Not since the Les Paul guitar had one musical instrument had such a massive effect on the sound of popular music as the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument, natch). The chunky sampling system of choice for the pop avant gardist of the early 1980s was knocked up by two blokes from Sydney after they became obsessed with the analogue bleepity stylings of everyone’s favourite second hand LP purchase, Switched on Bach. Ironically, all the junk shop, self-soldering fun of the era that record symbolised was to be swept away by the new breed ushered in by the CMI. And no wonder. The VCS3′s little pegboard playground was all well and good, but could it draw a dinky green graph of the sound it was playing? It could not.

Looks-wise, the chunky, piano-sized CMI was as of-the-decade as it came. Plastic keyboard, light pen, green flickery monitor and massive floppy disks were the order of the day when the first models trundled off Australian production lines in 1979, straight into the sheds of Peter Gabriel, Trevor Horn and Thomas Dolby. Any player worth their salt on the electro/new/wave/post-prog axis had to have one to fiddle with at leisure in their white-walled studio. Apart from Martin Hannett, to his considerable annoyance.

For the price of a three-bedroom semi, you could become the conductor of your own private orchestra. Said orchestra, admittedly, consisted of the same loops of muddy, all-the-string-section-at-once “whoomp!” noises played at varying, and increasingly tinny-sounding, pitches. Oh, and some murky-sounding handclaps. And an asthmatic choir of indeterminate gender going “aaaah”. And the barking of a rather unconvincing dog. You could do far more creative things than that, of course, but the CMI’s more predictable, out-of-the-box tricks proved a magnet for lazy composers, and the familiar factory samples became the amusingly defining sounds of the early ’80s, just as those well-worn sound effects library mainstays of whinnying horses, shattering windows and burbling test tubes were the de facto aural signifiers of the analogue era.

Eventually, the combination of cheaper devices flooding the market, and a listening public growing increasingly weary of tuneless songs featuring really squeaky and really gravelly versions of the same singer’s voice singing the same thing for four whole minutes, brought Fairlight Instruments to their knees as the decade wound up. But now, bizarrely, the CMI is back, as its inventors have released a 30^th anniversary special edition, which utilises modern processing power, but still packs it into that same, beige, boxy, light-pen-and-rounded-flickery-monitor format. Now you too can do what just about any bog-standard PC World purchase can do, and all for a knock-down fifteen grand! And we used to think paying a tenner on eBay for a fire-damaged Yogophant badge was a sign of madness.

Photography has been devalued. With digital cameras, it’s just too bloody easy to fire off a hundred shots of Alan and the boys ‘out on the razz’ and upload them onto Flickr the same night for the entire world to ignore. Not so long ago, you only had 36, or even 24 chances to preserve your companions’ merry antics for the ages, so a bit of thought was called for. If you were indoors things were even more fraught. ‘Denise, how many flashes are left on this?’ Yep, your housebound David Bailey could only do his thing if there was a sufficient supply of silvery plastic boxes full of wire wool to plug in the top of the camera, all the better to illuminate the alluring tableau of Auntie Jean’s paper crown slipping over her left eye with a veil of flat blue dazzle. The cube rotated four times to present a fresh bulb to the carousing throng, and then that was it, new cube please. Ooh, what a palaver! Small wonder everyone in photos from 1978 looks so damn fed up.

It all started with the Humphreys – those unseen drinking straw-wielding beasts insidiously snaffling the milk from under the noses of Frank Muir and co. That advert was paid for by Unigate Dairies, but the general message was people weren’t drinking enough milk, period. For the next few years, a slew of these ads – not advocating a particular brand per se, and seeming more like a public service announcement as a result – were all over the telly. The quaint Humphreys mutated into the racier ‘gotta lotta bottle!’ campaign, heralded by a chirpy bit of soft rock which informed us that ‘milk comes in a bottle’, while various tanned examples of calcium-enriched youth cavorted seductively, causing a Mary Whitehouse lookalike to peer disdainfully over the top of her half moon specs-on-a-chain and exclaim, “Well!” More desperately, a dairy-managing Brian Glover pleaded with us to “Use your milkman – don’t let him become a thing of the past!” Other dairy produce got their own, more modest, promotional leg-up. British Cheese created a cartoon country club populated by well-spoken wedges of Double Gloucester and Sage Derby. A squadron of jacket potato paratroopers asked, ‘Sarge, when we get there, it will be butter, won’t it? It won’t be – gulp! – anything else?’ The margarine threat was implicit: ‘No buts, it’s got to be butter!’ Meanwhile, the Meat Marketing Board were clearly worried about the encroaching fashion for vegetarianism. ‘Wot, no meat?’ cried a trio of Robin Askwith-like cheeky cockney lads, as they gate-crashed a couple’s pork-free dinner and regaled them with an impromptu oompah ditty detailing a plethora of exciting serving suggestions for a nice bit of British meat, aided by a marching band of only-just-starting-to-become-unacceptable racial stereotypes and a policeman with a flashing blue light on his head. Meanwhile, posters in butchers’ windows shouted: ‘What’s meat got? It’s got the lot!’ It wasn’t all animal-derived: ‘Make room for the mushrooms!’ sang a male voice choir of cartoon button-caps, marching onto the dinner table in a good-natured bid for fungal Lebensraum, while minimalist cinema verité ads demonstrated faked documentary evidence of the soothing powers of ‘tea – best drink of the day.’ But the least convincing of these unlikely broadcasts was not food-related at all: in the early 1980s, just as pit closures were starting to bite, a cosy family were shown relaxing by a fireplace warmed by ‘Coal: the fuel of the future.’

Besuited men behind desks considered it a nationwide dose of protein, but out in the field it was always a cheap and hasty alternative to breakfast or forking out for crisps at break-time. Free school milk had been on tap for all British state schools since the late 1930s, introduced to combat spiralling levels of childhood malnutrition and later becoming an enduring post-war tonic to supposedly ensure the next generation had ‘good bones’. Notoriously prolific – crates of untouched curdling bottles were always hanging around the most over-heated corridor in the building – the hearty swig on a weedy straw through the blue or red topped pints was, for ages, as much a part of the morning routine as running about whooping at a dog loose in the playground. Then Margaret Thatcher famously curtailed universal guzzling of the white stuff when the country sank into yet another 1970s economic slump, though nursery and primary schools were allowed to continue siphoning it out for another decade. The final deliveries were made in 1986 – until, that is, local authorities in Scotland recently decided to re-introduce it, thereby rather charitably allowing kids to partake in the right kind of nostalgia even before they could read or write.