What is the story of Lap Top Pop?
What happened? Tom Ellard: Well, ‘Op’ did start as ‘Lap Top Pop’, until all my laptops got stolen. I was writing the album on United Airlines flights. You can usually get quite a lot done on a Sydney to San Francisco haul, although sporadically. But the machines were taken by the usual junkie through the window, and the album with it. So I thought, ‘All permanence is illusionary’, and settled down to do what the fates were directing me to do, which was do an album that was never finished. The first edition of ‘Op’ was such a disaster that I knew I was onto something good. MVRemix: Where did you meet Stephen R. Jones? How did you eventually form the group? Tom Ellard: Stephen R. Jones showed up at our first gig in 1980. Later in 83, he built a video synthesizer, which used control voltages. As the band, at that stage, used the same voltages, he asked that we play live and send him some signal to drive the machine. That was the ‘Live At Metro’ gig that has been on a few DVDs and now on Y
