In the 1960s and 1970s synthesizers were huge room-size boxes that were awfully complex to use and very expensive. They were mostly played by experimentalists such as Brian Eno and Jean-Michel Jarre as well as prog rockers like Yes or Genesis. But as the 70s came to an end, smaller and cheaper synthesizers were introduced which eventually made purchase possible for everyone. Synthesizers were adopted by some post-punk and new wave artists but at first, they mostly only served as background instruments without taking the main role in the music - synth bands were still underground acts.
But something happened in 1979 that changed everything: Tubeway Army performed a synth pop song "Are 'Friends' Electric?" in Top of the Pops, a TV show that had millions and millions of young watchers in the UK. The song went number one in the UK and its massive success encouraged many new bands to incorporate synthesizers as lead instruments in their songs. Many of the new bands took influence from the glam/art rock scene artists Roxy Music, David Bowie and Marc Bolan while others were more interested in more experimental music such as Suicide and German pioneers Kraftwerk. As a result, by 1981 synth pop was everywhere in the music press and top lists.
As Music Television started transmitting programs in August 1981, music videos quickly became a very important way of marketing artists and their records. Synth pop burst to the mainstream at the right time as many artists had a distinctive and sometimes overblown appearance that was visible everywhere: on album covers, videos, posters, magazines and live tours. For some bands the visual style was even more important than the music. One of the most important visual asset was of course the hairstyle.
Now take a trip 35 years into the past and relive the golden age of the synth pop by finding the coordinates to the cache!
The Hairstyles:
The Videos:
- K: Band members hanging around and clanking metal in a battleship.
- L: A man with dull clothes singing (and dancing weirdly) with a base guitar, sky with clouds as a background.
- M: European decadence, lonely people and white horse walking in streets, blue-and-white video suddenly turns coloured in the middle when people arriving to a party is depicted.
- N: A guy with a white color-striped suit and straw hat sings on a theater stage with actors performing.
- P: Black background, the singer has different makeups during the video, stripes and patterns are painted by finger on his upper body.
- Q: Synth pop song with the cheesiest video?
Add (50*A + 57*B + 74*C + 52*D) modulo 1000 to the latitude and (42*K + 37*L + 43*M + 42*N + 38*P) modulo 1000 to the longitude of the bogus coordinates to find the cache. Ignore the word "the" in calculations. Don't go to the bogus coordinates, there is nothing interesting there unless you like walking in a forest.
The cache has a pen.
If you want to test your ideas, there are two hotspots in the geochecker: #1 - add A to the latitude of the bogus coordinates and leave longitude unchanged; #2 - add K to the longitude to the bogus coordinates and leave latitude unchanged.
Bonus cache: The caches of my three music mysteries contain numeric codes X, Y and Z. You need the values to be able to find the bonus cache. The caches are this one (Y), Prog rock mystery (Z) and Post-punk mystery (X). If you already have found some of these caches but don't have the codes, just ask me and I'll send them to you. (I added the codes to the log books of the caches 10.9.2017.)