Nu Shooz

I first heard ‘I Can’t Wait’ by Nu Shooz in a shop on the high street. I can’t remember which shop, but it can’t have been one of my usual haunts (the second-hand record shop, the comics store, or the model shop with a sideline in role playing games). They didn’t play that kind of chart music.

‘I Can’t Wait’ is an echt piece of mid-‘80s chart music, with that peculiarly crystalline ‘80s production that sounds machine-made. It is full of stuff, and yet full of space. There are all kinds of odd noises: insistently chiming percussion, stabs of tinny synthesised horns, gasping emulator barks like a robot faking an orgasm. Each of these noises was selected with care and skill and placed into an delicate but unbending structure, like lab-grown gems in a surgical steel tiara.

I wasn’t in the habit of listening to this kind of chart pop in 1986. I wasn’t entirely immune to chart music, but I was listening to Q-approved album rock like Paul Simon’s Graceland and crate-digging for second-hand copies of Japan obscurities. ‘I Can’t Wait’ reached number 2 in the UK charts, but I hadn’t heard it until I walked into whichever branch of whatever it was.

That meant that I didn’t know what it was. Which was a problem, because I really wanted to know what it was. I heard the hook, the ‘ah-ah-ah-ah-ah’ of the over-excited android, the big galumphing steps of the bass; but I had no way of knowing to whom they belonged. This was 1986: there was no Shazam, no internet (that I could use). Dial-a-Disc might have worked, but I didn’t even know that this was a chart hit. I knew nothing about it and could find out nothing about it, until I turned on BBC Radio 1 and managed to catch a DJ back-announcing it.

In a world of narrow media channels, that radio DJ’s act of curation was vital. Curation was how you discovered new things, whether they were new to the world and or simply new to you. In the week ‘I Can’t Wait’ reached number 2, John Peel’s show on Radio 1 featured — among many other things unlikely to trouble the official Top 40 — Eric B and Rakim, The Minutemen and some ‘60s ska from Roland Alphonso and the Ska-talites.

But even a daytime DJ off-handedly crashing the outros on the assigned playlist could perform crucial acts of curation, helping to build and refine the tastes of listeners. Even if their curation only confirmed the fact that you couldn’t stand Simply Red, freshly ousted from the Number 2 spot by Nu Shooz.

I Can’t Wait

But by 1986, DJs didn’t just play the hits.

‘I Can’t Wait’ originally appeared on Nu Shooz’s 1985 album Tha’s Right, but that version did not become a hit. The version that did was a remix by the Dutch DJ Peter Slaghuis.

John Smith, the founder and chief songwriter of Nu Shooz, claims Slaghuis didn’t like the song and ‘didn’t fool with it very much’. A lot of what he did do sounds terribly ‘80s now; basically a man playing around with new effects he’s found on his synthesiser. But it was undoubtedly his remix that made the song a hit.

The album version is eminently ignorable funk-pop, an indistinguishable wash of horns, guitars and vocals. It’s actually quite hard to pick the hook out from it. The production in Slaghuis’s ‘80s remix pares the song down to its elements, emphasising every sting and riff; if you’ll excuse the pun, it makes it pop. His experience of what worked on the dance floor no doubt informed his sense of what would work as a chart hit.

This reinvention is integral to the DJ function. Even if a DJ is just playing records at a wedding disco, they are always constructing: building an experience out of individual songs, building a taste out of influences or, as with hip hop DJs, building completely new music using a mixture of old and new parts.

The ‘80s DJ explosion was enabled by new, cheaper technologies. 1986 saw the launch of the Rane MP 24 (a mixer that updated club DJing) and the Casio SK-1, a consumer-level sampling keyboard that could (in theory) make the same robotic moaning noise as Peter Slaghuis’s E-mu emulator.

The collision of the punk DIY ethos, new independent record labels and newly affordable technology meant anyone with a Saturday job could sidestep a considerable part of the traditional music industry. Two people with a keyboard could be a whole band, like those ‘fire and ice’ synth-pop duos of the early ‘80s (or, indeed, like Nu Shooz themselves, who had considerably slimmed down from their original 12-person line-up). One person with two turntables and a stack of old soul records could be a hip hop DJ. Add in a sampler, a drum machine and a four-track recorder, and you too could reinvent dance music. As well as empowering creative people, new technologies were spawning new genres: techno, acid, rave. These genres were underground and, in the late ‘80s, practically outlawed, but they were about to completely revolutionise mainstream pop.

Now, anyone can create a polished production on their phone and broadcast it to the whole world. Amateurism — the act of doing or making something principally for one’s own amusement — has begun to feel like an odd, endangered pursuit; if technology can produce something with the veneer of pinpoint professionalism, it becomes hard to insist on the personal and creative value of making things that are slightly shit, things that no sane person would want to spend money on. (The repeated act of making slightly shit things is, of course, the means by which you gradually become able to make something that is not shit.)

Meanwhile, the ease of making professional-grade outputs apparently demands the simulacrum of a professional-grade distribution network, and so technology busies itself with the generation of artificial DJs. On Spotify I can activate ‘DJ X’, an AI host with a fantastically irritating upbeat American ‘voice’. DJ X can play tracks from my playlist, interspersed with authentically inane chatter. DJ X is awful but, more importantly, it is also useless. It plays songs that Spotify knows I like; it isn’t offering songs that I might like, but don’t yet know. It’s not going to play me anything from Radio Freedom: Voice Of The African National Congress And The People’s Army Umkhonto We Sizwe, as John Peel did in June 1986.

I’m not really a DJ guy, but I think we need DJs more than ever. Now that we have torn down the barriers to making music, we need curation at the other end. We need taste and expertise; people who can hear a muddy jazz-funk album track and realise it can be remixed into a banger. People who will add that banger to a high street shop playlist, where it can catch the ear of an unwary shopper.

And this time, I will have Shazam at the ready.

It might even be someone making a record by sampling the bass line from ‘Cavern’ by Liquid Liquid

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl; it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

You Give Me Fever

As a fresher at university I joined two societies: the drama soc, and a group that amounted to a dating service for musicians. Guitarists would pair up with guitarists and form axe-toting gangs, battling over scarce resources, like drummers.

These two interests came together when my friend Simon wrote a play about an Elvis obsessive and decided he wanted a live band to play Elvis songs during the performances.

Turning a play into also a gig was, of course, a smart decision, as anyone who has ever mounted a jukebox musical will tell you. If the play turns out to be terrible, the audience gets to watch a band. If the band sucks, there is always the play. And if both are terrible, there is at least some variety of suckage.

The less smart decision was bringing me in as lead guitarist. I owned a rather nice tobacco sunburst Gibson Les Paul guitar, it is true; but — given that I am unable to hold a tune or stay in rhythm — it might have been wiser to make me lend it to a musician. I liked punk, which is just about the only genre of music in which a lack of talent is a coveted quality. But in covering Elvis songs, I was essentially being asked to pretend to be Scotty Moore, one of the greatest rock n’ roll guitarists of all time.1

Simon’s smartest decision, however, was the counterintuitive focus on Elvis.

My friend Lucy tells the story of hearing the news of Elvis’s death in 1977 and asking her mother if John Travolta would be the new King of Rock n’ Roll. Travolta was more like one of those medieval pretenders who ended up watching their own intestines being roasted in front of them at Smithfield; but the King was, indeed, dead, and by this point had been so for some time. More terminally, he was unhip.

When we pictured him we saw bloated, spangled Vegas Elvis, all sweat and dyed sideburns, yelling his way through ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ in front of an audience of frantic grannies. The karate kicks and photo ops with Richard Nixon had a certain kitsch appeal, of course. Vegas Elvis embodied a moribund and decadent dark reality, a feverish excess and fatal self-indulgence that ran counter to the neon ‘80s of Madonna and Hollywood teen comedies. It was an image of mainstream pop culture that that mainstream was trying to pretend wasn’t there, like a demented relative in a distant nursing home. This reading was, inevitably, popular with the counter-cultural post-punk bands that Simon and I listened to.

