To some people, Dave Baker is that pub pianist who accompanies them on Carpenters and soul sing-alongs at North London venues. To others, he is that DJ with the eclectic collection and the wild hair. Those who read the credits on their record sleeves recognise him as a creator of some of the most elegant and emotionally-resonant synthpop and dance music ever recorded.
Baker is a cofounder of four acts that appeared on Daniel Miller’s Mute imprint. The first, I Start Counting, joined the label the same year that it released “People Are People” by Depeche Mode and “Collapsing New People” by Fad Gadget. Mute was riding a wave of international success and looking for the Next Big Thing. Baker and his musical partner, Simon Leonard, had been in Miller’s orbit for some time – Leonard was an early electronic music artist who, famously, broke up an on-stage fight between Miller and Robert Rental at a Paris show – and they arrived with a clutch of demos that combined pathos and minor key melodies in a way that suggested they could be it.
Miller took them into the studio with his trusty Synclavier. What emerged didn’t change pop chart history, but it was a remarkably creative product. “Letters to a Friend” had the same London creative team that worked on the “People Are People” releases – Trigger at Aosis Studios in NW1, John Fryer at Blackwing, TimTom mastering at CBS. It was a simple love song with a melancholy melody, layers of FM synthesis and sampling, and a quality that ought to have changed the world.
That was an important step for the former keyboard player with the otherwise obscure Sons of Cain. It marked the beginning of a long career with Mute that would see a supporting tour with Erasure, a shift into club territory as Fortran 5, the reinvention of Kraftwerk’s sound palette for Komputer, and various solo and collaborative projects under the names John Came (Ed: Allegedly.), OOO EEE OOO, and LonelyKlown. Through it all, Baker has maintained grounded and engaged. During the Covid lockdowns, he kept the pub singalongs going on Zoom from his base close to the landmarks described in “Looking Down on London.” He also uses special releases of his music to raise funds for stray cats (no, not Jennie Vee’s husband).
Baker and Leonard might not have hit the big time, commercially, but the work that they created has a reach and effect unmatched by many of the interlopers in the charts. Baker’s solo work continues to leave marks that reflect life on the 43 bus, leaving central London clubs, and feeling sentimental about old friends. It’s a growing legacy that can only be measured artistically.
10. I Start Counting – Letters to a Friend
Programmed on Daniel Miller’s Synclavier at his mother’s house in Decoy Avenue, the debut Mute single from I Start Counting announced a duo who were equally at home with pop hooks and experimental texture. Baker has said it was musically inspired by a Culture Club song and lyrically autobiographical – a combination that tells you something about the way the act always held pop and personal reflection in the same hand.
Miller’s production is clean and precise, giving Baker’s understated vocals room to breathe against a backdrop of sequenced synths and measured rhythm. It’s a modest record in the best sense: it doesn’t oversell itself, and it has lasted because of that restraint. Forty years on, it sounds like the confident beginning it was.
9. I Start Counting – Still Smiling
The follow-up single, also produced by and described by Baker as a sequel, deepened the I Start Counting template while sharpening the edges. The extended remix by Miller and Flood – a collaboration Baker has cited with evident pride – stretched the song into something more atmospheric and considered. On-U Sound’s Adrian Sherwood, then at the peak of his remixing powers, contributed a version that pushed the dub influences already latent in the original toward something stranger and more physical. The B-side, “There Is Always the Unexpected,” pointed toward the duo’s future experimentation. It is a rich artefact from an underappreciated moment in Mute’s history.
8. I Start Counting – Million Headed Monster
From the debut album My Translucent Hands, coproduced with Paul Kendall, this track captures I Start Counting at their most compellingly strange. The production layers Baker’s characteristic deadpan delivery against a bed of interlocking sequencer lines that manage to sound both clinical and warm. Like much of Baker and Leonard’s early work, it rewards closer listening than its pop surface initially suggests: the arrangements are intricate; the lyrical observations sharp; and it is excellent played LOUD.
