev/disk1s1 => /dev/rdisk1′ isn’t something you type, it’s something you work out in your head.
  
• Use a Windows box.

I did the former (on my second-best Mac), and it worked. My terminal session looked something like this:

Giles-Booths-IdeaPad:~ gilesbooth$ diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s1
Volume NO NAME on disk1s1 unmounted
Giles-Booths-IdeaPad:~ gilesbooth$ dd bs=1m if=~/Downloads/debian6-19-04-2012/debian6-19-04-2012.img of=/dev/rdisk1
dd: /dev/rdisk1: Invalid argument
1859+1 records in
1859+0 records out
1949302784 bytes transferred in 321.937141 secs (6054917 bytes/sec)
Giles-Booths-IdeaPad:~ gilesbooth$ diskutil eject /dev/rdisk1
Disk /dev/rdisk1 ejected

Your command will almost certainly be different, so don’t cut and paste this! It takes quite a while to write to the card, so don’t worry if it looks like nothing is happening, and that error message didn’t seem to cause any problems.

My new card booted ok after a while – lo! I have RaspberryPi wallpaper and programming tools, education tools like Scratch, though the screen is in a weird 1824 x 984 resolution on my TV (which doesn’t fill the screen), rather than the better 1920 x 1080 which I’d had before. And you still have to create a root password using ‘sudo passwd root’ in the terminal before you can install any applications using Aptitude.

I’ve been mulling over some possible uses for my RasPi:

• It would make an awesome partner to my Arduino.
• It could be left on all the time displaying my Google calendar for the day or week plus the time of my next train on a TV’s AV or HDMI input.
• Driving a display at work with relevant tweets or headines.

Installing software in Linux is always a bit of a minefield – it’s easy to get into ‘dependency hell’. Almost all software packages rely on other software packages to be installed before they will run, so you need to use a tool that will handle all this dependency stuff for you. My understanding is that Debian Linux (on which fluffy Ubuntu is based) is pretty good on this score.

The default Debian Squeeze RasPi distro comes with Aptitude for doing this. It’s not exactly a fluffy Synaptic-like experience; it’s a terminal-like thing running in a window, but at least it has menus so you’re not left at the mercy of a blank, accusing command line.

I thought I’d try installing the Photoshop-like image editing software Gimp as my first app. I started up Aptitude, managed to locate the Gimp package (itself no mean feat), selected it for installation and hit ‘g’ to install the packages. No luck. I needed to be logged in as root. The root account is the uber-low level admin account that has rights over everything on a Linux system.

Aptitude lets you ‘go root’ – but it wouldn’t take either of the passwords I could think of. Not ‘suse’ which I used to log in in the first place, nor ‘raspberry’.

Bit of googling revealed that this flavour of Linux has no root password by default. You need to get a terminal (command line) up and type the following:

sudo passwd root

You can then set a password for the root account, which you can give to Aptitude. And that’s how I installed Gimp.

Gimp is very slow – drawing is hilarious. My eldest son drew a wiggly line with a mouse and we watched it try to catch up for a good minute after he stopped moving it. But it works and it does screenshots.

My next objective is to work out how the hell I can download my own photos from Flickr. The bundled Midori web-browser seems to choke on the script on most modern Flickr pages (like the Lightbox) and I can’t find a simple ‘download this image’ on a plain page.

Oh, and I’d like a Twitter client. I’ve heard of one called Turpial but I can’t find it listed in Aptiude. Which will, I suspect, lead me into some editing of config files to get Aptitude to look at software packages other than the default rock-solid, up-to-date, free ones.

Today it arrived, and I had almost forgotten why I wanted it in the first place. Here are a few initial reactions and observations:

• A Kindle charger makes a perfect power supply. You need something with a micro USB plug. Mini USB won’t work.



• It’s a very long way from being a finished product – certainly not for the ‘consumer’ and probably not for an education market yet either.
• It’s not for the faint-hearted. At the moment I’d say not to get one unless you have at least some experience of Linux. I have a bit of Linux experience and it took me half a day to get it working.
• Wired (ethernet) internet is very handy, assuming you have the model B. The RasPi has no internal clock, for one thing, and the internet helps it know what millenium it is.
• Making the SD card with the operating system is a bit of a pig if, like me, you only have Macs and WindowsXP – most of the tools seem to be written for Windows7 and Linux.
• If you have a Mac, use RasPiWrite from www.exaviorn.com to make your SD card OS. A 4 GB one seemed big enough. [SEE NEW WARNING IN COMMENTS BELOW]



• DO NOT (at the time of writing) INSTALL FEDORA REMIX AS YOUR OS. I wasted hours on this. It was buggy beyond belief – forced me to change my password to something stupidly complex and then refused to let me log in. I never got past the login screen.
• Install Debian ‘Squeeze’ as your OS instead. This is option 1 in RasPiWrite.
• When you log in at the command line, you need to type startx to get the graphical user interface (windowed desktop) running. This isn’t at all obvious if you’ve never dicked around with Linux before.
• I don’t think sound works on this default distro yet, and there’s not much software with it. There’s a simple web browser and not much else. I easily managed to find MP3 files on my network (on a USB stick in my router) – but the supplied MP3 player couldn’t produce any audio.
• I couldn’t see a simple software / package installer for adding software. This is not Ubuntu. As I say, it’s all a bit hard-core nerdy Linux stuff. There is Python and possibly some other tools for programming but nothing terribly friendly-looking.
• It’s quite slow – but nowhere near as slow as I’d expect a $25 computer to be, and it was driving a 1920 x 1080 display!



• It’s still very early days for Raspberry Pi. Once people start making packages with more fluffy OSs (and perhaps even selling ready-made SD cards tailored to particular uses) this tiny computer will really start to change the world.

Issue 3 of Télégramme magazine is out now. It’s a stunning piece of work by my friend Sarah Hill.

It’s about photography and art, there are articles and interviews, but mostly the pictures just speak for themselves.

The layout is beautiful, and the pictures are amazing, and you can read it for free on your computer. Dive in!

• A pretty detailed electronics primer using the Arduino from a very cool woman called Limor Fried: http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/index.html
  
• The Arduino Programming Notebook by Brian W Evans:
  http://arduino.cc/playground/uploads/Main/arduino_notebook_v1-1.pdf
  This is an excellent primer on the Arduino’s programming language but also contains very simple circuits so you can get your code to do something in the real world.

Today I managed to control the brightness of an LED with a flex sensor.