Small pockets of British electronic artists in the late 1970s, including the Human League, Daniel Miller, and Cabaret Voltaire, take Kraftwerk's machine music and J.G. Ballard's bleak visions of the future and start writing songs with synthesisers instead of guitars, against a backdrop of high-rise council estates and post-punk disillusionment. The turning point arrives in 1979, when Gary Numan performs Tubeway Army's Are Friends Electric on Top of the Pops and synthpop breaks into the charts. From there Depeche Mode, four teenagers from Basildon, become the genre's biggest export, while Ultravox, Soft Cell, OMD, and Yazoo move the synthesiser from the inkier pages of the NME onto the cover of Smash Hits. By 1983 Pet Shop Boys and New Order are steering the sound toward the dancefloor. Philip Oakey, Vince Clarke, Martin Gore, Bernard Sumner, Gary Numan, and Neil Tennant narrate the shift in their own words, tracing how a scene built on drum machines and cheap keyboards ended up running pop radio.