John L Walters, songwriter, electronics, Lyricon
We had been this cult and edgy instrumental jazz-punk-indie band that no one would sign. The nicest rejection letter I got was from Quincy Jones: “Great horns, great arrangements, pass owing to time commitments.” I’d started the band as a nine-piece to play my own music, which wasn’t very economically viable. We got it down to five and decided we’d try to make the band sound as big as possible using electronics.
We were very conscious of the way technology was changing everything. Einstein a Go-Go was one of my first attempts at writing a tune to be played on a Lyricon – an electronic wind instrument that has a six-octave range. We actually demonstrated it on Tomorrow’s World. For Einstein a Go-Go, I programmed a simple drumbeat on a Dr Rhythm drum machine, then came up with the hook based on the jazz tunes I used to write in school.
We’d always been instrumental, but I’d met Ian Dury on the pub circuit and been really inspired by the way he combined a big band with spoken-word lyrics, which had taken him from a cult act to No 1. My initial concept for the song was a joke based on the fact that Einstein played violin: “Don’t you know anything about time, Albert?” I’d read his biography and was also thinking about his famous quote that “God does not play dice” with the universe. But when I took the tune to Richard he said: “No, let’s make it about someone who idolises Einstein but is actually a nuclear terrorist.”
The phone calls in the intro are genuine ones to the Kremlin and the White House. When we asked “Can we speak to President Carter?” they played for time so they could trace the call. Then we called the Iranian embassy: “Can we speak to the Ayatollah?” If you did all that today they’d send a Swat team, but we had a sign in the studio reading “No compromise”. We felt that the record company was going to drop us anyway so we might as well go for it.
Richard James Burgess, songwriter, vocals, electronics
I knew there was no way we’d have success with another instrumental album, but we also felt that bringing in a singer with a big ego could upset the chemistry and friendships we’d built up while doing over 200 gigs a year. So we decided to do it ourselves. I’d written lyrics in bands since my teens, so I ended up on vocals. The hot topic at the time was how the UK would have five minutes’ warning if the Soviet Union launched an intercontinental ballistic missile. We bounced that idea around and came up with a more cartoon Einstein reference: “Albert says that E = MC squared.”
Superficially it’s a jokey, nothing song but it’s actually about the very scary subject of religious fundamentalism. Hence the line “Bible says we must pay. I am the judge for the judgment day.” We’d been out to Peter Gabriel’s place in Bath to borrow his Fairlight [synthesiser and sampler] and he’d played us his new song, Intruder. I was really struck by its idea of a malevolent presence, and made our song about a fundamentalist terrorist.
We did all the pre-production in my house in Camberwell, then went into a proper studio to do vocals, guitar overdubs and such. Programming everything on a Roland MicroComposer was a very laborious process and if there was a power cut you lost everything.
I’d been going to the Blitz club and realised the New Romantic scene was developing. After I played our stuff to Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, he asked me to produce them, and I think the wind behind Spandau helped us. Also, the video was critically important to Einstein a Go-Go becoming a hit. We used dancers from [dance troupe] Shock, drums that looked like human faces and we had [trombonist] Pete Thoms’ disembodied head saying “Einstein a Go-Go.”
The record stalled at No 32, but having played drums on Top of the Pops before with the Buggles, I knew that whenever a booked live act got stuck in fog at the airport, the BBC would more than likely replace them with a video. I told our manager to get down there with the video and that’s exactly what happened, which helped the song into the Top 5. Einstein a Go-Go always felt a bit ahead of its time. We actually held it back for a few months because we felt it would get more attention in 1981 than 1980.
Landscape a Go-Go (The Story of Landscape 1977-83) is out on 21 July