You certainly didn’t hear the music much. Generation X was busy indulging in its own musical inventions, and didn’t have time for those of its parents. This was the era of rave and hip-hop and, for me, industrial punk that sounded like someone slowly demolishing an East German machine tool factory. Even if you were listening to ‘50s rock n’ roll, it was de rigueur to insist you preferred the Carl Perkins’ original of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and to point out that ‘Hound Dog’ had been a Big Mama Thornton song first.

So, when preparations for the play began, I had never heard most of our set list, and spent the first few rehearsals just guessing. Finally Simon sat me down and made me listen to Elvis’s recording of ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’, although admittedly this did not make my playing of it any better.

I did know ‘Fever’, though. I knew the Peggy Lee version, but that’s the version that Elvis copies (rather than the Little Willie John original). It is a gloriously strange song, somehow typical of that moment in the ‘50s when the new pop music genres were still trying to decide what they were. The music is stripped back to somewhere between jazz and soul, while the new lyrics that Lee apparently wrote for herself are splendidly hip and slangily erudite.

That image of the over-the-hill Elvis, stuffed full of fast food, drugs and his own ego, missed a (literally) vital element: his vitality, the culturally transformative force of his performance. This was the reason he had been crowned King of Rock n’ Roll in the first place. His performance on ‘Fever’ is blunter than Peggy Lee’s, and lacks her sly wit, but he puts a smouldering desperation into it that is threatening and vulnerable at the same time. Like many of his hits, Elvis’s ‘Fever’ is pure pop in its most sublime form: hooky and surprising, energetic and compulsive, full of sexual angst and a deep joy at being young and alive. More urgently for the purposes of our jukebox musical band, it goes heavy on the bass and drums. This allowed us to give full rein to our terrific rhythm section: Claire, whose upright double bass neck would be slathered in blood at the end of a gig, and Sam, our Charlie Watts, the irresistible, still but propulsive centre that rooted the whole shebang.2

Everybody’s Got The Fever

In a moment when Elvis’s music was deeply unfashionable, this all came together in an unexpectedly brilliant way. Being in a band was probably the closest I ever got to playing team sports. The same physical ineptitude that made me a terrible musician made me an even worse athlete. My experience of being part of a side was being the part everyone picked last (or, if I was lucky, never picked at all). As a consequence, I did not have any team spirit; but then, teams had never had any ‘me’ spirit either.

But I imagine that bands operate in a similar fashion to sports teams. Not only do you get to mess around with your mates, but there is also a purpose to it. You are creating something together, supplementing and integrating your skills to a mutual end. This frequently requires the sacrifice of your own creativity, the misinterpretation or disregarding of your invention as your collaborators ignore or pervert your contributions. But from that sacrifice comes gifts. The diversity of creative impulse is both uncomfortable and uplifting. From the conflict and concert of individual ideas comes a new whole.

One could argue that there is perhaps slightly less of a competitive element to making music than there is to sports, although anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of Britpop or hip hop may demur there. But there is, I think, a small but crucial difference in what this does to the performance. Sport has spectators; music, like theatre, has an audience. Spectators play a crucial part in sports, but you can play a match without them. Sport can happen, meaningfully, without spectators. But art without an audience is what we call ‘a rehearsal’.

To play in a covers band is to be an entertainer: the value you are creating lies in the audience’s enjoyment. In some ways you are barely there at all; much of the audience’s pleasure is in the songs. The performance — so long as it is competent — is just a means to an end. You are merely a conduit: a sweaty, sloppy stereo system.

We did try to write our own music as a band, but I got the distinct impression that not even all the band thought this was a good idea. When we played our songs live we did not have an audience so much as witnesses; rubberneckers, simultaneously aghast and confused. We were pleasing ourselves and no one else. What the audience wanted, quite rightly, was the Elvis material. It was as an Elvis covers band that we got hired to play parties on campus, busked during the Edinburgh Festival, and played the last night of the Fringe Club.3

One of the reasons we had (re)discovered Elvis in the first place was because we listened to Nick Cave, not least his song ‘Tupelo’ on The First Born Is Dead (1985; a title that surely references the fact that Elvis was the twin to a stillborn brother). In recent years Cave has talked a lot about how, as a young man, he saw his relationship with his audience as antagonistic, and how he now sees it as one of mutual joy and creation. Playing with a band doesn’t only require you to integrate your individual needs with those of the group; it also requires the band to integrate the needs of the audience.

Like Cave, when I was a young man I did not appreciate the value of the audience response. I wanted to shock and astonish with my own vision. Now, the memories of whole rooms dancing and singing along to the Elvis songs that we were playing is, naturally, deeply satisfying. Art does not exist without an audience, and that goes double for entertainment. Whether it is playing in a band, putting on a play or even writing a pop culture email newsletter, the tempering of one’s own creativity to the enjoyment of an audience is a crucial part of that creativity. The audience is yet another collaborator, pushing us to step beyond our instinctive, comfortable spaces, to meet their desires and so create something wholly new: not just to them, but to us.

I really should have taken Elvis a good deal more seriously.

Being a fan of unfashionable Elvis in the early ‘90s was just one of many defiantly hipster anti-hip choices:

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl; and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

This piece is about New Order’s ‘World in Motion’, the official England team song for Italia ‘90 (or, as the under-45s call it, the 1990 World Cup).

But why ‘World in Motion’? It is a decidedly ‘mid’ New Order record, leaning towards bad. It wouldn’t make it into any list of New Order’s best tracks (which are: 1. Bizarre Love Triangle / 2. Age of Consent / 3. Temptation / 4. Regret / 5. Thieves Like Us or The Perfect Kiss; I will be taking no questions on this matter.)

To understand why ‘World in Motion’ mattered more than it should have, you first need to take a trip back to 1986, and understand what it was like to take an interest in English football back then. Most of us did not have season tickets and attend every match; most of us were definitely not throwing bottles of piss from the terraces or stabbing each other in car parks. I’m talking about the ordinary, mildly-invested people. We were listening to the live commentary on Radio 2, watching live TV football when it was available (maybe a couple of times a week), and getting the transfer news from Ceefax.

People like this — people like me — have always formed the vast majority of football fans, and our experience was typical of the mid-’80s more generally: the clothes were bad, the food was awful, the weather sucked, and people from other countries were always more talented and better looking. The actual football, like any other kind of top-flight sport, had moments of splendour. But the overall experience for fans was underwhelming, drab, and pinched.

But in 1986, the music suddenly acquired potential.

Until 1986 I hadn’t realised football songs could be good. I only knew two: ‘Back Home’, the official England team song from 1970, and 1982’s ‘This Time We’ll Get it Right’, which a) they didn’t and b) is the aural equivalent of being repeatedly thumped on the ears with a sandbag. Wikipedia tells me the official World Cup song in 1986 was ‘We’ve Got the Whole World at our Feet’, of which I have no memory at all. But one night that year, on Radio 1, John Peel played something called ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’.

According to legend this was in the running to be the theme for the BBC’s World Cup coverage that year but lost out to ‘Aztec Lightning’ by the Heads, a sort of electro/mariachi mash-up. And so the title — ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’ — was itself a self-aware joke. Which was new, where football songs were concerned.

Colourbox were no slouches. They were signed to the cultish/experimental 4AD label, and in 1987 they would go on to have a worldwide smash as MARRS with ‘Pump Up the Volume’. But we didn’t know that in 1986. So, given that it was a football song, it felt weird that this propulsive, euphoric slice of cartoonish electronica was quite… good? I’m not going to be rude about ‘Aztec Lightning’ because I can see that it has a certain amount of charm, and I don’t want those of you with fond memories to come round my house and fight me. But it ain’t no ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’.

The Colourbox anthem was unusual in another way too. Now that everyone (including all Germans) can sing the allusively self-deprecating ‘Football’s Coming Home’ backwards, it’s easy to forget that football songs used to be chest-thumpingly boorish, and incredibly literal. Actual professional footballers were forced to sing lyrics in which they hymned their mum’s roast potatoes, asserted that our team is the best, and shamefacedly promised to really put their backs into it this time. ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’ doesn’t do any of this, not least because it has no lyrics. Nor does it make any references to the host country, Mexico; there is a blessed absence of mariachi horns.

No: like all good instrumentals, ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’ captures a feeling. Specifically, I think, it captures what it feels like to enjoy watching the World Cup. Not play in a World Cup: watch the World Cup. It’s about the fans, and how football makes you feel.