7. Fortran 5 – Time to Dream
“Time to Dream” is constructed around a sample from John Barry’s theme to the film, Midnight Cowboy. Although samples from soundtracks were not original, Fortran 5 married melancholy and momentum in a way that felt genuinely novel. Baker and Leonard always seemed more interested in the emotional charge of a piece of music than in just another 12″ for the clubs, and “Time to Dream” is one of the clearest demonstrations of that tendency. It is cinematic in the best sense: it makes you see something while you listen.
6. Fortran 5 – Heart on the Line
Originally demoed with a sample lifted from the opening of Blondie’s “X Offender,” Heart on the Line went through a significant transformation before release, with vocals provided by members of Miranda Sex Garden. The latter were originally engaged as backing dancers for a Fortran 5 tour; but, when the tour plans came apart, Baker discovered they could sing. He went on to produce the first MSG single in return.
5. Komputer – Valentina Tereshkova
When Baker and Leonard completed their transformation into Komputer in 1996, their stated mission was gleefully straightforward: if Oasis could spend a decade ripping off the Beatles, someone ought to rip off Kraftwerk. The song that announced them most completely was this hymn to Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. They reframed her story through lyrics written in the biographical style of Boney M’s “Rasputin.”
The track went through an extraordinary early development: an original demo was made with Claudia Brücken, with an entirely different melody and lyric. What emerged on The World of Tomorrow album is pristine and unhurried; cycling through Tereshkova’s achievements with a reverence that feels entirely unironic. Tereshkova’s nationalism and support for Putin during the war with Ukraine has made her a controversial figure outside of Russia, but there was a time when her face appeared on stamps as an image of the future.
4. Erasure – Victim of Love (Komputer Mix)
Released on the Pop! Remixed compilation, this remix is an act of confident reinvention: Baker has recalled listening back to it for the first time in years and finding it “very good,” with the stated aim of making it “sound more Erasure than Erasure.” It’s a characteristically Baker-ish formulation: deadpan; self-deprecating; and also entirely accurate.
The Komputer treatment brings the song into tighter, more mechanical alignment. It reshapes Vince Clarke‘s original production through the Kraftwerkian templates that Baker developed with Leonard. It also closes a circle: Erasure had featured on Baker’s dancefloor radar since the Fortran 5 years, when Clarke provided a “Heart on the Line” remix. Mute is a small world.
3. OMD – The Right Side?
The most unexpected entry on this list comes via Liverpool’s favourite electronic act. When Komputer released a track titled “Looking Down From London,” Andy McCluskey of OMD encountered the recording and heard something in it that he wanted to build on. He contacted Baker to ask permission to use the piece as the foundation for a new OMD song, adding new vocals, lyrics, and melody. The result was “The Right Side?,” from OMD’s History of Modern album. The band kept the Komputer original essentially intact beneath the additions. Baker told ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK that he was “very surprised and pleased” by what arrived.
2. LonelyKlown – Everything I Try to Do Is Wrong
During the Covid lockdowns (Ed: Thank you, Boris), Baker would walk from his home to Leonard’s flat in Crouch End to trade ideas. The song that emerged from one of those exchanges was put forward to Leonard as a Komputer track. Leonard disagreed. It was nice, but it just wasn’t Komputer. Baker asked if he could have it. The result became the most explicit statement of what Baker’s LonelyKlown project could be: exquisitely-wrought electronics over Baker’s own piano work, with a lyric that reads like a report from the funnier end of existential crisis. The deadpan voice that once sung about space stations could now be found contemplating, with serene resignation, the full sweep of man’s inadequacy.
1. Greenhaus feat. Dave Baker – I Can’t Escape Saturday
Greenhaus’ collaboration with Dave Baker on “I Can’t Escape Saturday” shows how comfortably he inhabits a more atmospheric, synth‑driven setting while keeping his songwriting fingerprints intact. The track plays as a story about being trapped in a looped weekend that never quite delivers its promised release. Baker leans on small inflections; turning the refrain into a subtle earworm and giving the song a late‑night intimacy. It’s another sign that the bloke on the piano leading a crowd on “Jungle Love,” down at The Winchester, has his own – and, at that, a remarkable – voice.