To all the synths I've loved before

Up next in his series, comedian Dan Antopolski recalls making sweet music... with a Korg SAS-20

Illustration by Tom Ford

I am a happily married man but sometimes my lust gets the better of me and I go to seedy parts of town to look at synthesisers and ask a guy with a ponytail technical questions – please don’t tell my wife. At the moment I am stalking the Native Instruments S-88 online. Of course I am: it has an 88-key hammer-action Fatar keybed with true piano feel, two screens and full DAW integration. Hot in here isn’t it?

But whenever I find a new love, my mind goes back to synths I’ve loved before, that have known the firm press of my fingers, the urgent climax of my solos. My first synth was a Korg SAS-20 with CompuMagic Accompaniment. The “Magic” in “CompuMagic” was that it could automatically adapt its bossa nova backing to the key you were in – I think the “Compu” was short for “Complete pu”.

It was very nice of my folks to get it for me but I came to the end of its expressive potential and hacked it by sticking a straightened paperclip into the expansion card port in the back and wiping it back and forth across the Scart-looking terminal, which at random intervals would make random lights go on and random noises jangle out of the speakers. I took the role of chance in the production of these noises seriously and performed them to myself as an early form of ambient music – and this was years before Ross from Friends made it cool.

By age 16, I had been given some money by my grandparents to save for the future and I blew it on a Roland D-50, the synth du jour in 1988. Fellow geeks reading this will be nodding sagely at its mention. I still have the foldout brochure which I pored over for weeks, daring myself to deserve it. The D-50 was famous for such sound patches as Digital Native Dance – which really transported you to a tribal village from the future, Staccato Heaven which was so staccato that it was lovely and Nylon Atmosphere which made you feel like you were wearing itchy leggings.

Friends from sixth form and I formed a band. Our musical style was Tepid White Funk, a popular genre at the time. We wrote our own songs and did a few covers. I couldn’t sing but I did sing on a fun version of Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” – for which accurate pitching was less essential than being willing to howl with conviction on the choruses.

There was no internet then to google lyrics so we had to transcribe them as best we could from the stereo, rendering what I now know to be “He’s the hairy handed gent / Who ran amok in Kent” as “He’s a hairy hungle jung / Who ran a market camp”. We didn’t know what a hungle jung was but it sounded expressive and nobody minded. Nobody ever minds.

Mainly though I was stuck behind the keyboard, waiting for my solo – when I would make full use of the pitch bend lever, don’t you worry about that. But I wanted to be out front, interacting with the energy of the crowd. The ultimate thing for me was the stage dive – it was always a thrill to see that trust built up between performer and audience and then cashed in spectacularly, it rubber-stamped the whole gig as special. But I never did a stage dive, even when I got out front as a standup – comedians don’t do them, our relationship with the audience is too arch for that open-hearted intimacy.

 I am and will always be a keyboard player – I see things in black and white

One day in 2006 I was MCing a Battle of the Bands in Winchester, riffing with a fun crowd while the kids set up behind me. The bands were all pretty young – they were me from years before – and it was sweet to be in their company.

One of the kids did a stage dive and was borne aloft and cheered and I was reminded how magical it was. When I came back on stage they started chanting for me to stage dive also. “Stage! Dive! Stage! Dive!” I only took a certain amount of persuading – what harm would there be in revisiting that youthful excitement, in giving myself up to the moment, in circling back to that unticked box. I took a little run-up and launched myself into the air!

I suppose the filled-out body of a man in his mid-thirties looks different from the lissom body of a teenager when it is falling towards you from above, it blots out the stage lights. It must feel like Armageddon. Anyway, the young crowd parted like the red sea and I smacked onto the parquet floor, a full belly flop from five feet up – five feet plus a margin of extra air that my hope and joy and sense of nostalgic closure had lent my spring.

They all winced with hypocritical sympathy. I peeled myself from the hardwood. I was painfully winded and my phone screen was smashed but since I wasn’t actually bleeding I walked round through the hushed spectators to mount the steps by the side of the stage. I resumed the mic. “You bastards!” I clowned as if I found it really funny – as if in one fell swoop both my body and my dreams had not just been betrayed by those whose new best buddy I had been moments before.

You can’t go back, to synth sounds that used to be cutting edge, to milestones you missed, or to Winchester, where they break your heart and your phone. You may think it is unfair for me to write the whole town off but I am and will always be a keyboard player. I see things in black and white.