The Fairlight, inspiration from afar to a generation of electronic musicians, was, once you got one in front of you, a load of old tosh, the electronic equivalent of a kazoo, with all the musicality of a vacuum cleaner. Whatever sound you put in, you got the same nasal honk out, and trying to use it like a normal keyboard was the most frustrating thing I ever did. I thought so the first time I heard/played one and nothing has happened since to change my mind (I am of course referring to the pre-Series III machines; the engineers at Fairlight would have been fools and charlatans indeed if they couldn't have made the Series III sound decent and play well after all the progress that had been made by other companies by the time that machine came out...). I am referring to the pile of junk marketed between 1979 and 1985. And when I say "the first time I heard one", I mean really heard one, on its own, not buried in a production with all the craft of experienced engineers and producers disguising its nasal honk. I still vividly remember Ken McAlpine, a former colleague of SOS Publisher Ian Gilby and myself at Electronics & Music Maker, sneaking me into the demo room at Syco in 1983 to hear a Fairlight naked for the first time. I was horrified. Everything sounded like it was coming through a fuzzbox, and a very cheap and nasty fuzzbox at that! I came away from that evening with a profound sense of loss that the supposed greatest electronic musical instrument was such a turkey (though it increased my admiration for all the musicians and engineers who managed to make it sound so good on their records).
) albums Revolutions en Chronologie (een CMI III).