At some point in the late ‘80s, football fans in England seemed to take a collective decision to reclaim the experience of watching the game for fans. I’ve got some theories about why this happened. First, the ‘86 tournament saw Gary Lineker winning the Golden Boot, a squad of promising young players, and England making it to the quarter-finals. Then, ahead of the ‘87—88 season, John Barnes moved to Liverpool, then (as now) the best team in the country, thus bringing him to further national attention. It’s hard, now, to convey the impact of this. Barnes was astonishingly talented and (sorry, but facts is facts) extremely handsome. He was also articulate. One of the most glamorous, thoughtful and promising faces of English football was black. This is unremarkable these days, but it was such a moment then, and played into the sense of a changing mood. (Barnes would go on, of course/regrettably, to perform the rap on ‘World in Motion’.)

Then, in 1989, came Hillsborough. I can’t say anything new about this, but there’s one thing I want to underline in the context of this absurdly over-involved piece about football songs: one of the realisations prompted by Hillsborough was that many people in England held a casual belief that football fans were essentially sub-human. The Taylor Report, published in early 1990, laid out the consequences of this and, together with the Hillsborough disaster itself, prompted a rethink. The report was still in the headlines when New Order were asked by the FA to write the official England song for Italia ‘90.

The scene was set for something to happen, but three further factors combined to produce a pop-cultural moment for the ages.

The first factor was the FA’s press officer David Bloomfield, who persevered with the then-unfashionable idea of an official England song, and insisted on the astoundingly counterintuitive choice of New Order. Interestingly, he was specifically inspired by ‘The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme’. (There’s a whole section on the Wikipedia page about this, liberally scattered with ‘citation needed’, which makes me suspect that David Bloomfield has decided to get events on the record.)

The second factor was New Order themselves. Like many people in England in 1990, they didn’t particularly like football. (This is why they had to draft Keith Allen to provide expertise on key points, such as the spelling and scansion of ‘In-ger-land’.) They were, though, from Manchester, where the collectivised drugged-up comradeship of the Second Summer of Love was entering its third year. A sport associated with menace and violence was being mashed together with a youth movement associated with going up to complete strangers and telling them they’re beautiful. ‘World in Motion’ — whose original lyrics were about taking ecstasy — was the gorgeous bastard child of football culture and rave culture. It is love that has the world in motion; Peter Beardsley is merely love’s glorious instrument.

The third factor was pure serendipity: Italia ‘90 turned out to be a good tournament for England, and drew huge TV audiences. As England got deeper and deeper into the latter stages and the collective mood became more and more joyfully hysterical, you could barely pass a shop, a pub, a rave, a building site or a house party without hearing ‘World in Motion’. Finally, as is the way with such things — indeed, it’s the whole premise of The Metropolitan — Paul Gascoigne’s tears in the semi-final took on great pop-cultural significance. You can take your pick about what that significance was, because what Gazza was actually crying about was that he wouldn’t be able to play in the final. The point is that a footballer — a footballer! — had publicly expressed a deep emotion that wasn’t rage, and in turn this prompted everyone to start talking about how Gazza’s tears made them feel. Suddenly it was just feelings, turbulent and overflowing, all the way down. (There is a whole thing here about conceptions of masculinity, but this piece is already too long.)

‘World in Motion’ marked the official beginning of an era in which millions of people who — like New Order — didn’t particularly like football cautiously started to take part in football-adjacent activities. Lots of them discovered what sports fans have always known: that there’s real sustenance to be had in being a part of a crowd. Not all the time, you understand. Some crowds are awful, and people who cannot exist outside the crowd are scary and weird. But it does us all good, sometimes, to be part of a crowd; to subsume your own individuality a little, just for a couple of hours, and experience the communal expression of emotion. It reminds you that in a lot of ways we are all the same, and feel roughly the same things.

After 1990, gatekeeping was out: joyful inclusivity was in. You didn’t have to be a dour, obsessive, violent monomaniac to enjoy Nick Hornby’s breakthrough book Fever Pitch (1992) (which was partly about what it had been like to be a football fan in the benighted ‘70s and ‘80s, and partly about what it had felt like to be the child of separating parents). You didn’t have to know much about football to watch a Euro ‘96 game in the pub. (As a young woman at the time, I can tell you that the vibe shift in pubs was real.) The smart, funny fanzine When Saturday Comes suddenly became mass-circulation, and the moment in the early ‘90s when the London media class discovered that Camus had been a goalkeeper was quite something to behold. Football in England became a thing you could just do when you felt like it, a thing that was fun: a thing that could be lighthearted and self-aware, increasingly distanced from negative connotations and the chance of getting stabbed.

Gloriously, none of this was contingent on being an England fan. It was discovered that almost every country in the world plays football, and that lots of them are really, really good at it. Uncommitted newbies fell in love with individual players and ended up adopting whole countries. People with dual or multiple heritage could declare their maps of allegiance without falling foul of Tebbit Test dullards. The streets were awash with France shirts, Holland shirts, Cameroon shirts, Nigeria shirts, and yes — occasionally — Germany shirts. (The Berlin Wall came down less than a year before Italia ‘90, another huge factor in the vibe shift. I had to check whether the eventual winners were ‘West’ Germany or simply ‘Germany’.)

Of course, there are still millions of people in this country who don’t like football. And that’s OK; whatever your PE teacher told you 40 years ago, it’s not compulsory. For those people, there is a valid alternative version of this story: that the football mania kicked off by Italia ‘90 had, by 2002 if not before, curdled into an oppressive laddishness characterised by the threat implied in the phrase ‘can’t you take a joke?’ For people entirely on the outside of the phenomenon — goths, Scottish football fans — none of this felt particularly pleasant.

But for all its faults, I think something happened in this story that is worth paying attention to. Something that had been associated with violence and tragedy was commuted into something hopeful, lighthearted and, if not definitively inclusive, a great deal more open-minded than it had been before. A game that had long been associated with the worst kind of menacing nationalism became a vehicle for a positive, multicultural patriotism. And a lot of us had a bunch of innocent, collective fun, and shared a lot of feelings.

Football culture in England remains imperfect, sometimes menacing, and often racist. But it’s still a lot more fun, appealing and open-hearted than it was in the mid-’80s. ‘World in Motion’ took pains to declare ‘this ain’t a football song’; 35 years later, you don’t need to be a football fan to be glad that it was.

For a slightly more… accomplished rapper than John Barnes (perish the thought), here’s Melle Mel

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl; and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

In 1989 I was working and living in London with my friend Lars, saving up to go on holiday before starting university. By the time we finally went away, Lars and I had filled a whole backpack with home-recorded tapes: our taste, our friends’ tastes, our families’ tastes, other people’s families’ tastes. As we drove across Europe we listened to one after the other on the car stereo. Most of them were thrown into the back seat when we were done.

Two C90 tapes, though, were on heavy rotation. Our friend Ben had made them for us: four sides, four albums. Three of those records were by legendary indie bands. The fourth was something you probably won’t have heard of. (Contrary to the usual hipster implication, this is an indication of your good taste and discretion.)

However, it is in the nature of a cassette that the easiest way to rewind it is to listen to the other side. Every time we listened to one of those albums we listened to the one on the other side too. This means that for every play of Doolittle, we racked up one play of an album that for everyone else had immediately sunk into rightful obscurity.

The lesson of this story is that the music you listen to on repeat when you’re 19 gets burned right in there, whether it’s one of the greatest records ever made or its Beelzebubba by The Dead Milkmen.

Doolittle — Pixies

Can there be a gift any more generous than a copy of Doolittle, the third(ish) album by the Pixies? Especially if, like me, the recipient hasn’t ever heard the Pixies before.

Among its many uses, home taping was a gift to adolescent gifting. A C90 tape was considerably cheaper than two albums; for the price of a pint and some fiddling around with aux leads, you could give a friend two whole albums and spend the leftover money on more beer. Of course, it meant less beer for Black Francis and Kim Deal, but at 19 other people’s copyright is not perhaps the priority it should be. And like all good presents this also allowed the giver to show off their taste a little.

