Quotes from Dylan Jones

Neil Tennant: Live Aid was the last thing I was asked to do for Smash Hits. Mark [Ellen] asked me to cover it, and for some completely childish reason I just sort of couldn't be bothered and said no. So I watched Live Aid sitting in my studio flat on the King's Road with Jon Savage and [photographer] Eric Watson, all three of us slagging it off.

David Bowie: By 1985, I was something I never wanted to be: I was a well-accepted artist. I had started appealing to people who bought Phil Collins records. I suddenly didn't know my audience and, worse, I didn't care about them. I always looked OK in clothes – I was kind of a target for designers, always. They sort of made a beeline for me and tried to get me to wear their things. But I guess it was up to me to choose which ones I would wear.

It was people sitting in their little studios going plink, plonk, plink, plonk on one track, and then putting a vocal on the other or making a bass drum sound out of a synthesizer. Plus, we all started to listen to Europe rather than America, as that was where all the electronic experimentation was coming from, from Kraftwerk to Jean-Michel Jarre, from Telex to Yello, even the Yellow Magic Orchestra from Japan.

Midge Ure: In Slik, there were just girls in the audience. In Ultravox, the boys started to come too, in mackintoshes and moustaches. There were always lots of men at Ultravox concerts.

Deborah Harry: Giorgio was great. He's a funny personality. In a way, he's a scientist. A bit like Leonardo da Vinci, he's this multilayered artist, a scientist, a curious person. He's kind of a mathematician, and we were all sort of in awe of him.

1984 THE PLEASUREDOME 'It was much more baroque. I think what happened is that as we became a successful touring band, we were no longer those kids in the street, we were no longer going to those clubs. Even though London is an exciting place, all of those poor Blitz Kids were becoming rich kids because they were becoming successful.' GARY KEMP

Bono (singer, musician, activist): People were very good to me. I was walking with [my wife] Ali, and Freddie Mercury pulled me aside and said, 'Oh, Bo-No … Is it Bo-No or Bon-O?' I told him, 'It's Bon-O.

And if you think about Soft Cell, Depeche or Human League, these were people who didn't know what they were doing, there was no musicianship involved. There wasn't any training; it was people's ideas going straight down onto tape, without having to deal with all the niceties of being a good keyboard player, and it was this new whole new sound of electronic music.

The eighties weren't just about androgyny, and in a sense they embraced polymorphous perversity in a way it had never been embraced before, an exploration of self that hadn't been as intense since the sixties. This was a new type of bohemianism, one empowered by a certainty and an optimism that was only fleeting back in the so-called Swinging Sixties.

The PMRC pressured the music industry to establish a rating system that would warn potential record buyers of sexually explicit and violent lyrics. Their purchases may as well have carried stickers emblazoned with 'THIS RECORD CONTAINS SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK'N'ROLL!

The eighties would continue to evolve, driven by ever more mutations of the LinnDrum, the Fairlight CMI, the 808 drum machine and various versions of the Roland synthesizer.

John Foxx: The point of using synthesizers on the first Ultravox records was to find out what these strange new instruments could do that hadn't been done before. I figured new instruments had always radically altered music in the past – for instance, the electric guitar. Here was the next major shift – the synthesizer.

Steve Strange: I ran a very tight ship in terms of my door policy. I wanted creative-minded pioneers there who looked like a walking piece of art, not some drunken, beery lads. The best move I made was turning Mick Jagger away at the door. He was wearing trainers.

Nick Rhodes (musician): My parents would often watch Top of the Pops with me, as they were quite turned on by knowing what was going on in the charts, and I remember they actually liked Bowie. They liked him so much they took me to see him when he played the Empire Pool in Wembley, in London, in 1976, on the Station to Station tour, not once but twice. I'd become such a fan, and he had become such a focus of what I thought I wanted to do with my life at the time.

Martin Gore (musician): To us, the synthesizer was the punk instrument. It was an instant, do-it-yourself tool. Because it was still new, its potential seemed limitless.

Gary Kemp: 'True' was written about Clare Grogan. She was the inspiration, and she also gave me a copy of Nabokov's Lolita, and I used a couple of lines out of it for the song – 'seaside arms'.

Dave Stewart: In 1982, Annie and I went to Australia with the Tourists, but the band broke up and we ended up in a hotel in Wagga Wagga. I had a little black and yellow Wasp synthesizer and was making didgeridoo sounds. When Annie started singing along, we thought, 'Maybe we could make weird and experimental electronic music?' On the flight home, we split up as a couple but kept on with the music, carting the gear in a second-hand horsebox.

Marc Almond: David came along with this thing called a synthesizer, which at that time we only really knew from the likes of Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, who had huge banks of them. Eno had used one in Roxy Music, and I remember them on The Old Grey Whistle Test playing a ten-minute version of 'Ladytron', one of the greatest things I've ever seen on television.

Neil Tennant: The whole renaissance of British pop starts with Gary Numan and 'Are "Friends" Electric?'. He took the David Bowie thing and reduced it to a black shirt and a pair of black jeans.