VIA PRESS RELEASE | Telex has announced details of a vinyl box set, collating the long awaited remastered reissues of their six studio albums, Looking for Saint-Tropez (1979), Neurovision (1980), Sex (1981), Wonderful World (1984), Looney Tunes (1988), and How Do You Dance? (2006). Remastered and newly mixed from the original tapes by Dan Lacksman and Michel Moers, Telex will be out on limited edition vinyl box set, CD box set, and digitally on Mute on March 3, 2023.
The Belgian synthpop trio—Marc Moulin (1942–2008), Dan Lacksman, and Michel Moers—launched in Brussels in 1978 and, as one of only a handful of synthpop pioneers at the time, helped bring electronic pop to the mainstream. Telex skillfully used cover versions to deliberately play up the disparity between their ice-cool electronic approach and the sweaty, fleshy, frenetic passion of pop, demonstrated here on the opening track for a digital EP to launch the box set. Their take of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around The Clock” from the debut album, in which, so to speak, all of the rock is removed leaving nothing but the clock; a ticking, vocoderised, supremely deadpan robot parody of the original that the band performed on Top of the Pops in 1979. “Buster Keaton was our idol,” explains Moers, and it shows.
The follow up album, Neurovision, includes the track “Euro-vision” which was famously entered into the Eurovision Song Contest, representing Belgium. Moers says he regarded their entry as “very Situationist International, the worm in the apple.” And they resolved either to come first or last. They didn’t achieve that goal, but became part of the Eurovision saga.
For 1981’s Sex, the trio teamed up with Sparks, a match made in heaven given both band’s determination to make electronic pop music suffused with conceptual wit. They got along tremendously, Ron & Russell Mael staying on in Brussels far longer than they’d originally intended, and Sparks contributed lyrics for the entire album.
Wonderful World followed in 1984, and the title track included here on the EP shows a band continuing to push a state-of-the art sound. 1988’s Looney Tunes, featuring the Dadaist cut-up “rap” of “Peanuts,” resulted in Motown Records among those vying to sign them. “It would have been great to have been the second white band on Tamla Motown. Iron Butterfly were the first,” says Lacksman.
That wasn’t to be, though, and the band instead worked on projects outside of Telex until 2006’s How Do You Dance?, an album that proves that Telex remained not only true to themselves but had grown with the new developments in musical software. Telex announced their retirement in 2008, following Moulin’s death, and in 2021 began a new partnership with Mute beginning with the release of This Is Telex, featuring two unreleased tracks.
The vinyl Telex box set is released by Mute, and includes a 12-page booklet and audio download code. The CD version comes in a clamshell box and includes a 20-page stitched booklet.