Ben’s gift to Lars and I was the perfect soundtrack for being 19 in 1989 in the greatest city in the world. London was largely shabby and empty in those days; it had not yet recovered from the capital flight of the ‘70s and early ‘80s. There were impromptu weed-filled carparks on bombsites left over from the Blitz; there were empty shop fronts on the Kings Road. But there were also Hooray Henrys everywhere, girls in pearls and twerps in red braces, and a new city of finance rising in the old docklands.

Thatcher was in her tenth year as Prime Minister and was growing increasingly unhinged. It was the year of Hillsborough and the Marchioness disaster; there was growing unrest in the Eastern Bloc, but — as we set off for western Europe — the Berlin Wall had not yet fallen, and protestors had recently been mown down in Tiananmen Square. The times were dark and fierce and full of promise. It was summer, and I was young and on the loose in the big city.

Doolittle captured all of this: the screaming, the lopsided song construction, the big tunes. The ferocious glee of ‘Debaser’, the ecstatic doom of ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’. Quiet, loud, quiet; a wave of mute elation, a wave of mutilation, disaster and joy. The promise and fear of the future.

Tender Prey — Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

This underground exchange of music through blank tapes mirrored the underground music scene that it so often propagated. Where, for instance, was I going to hear the newest release by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds? Not in the music section of the local W H Smith (although I did unexpectedly discover Japan’s Oil On Canvas in there). Not on daytime BBC Radio 1, where the fatuous, superannuated DJs were mostly talking over Jive Bunny.

You might hear the new Nick Cave album, though, on a battered Boots-brand blank tape that had been pressed into your hand. Like the music, the tape was contraband, samizdat; a bulletin from the underground. The truly brilliant logo of the ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’ campaign — a piratical crossbones with a cassette as the skull — only emphasised the rebellious, buccaneering vibe. The homogenised national taste of Radio 1 and Top of The Pops made for a very clearly defined mainstream which, in turn, made for a clearly defined alternative scene, a piratical way of life.

This ease of exchanging music made curation easier and discovery cheaper. It also allowed for a networking of music taste. Your record collection was individual, but your music collection was promiscuously intermingled. Only one member of an extended social group actually needed to own any given record; the rest could all just buy blank tapes and get their own copies. With a little careful planning you could all have a music library that vastly exceeded the scope of your pocket money.

I’d immediately gone out and bought From Her To Eternity (1983) after I’d seen Wim Wenders’ Wings Of Desire (1987), which featured a performance by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. But I didn’t own Tender Prey. Ben’s present meant I didn’t have to buy it, and could instead go out and get The Firstborn Is Dead (1985), and through both of these find my way to Elvis and Johnny Cash and Howlin’ Wolf, just as Paul Simon and David Byrne introduced me to African music, and David Sylvian led me to Japanese music.

This Nation’s Saving Grace — The Fall

The stranglehold of the mainstream — four TV channels and two national pop music radio stations — also meant that if someone interesting or innovative got tangled up in it, then they could have a national effect. Someone, say, who really, really liked The Fall.

Cue ‘Pickin the Blues’ by Grinderswitch, which is on none of these records, but (if you’re a British adult of a certain age) will cause goosebumps, a surge of endorphins and possible age-related lachrymosity, because it was the theme tune to the John Peel Show.

John Peel had been part of the founding line-up of DJs for Radio 1, the BBC’s response to the pirate pop radio boom of the ‘60s. He had always championed underground music and that didn’t stop with the arrival of punk. He was our honorary cool uncle, helping to curate and build our taste. I’m pretty sure, for example, that Ben had only heard of The Dead Milkmen because Peel had played them in July 1987; he followed them with Elvis Presley and Sonic Youth, which should give you some idea of what his show was like. You were unlikely to see The Fall on Top Of The Pops, but you were going to hear them on Peel. They were his favourite band, and consequently inescapable.

The glory of a non-commercial, public service broadcaster like the BBC was that the alternative could become nestled within the mainstream, as much as it was defined in opposition to it. A band like The Fall were thus, quite rightly, established as an intrinsic part of the national culture. They are, after all, a quintessentially English band. Or, rather, Anglian. Mercian, even; forever suspicious of the soft South, the Saxons and the Wessex hegemony.

There’s a lot to criticise about Peel, of course, not least his appalling treatment of young women in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But his association with a certain kind of nerdy, male underground music fan is unfair. He himself was constantly infuriated by his fans’ tastes for snotty white boys with fuzzboxes and was determined to make them listen to whatever was new in dub, Zimbabewean rock or techno. Curators can easily become gatekeepers, but they can also be gate-openers, euterpomps, ushering the listener into a whole new perfumed garden of music.

Beelzebubba — The Dead Milkmen

Taste and identity are closely intertwined. The culture we consume inevitably affects our self-image, just as our personal experiences affect our taste. But we also frequently use our taste to identify ourselves.

This can make fandoms extremely deeply felt and closely guarded. They can be exclusive groups. As John Peel said, ‘There are people who don't like The Fall— they must be half-dead with beastliness. I spurn them with my toe.’ He was joking but, of course, he also wasn’t.

As well as a way of defining your own identity, taste becomes a way of sorting others. Perhaps as a side effect of the labyrinthine and underhand discovery process, the indie scene in 1989 was dominated by nerdery. Fans would not accept you if you didn’t have all the right concert bootlegs and Peel sessions, and couldn’t name all members of The Fall. Or, frequently, if you happened to be female. (Of course, not even Mark E Smith could name all the members of The Fall. Neither would he have cared to. As he said: ‘If it's me and your granny on bongos, then it's a Fall gig.’ Although I can’t imagine my grandmother would have had much truck with him.)

1989 was also the year of the infamous NME summit, a meeting in a North London pub between Mark E Smith, Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan of The Pogues, in which Mark E Smith lives up to his reputation as an ornery and self-absorbed troll. Nick Cave emerges heroically, valiantly trying to engage the cantankerous Smith and generously leaping to the defence of MacGowan. This is the flipside of that exclusivity: inclusivity.

This was not just a way of discovering music; it was a way of discovering friends. My party piece at university was a song I had written full of jokes about hillbilly inbreeding, a subject I knew nothing about. I’m not saying it was a good song, but if I found someone else who would laugh at it, then in all likelihood I had found a friend. And so, in a way, any friends I made through this route I owe to the snotty folk-punk of The Dead Milkmen, from whom I was cribbing.

In the only song I still play from this record, ‘Punk Rock Girl’, the lead singer suggests dressing ‘like Minnie Pearl’. This reference, which I had to hunt down, was to a country comedy act who dressed in outmoded ‘40s fashions. Like the music and the jokes, thrift-store chic was a social marker that displayed — like a butterfly’s wings or a baboon’s purple behind — your identity. If you dress like a Nick Cave fan, other Nick Cave fans are going to recognise you, and most likely hand you a C90 containing albums by Swans and A R Kane.1 You, on the other hand, have Einstürzende Neubauten and A C Marias and you can return the favour. All for the price of a blank cassette.

Of course, questions of music taste can be gendered too:

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

Hey, hey, we're the Monkees

In 1988, on the way through Hong Kong airport1, I bought two tapes to listen to on my Walkman on the flight home. I had been listening to a lot of traditional Chinese music for the past two weeks and was craving a shot of Western pop. One of these tapes would, at the time, have seemed like a likely choice and one of them would have seemed weird. I suspect those positions are reversed now.

The first tape was the eponymous debut album by the dream goth band All About Eve. They’d vaguely troubled the upper reaches of the Top 40 the year before but their single ‘Martha’s Harbour’ was just about to reach your actual Top 10. Albeit at number 10, but it still counts. They were a hip, new, vaguely indie band and exactly the sort of thing that a dreamy goth like me was going to listen to. These days, though, if All About Eve are remembered for anything, it’s for their disastrous appearance on the BBC’s leading pop show Top of the Pops.

The other tape I bought was the compilation ‘Then & Now… The Best of The Monkees’ (1986). This would have seemed much the stranger choice at the time. The Monkees were still seen as a cartoonish, ‘fake’ boy band known for faddish, plastic pop hits. It's not that we weren’t listening to ‘60s music in the late ‘80s; if anything, it was hard to avoid. But we were supposed to be listening to hallowed, serious legends such as Jimi Hendrix, not fun cheeky chappies from a kids’ TV show.

