The Future - We Are The Future (1977)

There's a bit of a theme running through these last two posts, as both bands formed in Sheffield in the late 70's, and both played predominantly electronic instrumental music, but there the similarities end, as The Future went for a clean, dance-based sound while Cabaret Voltaire made their music as challenging and uncompromising as possible. As I mentioned in the Human League post, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh formed The Future in 1977 with their friend Adi Newton, who brought his Roland System-100 synthesizer with him to supplement Ware and Marsh's Korg 700s, and they started writing and recording music in their own rehearsal facility in a disused cutlery workshop in the centre of Sheffield. Newton left after a short stint with the band to form Clock DVA, another highly influential Sheffield outfit, and the other two members then recruited Phil Oakey as a vocalist, to try to give them a more commercial sound. Some of these tracks have recently surfaced on a joint archive CD together with songs by The Human League, so I've extracted them and added in a number of other tracks which weren't on the CD to make up a 40 minute album. These include 'Dancevision', which appeared on the double 7" version of the Human League single 'Holiday '80', and was actually credited to The Future on the labels, as well as a radically different version of 'Almost Medieval', which was the opening track on their debut album as The Human League. Most of these tracks were ditched along the way, and so it's great that these recordings have been kept safe for the past 40 years, so that we can hear the fledgling sound of a band who would go on to define electronic music in the 1980's. 

Track listing

01 Blank Clocks 
02 Looking For The Black Haired Girls
03 Cairo
04 Dancevision
05 Titled UN
06 C'est Grave
07 Future Religion
08 Almost Medieval
09 Dada Dada Duchamp Vortex 
10 Daz  
11 Pulse Lovers