I love this series! Amusingly when I reviewed the third instalment, which covers electronic music from 1982, I said: ‘There could be one for every year of that decade and I’d buy them all.’ They didn’t go forward into the 80s, however, but back to 1979. It’s not quite on a par with the other albums because synth pop wasn’t mainstream yet and this was the year that Gary Numan changed music. His most well-known songs, ‘Cars’ and ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ are on this album and although you can’t talk about electronic music from 1979 without them, nothing else in the compilation is even nearly as good. It’s valuable to have context though. Other than Numan, the usual suspects are here, such as The Human League, Visage, Yello, OMD, John Foxx, Fad Gadget and Japan.

Some of the best tracks on here, in my opinion, are: ‘At the Banks of the River’ by Metal Voices, ‘Living by Numbers’ by New Musik (I already have this on 7″), ‘Star Control’ B-side Mix by Dollar, ‘Technofascist’ by Fashion, ‘Strange Pursuit’ by Devo, ‘Mirror Mirror’ by Jude, ‘Japan’ 12″ by Landscape, ‘Technopop’ by The Buggles, ‘Mirror of Infinity’ by Moebius and ‘Forever Tonight’ by Hammer. A few songs on the album can be found on other Cherry Red compilations. There are some real curiosities also, such the first version of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ by Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club (I like this one better!) and weirdly good covers of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Telex and ‘All You Need is Love’ by Instant Automatons.

This album is fun, futuristic and fascinating; you can hear elements of punk, disco and prog rock. Some of the songs are more like rock with added synthesiser while others sound purely electronic. Considering that the music was produced well over 40 years ago, most of it sounds really good today. If you love vintage synth pop, add this to your collection.