And people say we monkey around

(Video from The Rewind Team)

But I had grown up with The Monkees. In August 1981 the BBC started showing episodes of their eponymous TV show (1966–68) as part of its children’s programming during the summer holidays. The show had been the brainchild of Bob Rafaelson; the production company he ran with Bert Schnieder, Raybert, was also behind the production of Easy Rider and other New Hollywood hits.

The Monkees brought a lot of these new approaches to the small screen. Rafaelson’s basic idea had been to create a TV version of The Beatles’ movie A Hard Day’s Night (1964), which itself had been deeply influenced by French Nouvelle Vague styles, with its inventive editing and energetic, handheld filming. These techniques fed through into New Hollywood, and also into The Monkees.

Inventiveness was paired with a traditional approach to the material. The Monkees themselves – Mike Nesmith, Mickey Dolenz, Peter Tork and Davy Jones – were as much Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo as they were John, Ringo, George and Paul. Although studded with ‘hip’ cultural references (which inevitably went out of date fast), jump cuts, film speeds and weird story structures, their basic approach was kid-friendly slapsticking and wisecracking.

All this created an image of the West Coast ‘60s as neither hippie drop-out culture nor politically revolutionary, but rather as elements of both melded together: friendly, sunny, unruly, inventive. Fun. It was the perfect summer holiday viewing: light, bright, energetic, enjoyable and packed with amazing music.

But we're too busy singing

Singing bubblegum pop to a kiddie audience meant The Monkees weren’t taken seriously at the time or, indeed, in the late ‘80s. It also didn’t help that they didn’t play the instruments on their early hits. The Monkees had been recruited by Raybert as TV actors; their early hits were written by Tin Pan Alley professionals and recorded by session musicians (including the famous Wrecking Crew). Only at the end would Mickey or Davy be drafted in to sing vocals over the track.

None of these things were particularly unusual in the ‘60s, so the scorn they attracted was somewhat unfair. There’s a good argument, for example, that the Jimi Hendrix Experience was the creation of Chas Chandler, their manager. The Wrecking Crew played extensively on both The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Smile. And plenty of artists recorded songs written by professional songwriters. Indeed, The Monkees earned abuse for recording a version of the song ‘Mary, Mary’, previously recorded by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, until it was discovered that the song had, in fact, originally been written by Mike Nesmith.

Ironically, most of The Monkees were competent – and to a degree, professional – musicians. Nesmith had worked as a singer and songwriter2; Peter Tork was a multi-instrumentalist and veteran of the Greenwich Village folk scene; and Davy Jones had played the Artful Dodger in Oliver! on Broadway. Mickey Dolenz was more of an actor than a musician, but even he had been in bands. Once he learned to play the drums The Monkees were finally allowed to play on their own records.

These travails only added to their appeal. They were like a model of the ‘60s music industry, from bubblegum pop to album oriented rock; and they were also like a model of a growing up, from contained childhood to ornery adolescence. As you grow older you move on from the perfect pop of Neil Diamond’s ‘I’m a Believer’, through the sunny cynicism of Carole King’s ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’, and on to the psychedelic patter of Mickey Dolenz’s ‘Randy Scouse Git’. The Monkees were LA scene hipsters, after all; they recruited The Jimi Hendrix Experience to support them on tour and scare all their teen fans. Their own music was never going to be as mainstream as the perfect pop written for them.

All this culminated in The Monkees film Head (1968), a film that starts with The Monkees committing suicide and just gets weirder from there. It grew out of a brainstorm session involving The Monkees getting stoned with Bob Rafaelson and Jack Nicholson, after which Nicholson dropped a tab of acid and wrote the screenplay. And it shows. It is a splendidly late-‘60s West Coast confection, and ideal viewing for any teenager who grew up watching The Monkees on TV. Not only is it fantastically silly and obscure; it catches perfectly that adolescent wish to see your childhood favourites recontextualised and unexpectedly adult, the same spirit that brought us ‘The Trumpton Riots’ by Half Man Half Biscuit and Peter Jackson’s Meet The Feebles (1989).

To put anybody down

All this has meant that I’m still a fan, forty years later. It is a Metropolitan tradition to go on a Christmas cinema trip, and my trip last year was to the Garden Cinema in Covent Garden to watch a The Monkees Christmas episode on the big screen.

Anything read, listened to or watched in childhood is likely to have unlikely repercussions in adulthood. The Monkees, along with The Beatles in Help (1965) and numerous super-teams like Thunderbirds and G-Force, gave me a wholly unrealistic set of expectations for living in a shared house as a young adult. The life of the Monkees – four friends who get to hang out all day having whimsical adventures and larking about – seems like the perfect life to a child, and is absolutely part of why the Harry Potter series is so popular.

Moreover, a band is the ideal form for male friendships. Like a sports team, it gives everyone an excuse to get together and gives them something to do when they do. They all have something to talk about and, like those super-teams, they all have assigned roles which come with pre-determined characteristics (ask a musician for a drummer joke if you need an example). When I finally got to live in a shared house with my friends, our lives were admittedly a little more The Young Ones than The Monkees; but some of us were, at least, in a band. And the only cover we played was Circle Sky, a Monkees song (written by Mike Nesmith) from the soundtrack of Head.

For more on the unexpected resonances of the music of childhood, try Rowan’s piece on the sounds of ‘76

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

Tom Waits’ 1987 album Frank’s Wild Years, track by track.

Hang on St. Christopher

Despite being tone deaf, having no sense of rhythm and being far too cack handed to play an instrument effectively, I always wanted to be a musician. Around the age of eighteen I had a very clear idea of the kind of music I would make if I was. It would be rhythmically lumbering, musically peculiar, unexpected, delirious, the sort of music a monster in a Universal movie might make. Like nothing anyone else had ever done before.

Then, one day, I walked into a friend’s bedroom and discovered someone else had done it. Someone had made the music I was hearing in my head. Music no one else had made before. A whole new direction. Hang on to your St. Christophers, because it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Straight to the Top (Rhumba)

How do you describe the music Tom Waits was making in this period to someone who has never heard it before? The Rhumba version of ‘Straight to the Top’ is a decent enough place to start, possibly. Several hairy percussion sections have got together to rumble out a rhumba beat, while the horns from a Turkish big band are playing odd little snippets of melodies, with an angry old street preacher yelling a parody Frank Sinatra song over the top.

None of it sounds like it should work on its own and certainly not all happening together, and yet it all coalesces into an extraordinary sound that is simultaneously new and full of its influences. This meld of obscure folk instruments, blues song structures and beat lyrics created the soundtrack of a parallel world, of back streets and cellar bars and attic roosts, a music unlike any other.

Blow Wind Blow

The friend had been given the Tom Waits record by an Aunt, which was just as well because we were unlikely to have found it by ourselves.

Starting in the late ‘70s Radio One DJ and universal hipster uncle John Peel would compile his Festive Fifty, a list of the best records of the year, voted for by his listeners. The Festive Fifty for 1987 included a lot of bands I loved, like The Wedding Present, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Big Black and Sonic Youth, but no Tom Waits. Twelve different Smiths tracks. Twelve. A whole thirteen too many. But no Tom Waits. Even for the indie kids, who scorned Top of the Pops and used the Top 40 merely as a guide as to what not to listen to, Tom Waits was too weird.

This was an alternative to the alternative.

Temptation

Which was very appealing, of course. Particularly because I hated The Smiths. But listening to Frank’s Wild Years you got the impression that Tom Waits may have had no opinion of them, may never have heard of them or any of the ‘80s cultural world in which we were saturated. He was from somewhere else.

Halfway up Parkway in Camden, London, there was then a greasy spoon cafe. This cafe had its name painted on its windows, just above shallow gingham curtains that ran along a brass rail across the vertical centre of the glass, so that, from the outside, you only saw the heads of occupants, nursing their vile instant coffee in the steamy yellow light.

In other words, it looked to us like the closest we could get to the cover of Waits’ 1975 album Nighthawks at the Diner, and so, ignoring the temptations of Camden Market, the goths and the bootlegs and oily noodles, we would sit there, nursing our horrible coffee, trying to force ourselves into his world.

