Digital 60

It was filmed for the 50th anniversary of 'Baby' and in it, the late great music impresario claims that it was the Manchester music legends, New Order, who first saw the potential of computer produced music, though he said their reasons may not have been totally artistic.

"In a sense, the beginning of digital music in pop music… was actually New Order, one of my bands, who began with very early Apple Macs.

"I used to go to their rehearsal room in 80, 81, 82. And they had very early Macs and wires joined to different pieces… They developed a song which the machines could play, so they could go off stage and leave everybody… bored and bemused by a track that would go on playing. This is a song that was called Blue Monday.

The 'Baby'

"That song is seen as being the dawn of digital music and computer generated music in Britain."

The first computer tune

Of course, whether New Order were the first to actually use computers to make commercial music is up for debate – they were certainly pioneers, but bands like Kraftwerk also have a claim to the title – but regardless, Wilson goes on to say that he is sure that Manchester did make "the first ever computer generated music", though it wasn’t by any of the groups one might think of – in fact it happened all the way back in 1951!

"Alan Turing, the great philosopher who'd invented the idea of the computer... did his own things with the computer in Manchester, but sent a letter to all his friends saying, 'This is the great computer they’ve got here. If any of you want to write a programme to use it, please do.'

"He puts the punch card in this machine and it plays God Save The Queen… He'd looked at Turing’s specification of the Manchester machine, seen a hoot instruction and figured out that if you actually changed some of the parameters you could make the machine play music."

So Tony’s claim that Manchester invented digital music might have seemed like a big one but it turns out that it is probably true, even if it did take 32 years for the city’s musicians to really get to grips with the potential of what Turing, Scratchey and the team behind 'Baby' had begun!