Telex

It must be Music Nostalgia Week here (or maybe Midlife Crisis Week) because I feel like posting clip after clip of songs from my youth! I'll restrain myself and drip feed you the fabulousness, because you know, too much of a good thing and all that.

Pop quiz, who remembers Telex machines? Anyone?

This pic is not quite right, but the closest I could find to the sort of machine I used way back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

I actually operated one of these precursors to email many years ago. They were typewriter style contraptions that were larger than a sedan, but smaller than a stationwagon. Ideal for a family of four!

The pic above is not quite right, because the machine I operated had a punch tape on the side. You see, the telex machine sent plain text down a telephone line to a matching machine at the other end. Like magic. You could type and send in real time or (my favourite bit) type your message onto a punched ticker tape that could be spliced to edit (no, really - with scissors and sticky tape, and everything) and then run through the reader to send a faster (and neater if you are a crapola typist like me) message down the line.

Anyhoo, wow exposition! So. When telex machines were brand spanking new there was a French electronica group that came out, calling themselves Telex. (Imagine a group calling themselves Email, or IM, these days.) I loved them unreservedly because their simple, repetitive synth tracks sounded like the future. They were mildly successful in OZ, but not so successful that loving them made me feel more mainstream that cutting edge.

Here's their biggest hit, "Twist A Saint Tropez", Telex. 1978.:

What I didn't realise is that they were responsible for a hideously bad 1980 Eurovision entry! Brace yourselves:

Makes you want to scrub your ears, right? Sorry about that.