Innocent When You Dream (Barroom)

The thing is, Frank’s Wild Years was not just different to other records, it was different to other Tom Waits records. Waits had started out as a cocktail bar pianist, a down-at-heel crooner, mumbling out comedy songs like ‘Better off without a wife’ and bleary anthems like ‘Ol’ 55’ to tipsy audiences. At one point his knack for a tune and a poetic lyric had critics bracketing him with Bruce Springsteen as the great hope for the American Songbook. You can hear that talent for classic song writing in ‘Innocent When You Dream’, a delicate melody floating over the wheezing organ and jangling piano.

And then, starting with the album Swordfishtrombones things started to get strange. There had been signs of it, of course, on earlier records, the wandering beat jazz of ‘Diamonds on my Windshield’, the odd shiver and hiss of ‘Red Shoes by the Drugstore’. But Swordfishtrombones opens with a Frankenstein percussion and a skeletal marimba and, as the first song’s chorus says: ‘There’s a world going on underground’.

I’ll Be Gone

The old Tom Waits had been transformed. And the transformer was Kathleen Brennan. Waits met Brennan on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s One From The Heart, for which Waits was working on the soundtrack. They were engaged within a week. It was Brennan who introduced Waits to far more obscure musical inspirations like Captain Beefheart (an obvious influence with his fractured arrangements) and Harry Partch, the experimental musician who made his own strange instruments. Waits and Brennan have been married collaborators ever since. As Waits says: ‘I'm just the figurehead. She's the one who's steering the ship’.

Yesterday is Here

Part of what makes Frank’s Wild Years so persistently timeless is how out of time so many of those influences are. Brennan’s experimental taste mixed with Waits’ own influences of jazz and blues makes for an indefinable combination, especially where those traditions meet, in artists like Kurt Weill. Weill was born in Germany in 1900, studied as a classical composer and co-wrote The Threepenny Opera with Berthold Brecht, including the now jazz standard ‘Mack the Knife’. You can hear Weill’s twitchy, Berlin cabaret sound all the way through Frank’s Wild Years; Mittel European, dark, theatrical.

Please Wake Me Up

It’s appropriate, that theatricality, the promise of becoming someone else of reinvention and transformation. The first time listener has their idea of popular music transformed for a start. But in Waits’ growth as a musician there is also the promise of artistic renaissance. You don’t have to be Mick and Keith, grinding out the same turgid twelve-bar chug for fifty years. You can transform, be someone new.

Frank’s Theme

That theatricality is also appropriate since the album started out as a play. Described by Waits as ‘ cross between Eraserhead and It's A Wonderful Life’, it tells the story of a failed accordion player, Frank O’Brien, who is freezing to death on a East St. Louis park bench and dreams of his life story.

The play was put on by the renown Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago in 1985. Waits and Brennan wrote the libretto, with Waits writing all of the music, and Waits played Frank O’Brien. It was directed by Gary Sinise, of all people, and included Steppenwolf ensemble member Gary Cole in the cast.

Incidentally, Waits’ father was called Frank, but as Waits has pointed out, his actual first name was Jesse and ‘no, Dad, it's not about you.’

More Than Rain

But then, Waits was no stranger to acting a part. So much of his performance was performance. He seemed to have spent his youth pretending to be a fifty-something bar-fly, singing songs that were full of characters and their stories: the desperate pregnant writer of ‘Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis’, the tired and emotional romantic of ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You’. Playing a character called Tom Waits, essentially. And now playing, on this record, multiple voices from the life of Frank O’Brien, a character played on stage by Tom Waits. It’s a carnival hall of distorting mirrors, but nothing new for Waits. It's a short step from being the carnival barker of ‘Step Right Up’ on the album Small Change, to being the hell-fire preacher of ‘Way Down In A Hole’ on Frank’s Wild Years.

Way Down In A Hole

If you’ve never heard Frank’s Wild Years, you’ve almost certainly heard at least some version of ‘Way Down In A Hole’ because it was used as the theme music for one of the most significant TV series of the early twenty-first century: The Wire. Different seasons used different covers, with Waits’ version only appearing in season two. For all that it's hard to think of anyone working in Waits’ style, the classical song writing skills that underlie his music mean that he is endlessly covered, often by unexpected artists like Rod Stewart or Paul Young. Scarlett Johanssen has done a whole album of mostly Tom Waits covers.

Straight To The Top (Vegas)

The influence goes the other way, of course. ‘Straight To The Top (Vegas)’ is a parody of the kind of self-aggrandizing, boosterish cabaret song about success in show business, though here sung by someone who is very much headed to the bottom. But like all parody, it's also an introduction to the material it’s parodying, it might just prompt you to listen to more Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett to try and find out where Tom Waits is coming from.

I'll Take New York

Or where he’s going to. Like the record as a whole, the wonky, downward slide of ‘I’ll Take New York’, the sound of a dream dying in a back alley, is an introduction to another world. ‘Some day they’re going to name a street after me’ wails (presumably) Frank, but it won’t be Broadway. It’ll be some grimy little backstreet leading only to a seedy dive bar full of failed stars and men who only remember what they could have been when they’re drunk.

The cartoonist Tom Gauld did a cartoon called ‘The street Tom Waits grew up on’, which includes an ‘abandoned clown-show factory’, ‘Saint Frank’s hobo orphanage’ and the ‘accordion players’ graveyard’. This is the street we’re being led down.

Telephone Call From Istanbul

My friend (and friend of The Metropolitan) Simon, used to run a student bop when we were at University together. Early on in the evening, before the place was busy, he would always play me a Tom Waits track, so I could heave and shoulder around the dance floor, ticking and jumping like a broken clockwork scarecrow. ‘Telephone Call From Istanbul’ is surprisingly danceable.

It’s not a lonely street, that Tom Waits street. A lot of people live there, or at least wander down, now and then, to see the sights and meet the weirdos who live there. Like so many iconic artists and outré albums it serves as a cheat code, a quick way of establishing a shared world view and tastes, a friendship accelerator.

Cold Cold Ground

Most of all though, it remains an incredible record. As the first full realisation of the newly transformed Tom Waits, it is still, musically, unlike anything else, of its time or since, even among Tom Waits records. Most of all, though, underpinning all the experimental theatre and mutant instrumentation, there is a solid foundation of plain old good song writing.

Train Song

Part of that solidity is that under all the playacting there is a deep honesty. Waits may be playing characters and telling stories, but he is telling those stories to a purpose and they can be full of real emotion. Especially in 1987, when the top selling singles in the UK were ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’, ‘Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now’ and - wait for it - ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ (you’ve only got yourself to blame if you click that link). None of which are half so achingly beautiful or heart-felt as ‘Train Song’.

Innocent When You Dream (78)

My favourite track on the record, this. And I always used to say that Frank’s Wild Years was my favourite album. According to my Spotify Wrapped my top artist for 2024 was Tom Waits, so I suppose it still is.

Waits has, of course, appeared in The Metropolitan before, by appearing in Jim Jarmusch’s fim Mystery Train

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

Hints and allegations

It didn’t start well. Paul Simon was working with Heidi Berg, a young singer-songwriter, who gave him a home-recorded tape of South African music as a reference for the kind of sound she wanted to achieve. Simon immediately fell in love with the music, took the tape, identified the musicians, and went off to make his own record, leaving an annoyed Heidi Berg in his dust.

And that was just the start, because when the record, Graceland, was finally released everyone else got annoyed. This was the period of racist, apartheid rule in South Africa, and the UN had called for a worldwide cultural boycott. By going to South Africa and working with South African musicians, Simon had broken that embargo.

His defenders argued that he was working only with black South African musicians, giving an outlet (and money) to oppressed artists. But the power of this boycott didn’t lie so much in its economic pressure as in the most effective punishment known to social apes: ostracism. The point was to tell the ruling white South Africans that their repugnant views made everything about South Africa unwelcome among other humans. Whether they were selling oranges or township jive, their political system made their cultural products untouchable.

In other words, the embargo was indiscriminate, as all embargos must be. But the case of Graceland seemed to draw out a particularly painful quirk: if it had worked as intended, it would have isolated the black South African creators with whom Simon collaborated. This was – to use a word we didn’t use so much then – problematic. The album was released barely one year after Live Aid, a pioneering international rock concert that raised millions for famine relief in Ethiopia and featured not a single African artist. Here, finally, were some African musicians appearing in the pop charts. They were not receiving Western charity; the audience was not asked to interpret them as the victims of oppression. They were, unequivocally, artists: the makers of music, the spreaders of joy.

