For those who like old fashioned synth pop

For me it is a matter of chronology rather than categories, with Synth Pop occupying a period from 1977 through to about 1985 - the style of music after that period diversified too much to be a single category or genre and is known broadly as Electronica. EbtG and Massive Attack do not fit into the time-line as "Synth Pop" ... even though EbtG were an early 80s bands, they did not move into electronica until the late 80s/early 90s (after working with Massive Attack as it happens).

'Fade Away and Radiate' is the highlight of the album for me - I loved that track when I first heard it as the flip-side to 'Picture This', that the album didn't contain more music in that direction was a disapointment.

 

That whole sequence of events is a fascinating glimpse of the music business vs. the artists at that time, starting with Fripp joining Bowie and Eno in Berlin for the "Heroes" sessions to him moving to New York and finding the GBGB new wave scene that resulted in the Exposure project, which was subsequently stymied by "the suits" at every turn, starting with Gabriel's second album being described by the US record label as musical suicide, Daryl Hall's Sacred Songs being shelved for three years by RCA because it "wasn't commercial" and the difficulties in recording the final part of the trilogy. I've just read that he wanted Debbie Harry to do a cover of Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love', a song that Eno described during the Berlin sessions as " the sound of the future". In talking about Exposure Fripp said: "What I was trying to do in the original trilogy was to investigate the 'pop song' as a means of expression ... I think it's a supreme discipline to know that you have three to four minutes to get together all your lost emotions and find words of one syllable or less to put forward all your ideas. It's a discipline of form that I don't think is cheap or shoddy."