Taking its title from a line in an Ultravox song, Listening To The Music The Machines Make tells the story of synthpop, a largely British phenomenon – from its inspirations, through a focus on its formative years and bands (including big hitters The Human League, Gary Numan, Soft Cell, Japan, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet), to its many subsequent descendants: modern pop, house, techno, rave, industrial and more.

Richard Evans’ thesis in Listening To The Music The Machines Make – such as it is – is that punk cleared a space in which electronic pop could flourish, but that it would have done so anyway, having an alternative lineage that completely bypassed the Sex Pistols and all that: Bowie and Bolan, Brian Eno, Delia Derbyshire and Wendy Carlos, Giorgio Moroder and perhaps above all Kraftwerk. The sudden affordability and availability of synthesisers made music accessible to those without ability or expertise, thus delivering on punk’s excitingly egalitarian ethos and achieving a break from the past where punk itself had failed. Artists embraced the technology – initially tentatively, later wholeheartedly – and new forms rapidly emerged, often misunderstood before becoming mainstream.

I say “such as it is”, however, because the narrator’s voice is conspicuous by its absence. Concerned (arguably overly so) not to perpetuate myths and misinterpretations or to introduce the potentially warped perspective of hindsight, Evans constructs his narrative as a collage of quotes unearthed from diligent and dogged archival research. Rare are the occasions when we hear his take on the music of synthpop, rather than that of journalists. Flitting between bands and bogged down in the minutiae of chart positions and release details, he gives us only fleeting glimpses of the (fascinating) bigger picture.