The embargo aside, there were other controversies. Many of the tracks are co-credited to Simon and his collaborators, but there have been various accusations of plagiarism, not least from some of his American collaborators, including the Mexican-American band Los Lobos. As with many creative collaborations it seems that origins and inspirations were frequently muddy, but in the end everything was – at least in part – credited to ‘Paul Simon’. This wasn’t the first time Simon had been accused of playing fast and loose with attribution; English folk singer Martin McCarthy was furious with him for leaving the customary ‘trad.’ off the credits to ‘Scarborough Fair’, and thus appearing to claim authorship of one of England’s most enduring folk songs. But then Bob Dylan did the same when he used some ‘Scarborough Fair’ lyrics in ‘Girl from the North Country’. The folk tradition is full of versions, adaptations, reworkings and developments; all popular music is. Everything is a remix. Sadly, copyright law is less catholic. The history of popular music is all too often one of famous artists writing down, recording and getting the credit for the work of the creators who preceded them.

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts

A lot of this fuss only made the headlines because the record was a hit. By the mid-’80s Paul Simon’s career had slumped, but it was revived spectacularly by the unexpected, joyful sound of township jive and zydeco. The mainstream was full of lumbering rock dinosaurs peddling flatulent rock n’roll; Graceland was extraordinarily different. This ‘60s rock star sounded more like Talking Heads (similarly influenced by African music) or Lloyd Cole and Commotions, or – in the case of the track ‘I Know What I Know’ – alt-rock legends fIREHOSE.

In truth, Simon had never had much in common with the rock dinosaurs. His background in ‘50s pop and ‘60s folk meant he had always had a peculiar relationship with the rock mainstream; his output had always been far more poppy and far more literate. His lyrics place him as at least partly within the tradition of musical theatre; he has the rhythmic verbal knack of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, and Cole Porter’s delight in multisyllabic rhymes and inventions. Graceland is full of surprising and beautiful images. Think of the opening line to the title track: ‘The Mississippi Delta / Was shining like a National guitar’. (The 1985 Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms had featured a gleaming, chromed National guitar on the cover.) There’s the joyful metonymy of ‘Empty as a pocket’, and incisive epigrams: ‘Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts’.

His folk inheritance, meanwhile, gives him a gift for poignant storytelling - ‘My travelling companion is nine years old / He is the child of my first marriage’ - and a light and illuminating poetry. The last verse of ‘Boy in the Bubble’ contains a perfect little summary of the late 20th/early 21st century:

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
…
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Don't cry, don't cry

‘These are the days of miracle and wonder / And don’t cry baby’  should be the words written over the door to the modern world.

Best of all, this verbal dexterity plays beautifully with the rhythms of the South African backing, his sweet voice with the intricate verbal dexterity dancing around the chiming guitars, choral voices and propulsive bass. You could see this mixture of upbeat music, adult lyrics and hummable pop tunes as the epitome of self-confident and sunny Reaganite America, resurgent across the world, hoovering up everyone else’s art and repackaging it as disposable fast culture. This is particularly easy if the image in your mind’s eye is of Chevy Chase in the video for ‘You Can Call Me Al’, linen jacket over his t-shirt and a smug smirk on his frat-bro face: the very icon of the ‘80s Boomer. I certainly felt uneasy listening to it, aged 16. I was vaguely aware that I should be listening to something harder, obscurer, less commercial.

But you can’t write Graceland off as plastic corporate output. (The closest it gets to conventional mid-80s schlock is ‘Crazy Love, Vol II’). The music is internationalist and inclusive, the lyrics are adult, literate and funny, and the tunes remain hummable. The innovation and invention that made it a massive worldwide hit have also made it a lasting and rewarding piece of work. It still sounds fresh and exciting.

Paul Simon has always been lurking away in the background of my life. Our story started with my dad’s copy of The Graduate soundtrack, the impeccable storytelling of ‘Mrs Robinson’ (‘Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home’) and the delicate gem that is ‘April Come She Will’. Throughout my childhood he was on the radio with cheerful pop hits: ‘Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard’. ‘Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover’. Lately Spotify has been slipping tracks into my playlist: ‘Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War’. I was beginning to suspect that I was becoming a Paul Simon fan. On re-listening to Graceland I discovered I had been one all along.

For slightly more unsettling sunshiney ‘80s pop, there’s always the looming threat of the Boys of Summer:

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

Duel

My abiding love for Propaganda’s 1985 single ‘Duel’ is entirely the fault of my school friend Omer. Omer had Belgian connections and a European affect, and he introduced me to all kinds of unspeakable Continental tastes like the film Subway and Swatch watches.

But Omer wasn’t only a fan of Propaganda, a German quasi-industrial electronic band; he was also a fan of their very British record label, ZTT.

Independent and small record labels played an important role in the ‘80s music scene. They had their own distinctive looks and sounds; you would sometimes chance a purchase of an artist you didn’t know if you recognised and liked the label. A 4AD record would have a Vaughan Oliver cover and most likely something shoegazey inside. Mute meant electronica. Rough Trade meant guitars. And ZTT? Well, ZTT promised pretension.

Even the name ‘ZTT’ is pretentious; it comes from a poem by the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in which the sound of a machine gun is phoneticised as ‘zang tumb tumb’. (Incidentally, Marinetti once fought a duel with a critic, largely for the swank of it. He was pretty pretentious himself.) The Propaganda record I have in front of me goes so far as to have a quote from Goethe on the back: 

Und umzuschaffen das Geschaffne,
Damit sich's nicht zum Starren waffne,
Wirkt ewiges, lebendiges Tun.

ZTT was founded by three people: Jill Sinclair, who co-founded London’s Sarm Studios; her husband, the producer Trevor Horn; and the music journalist Paul Morley. It seems fair to assume that most of the pretentiousness came from Morley; he has enough of it to spare. He was born in Surrey but grew up in Lancashire and went to grammar school there, as did Horn (and their fellow pop/art provocateur and co-founder of Factory Records, Tony Wilson). 

It is tempting to see their pretentiousness as a product of this background: that these ambitious, clever and slightly chippy northern grammar school boys enjoyed surprising the flabby, cosy southern public school establishment with their intelligence and sophistication. But it could also be part of the post-punk rising of the North (of England), the way that local scenes in Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield stood against the mainstream music industry in London while constantly feeding it with novelty and revolution. 

Then again, the pretentiousness might have been a challenge to the earnestness of punk and the earthiness of ‘70s rock; an iteration of the New Romantic ‘revolt into style’, a languid middle finger to bands who smelled of pub carpets and knew the price of rolling tobacco. New Romantics had never been afraid of quoting a German poet or two. Propaganda, a band from Düsseldorf, took aim at kneejerk little-Englander anti-intellectualism. (Does any country other than England have an equivalent for the insult ‘too clever by half’? No one is accused of being ‘too agile by half’ or ‘too good a plumber by half’.) When I was a teenager ‘pretentious’ was a common insult, and when I was around it was frequently aimed at me. It felt like a scarlet letter pinned on anyone with a book of translated stories in one pocket and a notebook of poor poetry in the other. It was a switching cane aimed at tall poppies, a curb on the curious. 

A record cover with a Goethe quote on felt like a challenge raised on behalf of all the awkward teenage poetasters; a promise that there was another country, somewhere one might be able to discuss books, enjoy paintings, and listen to art pop, all without being insulted. Possibly just on the other side of the Channel, where they made stylish movies and mass-produced designer watches.

Jewel

That Goethe quote above is not on the cover of Propaganda’s first LP, A Secret Wish. Instead, it is on the back of Wishful Thinking, an album of — wait for it — ‘disturbdances’: that is, remixes of tracks from A Secret Wish. In the sort of glorious bathetic mode that so typifies proper pretension, Goethe’s lines are deployed as a metaphor for pop remixes:

And refashioning the fashioned
Lest it stiffen into iron
Is work of endless vital activity

‘Duel’ did not stand on its own. There was always also the B-side, ‘Jewel’, a much more industrial version sung by a different member of the band (Susanne Freytag rather than Claudia Brücken). ZTT was an inveterate releaser of remixes, producing an endless and confusing slew of 12-inches, cassingles (which they popularised) and compilations.

