Our man Alf pulled himself away from the West Ham game on the box to give us this report from the London show with a lot of 'X' in it.

...'ere Tosh, did ya go to that Yamaha thing the other month. No? Well let me tell you, it was pretty good mate. There were loads of people there, about 1000 - not bad for a Sunday afternoon - gets 'em off the streets, don't it.

Tony Wride and those DX Owners' Club people did the business with the Yamaha boys and organised the whole event. It was pretty posh as well, non of ya sweaty basement jobs, and there was food too. Of course, I would have eaten in the actual London Tara Hotel restaurant itself but I couldn't decide on the pheasant with white wine or the beef with the red, so I stayed in the show and grabbed a couple of ham sandwiches and coffee whilst flicking through a copy of SOUND ON SOUND. They were giving them away free ya know.

Anyway, I had a go on some new DX synths that I hadn't even seen in a Future Music advert, it was all up to the minute stuff. There was loads of instruments and guys jiving with them little headphone listening whatsits. And then I got a bit nosey and asked those Skyslip geezers about these ROM and RAM cartridges. I think I impressed them with me technical jargon - the guy said its a 64Kbyte and I said that's amazing cos my ham sandwich only took 4 bites!

Next I copped that UMI-2B software from London Rock Shop and then I got all the leaflets on the EMR MIDI programs. I was hanging around that DMS software guy from Sounds Great for ages, it was packed out, and then I forgot the bleeding question! Still I sorted out those blokes from Rittor Music. They brought a load of books on synths printed in ya Japanese Ying Tong - silly moos. Mind you, they threw it all back at me and said the English versions were coming soon and then stuffed one of those Passport software packages in me hand and said 'read that, it's in American'.

Talking of Yanks, Dr David Wessel - an American in Paris (good film that!) - was doing a talk on ya MIDI bits and telling a whole room full of people about that IRCAM place with all those synthesizers and computers. It was good that, a bit of ya education on the topic like. And that Dave Bristow guy was there, he knows it all, the FM things, playing that gear - I think people were a bit amazed at what he was getting that X series equipment to do.

There was some prizes given away too. I 'ad me ticket for the draw but that Tony Wride fellow wouldn't do me a deal.

That was it then. I 'ad a good afternoon at the lectures and exercised me technical parlance with the people on the exhibition stands. It was time to go, so I said goodbye to that SOUND ON SOUND crowd; poor bleeders had been there all day! It's an 'ard life for some...