Telex Shares New EP Collated From Forthcoming Career-Spanning Box Set

Telex have recently announced that they will release a box set collating the long-awaited remastered reissues of their 6 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 as a 6-piece vinyl box set, a 6xCD box set and digitally on Mute on March 3rd, 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.

The new EP includes tracks from across all 6 albums, including "Pakmoväst" from their debut (which also appeared on the flip side of "Moskow Diskow"), "Tour De France" (no, not that one - this track pre-dates Kraftwerk's by 3 years), the single "Haven't We Met Somewhere Before" (a songwriting collaboration with Ron & Russell Mael aka Sparks), "Temporary Chicken" (from the aptly titled album Looney Tunes) and their take on Canned Heat's '68 classic "On The Road Again".

Their debut album Looking For Saint Tropez contains covers of Plastic Bertrand's pop-punk "Ça Plane Pour Moi" and Bill Haley's "Rock Around The Clock", 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. Had Telex merely confined themselves to such covers they might have been regarded as a rather clever comedy band.

But they also cut "Moskow Diskow", a rollicking, swerving, steaming dancefloor classic, a track which lays down the railroad for as yet unimagined electronic music such as House and Techno. Years ahead of its time, its reputation has only been enhanced over time, as other, more date stamped electropop has fallen by the wayside.

The follow up, 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 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.

photo credit: Frank Uyttenhove

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