Studio-finessed electronic tracks such as ‘Duel’ lent themselves to this kind of disassembly and reimagining. Jill Sinclair’s Sarm Studios was the first 48-track recording studio in England. It used analogue technology, but prefigured the digital copying and pasting of stems and tracks, the remastering and mashing up. 

This is music that never quite settles; it is a continually evolving conversation between artists, audiences and curators. You might see it as a return to a more traditional form. Before recording — the act of setting a particular performance in stone — music was a matter of interpretation and invention. 

ZTT’s branding and packaging, though, suggested yet another lens: remixing as the reformulation of a mass produced object, responsive to changing consumer tastes. ZTT were extraordinarily good at branding. Their signature graphics — lowercase sans serif fonts, plenty of white space, primary colours and juxtaposed patterns — recalled the seminal Memphis design palette that Swatch referenced too.

ZTT were responsible for the most emblematic of all ‘80s branding exercises: the ‘Frankie say’ t-shirt. Frankie Goes To Hollywood were ZTT’s breakout act, and as marketing for the single ‘Relax’ the label produced plain white t-shirts with huge slogans in black block Impact font: ‘FRANKIE SAY RELAX DON’T DO IT’, ‘FRANKIE SAY WAR! HIDE YOURSELF’, ‘FRANKIE SAY ARM THE UNEMPLOYED’. Inspired by Katherine Hamnett, these shirts were huge in both size and sales figures, in some shops outselling the actual single they were marketing. (The plural form of the verb — ‘Frankie say’ not ‘Frankie says’ — was arguably correct when ‘Frankie’ is a group of people; but it sounded odd on the ear, because we are used to assuming that somebody called ‘Frankie’ is a single person. This — both the formal correctness and the jarring quality — was undoubtedly intentional, and an absolute chef’s-kiss of pretentiousness.)

But – and this is the crucial thing – as well as being very good at branding, ZTT were very good at making pop records. ‘Relax’ reached Number One in the UK and stayed in the charts for a whole year. ‘Duel’ reached 21 in the charts, which wasn’t bad for a post-industrial electronica outfit from Düsseldorf. 

For all the design and posing going on around it, ‘Duel’ is, ultimately, a pristine bit of ‘80s pop. From the opening plangent riff, through the throbbing, nightclub verse (with Stewart Copeland of The Police providing the drum track) to the rising, glorious chorus; from Claudia Brücken’s fog-horn voice wailing over the icy sheets of synthesiser to the great, sliding glacial roars and stabs; it is, to put it mildly, a banger. 

This is not music for a poetry reading or a first night opening. This is music for playing loud, for losing yourself in, for dancing. The German poetry, complementary-coloured halftone patterns and endless repackaging were nothing but rococo decoration, a period setting for a shining jewel.

On the front cover of Wishful Thinking is the motto: ‘for the footsteps and heartbeats of the connoisseur’. It sounds pretentious but you know what? They’re not wrong.

For more suspect Continental music, there’s always our piece on French laser harpist Jean-Michel Jarre:

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

I have a confession: I don’t like ‘I Feel For You’ by Chaka Khan. This feels like a bad place to start, because pretty much everyone else thinks it’s perfect. This includes Tobias, who is not a noted connoisseur of new jack swing; my best school-run-mum friend, who listens to Magic FM; and my children’s father, who likes music you couldn't possibly understand by artists you have absolutely never heard of.  

Everybody except me, apparently, loves ‘I Feel For You’. Now that Spotify has collapsed the signifiers of age and genre and generally brought popular music into a single unified bloc, the youth have discovered ‘I Feel For You’; my older son — guess what? — loves it. (Literally this week there was excited chatter in the family WhatsApp about Chaka Khan doing a Tiny Desk, an NPR strand that — I’m told — is like Peel Sessions, but recorded in the corner of an office.)

It’s just never done it for me. And I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, because I first started hearing ‘I Feel For You’ a lot more than I wanted to 40 years ago, when it was released in 1984.

This is basically my mother’s fault, as is traditional. She went about her business with Radio 4 burbling constantly in the background, which meant that – as well as Farming Week and The Financial World Tonight and Poetry Please! (no thank you!) – she listened to, and internalised the contents of, Science Now. And at some point in the early ‘80s, Science bloody Now told her that headphones cause hearing loss.

This, in turn, led to the issuing of an edict that my brother and I would not be allowed Walkmans or headphones of any kind until we achieved adulthood, got incomes, started buying our own stuff, and generally went the hell away. And all of this meant that the only way we could listen to music of our choice was to commandeer the record player in our front room and make use of its speakers.

We almost always did this alone, which gave it a kind of devotional quality; there was an unspoken understanding that nobody else would come into the room while we were listening to our records. But this is not to say that the rest of the family was unmarked by the experience, because the more we liked something, the more we would turn the volume up. And my brother really liked ‘I Feel For You’. When he went alone into our front room to play it he would turn the speakers all the way up to 8. (It never crossed our minds to turn them up to 10. We weren’t that sort of family.)

So it was that, for about six months, ‘I Feel For You’ became the fifth member of the household. I can confidently report that it is a very trebly sort of track, and that its synth trills and hi-hats remain audible through two firmly closed doors. Our shonky speakers didn’t do a lot with the bass, but not to worry: those frequencies were amply provided by other means. 

This was the era of body popping and headspinning and The Kids From Fame! Under the influence of the times, my brother and I both liked to express our musical enthusiasm using the universal language of dance. Unfortunately we are from stout Pembrokeshire farming stock, and we defied gravity in exactly the way that Shire horses don’t. When my brother — wearing a karate belt tied around his forehead, a white vest from M&S, and red nylon shorts — was dancing to ‘I Feel For You’, you could hear it from the bathroom to the garden shed, and probably on the Space Shuttle.

Of course, you don’t listen to a song you love just once. And my brother — did I mention? — really loved ‘I Feel For You’. After each thunderous performance there would be a pause; sometimes a short one while my brother lifted the needle and brought it carefully back to the beginning, sometimes a longer one during which he would emerge from the front room, running with sweat, to have a pee or get a glass of water or just stand in the garden in the cool winter night, emitting steam. And then he would go back into the front room, close the door, and we would be off for another round with Chaka. 

And alright: I sort of get it, in the way you can ‘get’ a perfect pop song even if it doesn’t hit your personal sweet spot. It’s fast and fun, and amazingly kinetic. The synths swoop and then stab, holding you in space while the momentum punches through you; and then the synths explode and you hurtle off again. It’s the audio equivalent of a ride on a Waltzer, and I can’t say fairer than that because I bloody love Waltzers. I am also a tremendous fan of a Stevie Wonder harmonica solo. And I bought ‘Little Red Corvette’ by Prince (whose song it originally was) before Prince was even a thing in the UK. I really should have liked ‘I Feel For You’.

But you can divide Prince songs into meticulously engineered falsettos and free-swinging grooves, and I’ve always preferred the latter. I love ‘Starfish and Coffee’ and ‘I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man’, but the mode that everyone associates with Prince is the stop-start-and-hiccup of ‘Kiss’, and it’s this stuttery vibe that characterises ‘I Feel For You’. It’s also the giveaway that someone is ripping Prince off: see Janelle Monáe’s ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ and Amerie’s ‘1 Thing’, with their precise trebly pops and clicks and air-gaps. It’s all so weightless. If ‘the funk’ means skittering about like a surprised earwig then I just do not have the funk, and I don’t care who knows it. Give me the great big stomping squelch of ‘Superstition’ any day.

There were a lot of stuttery songs in 1984. There were a lot of stops and starts and repeats, and darts and slaps and pokes and sudden incursions, like having a fight with three or more toddlers. There was also far, far too much stuff being played backwards. Keyboard technology was evolving fast — in 1983 US sales of keyboards overtook sales of fretted instruments for the first time — and a generation of producers were experimenting with sampling. Twelve-inch club-mixes had brought the whole idea of ‘remixing’ to the mainstream surface; and, regrettably, the general public had discovered rap. 

To be polite, the various musical expressions of these trends did not always display a sophisticated understanding of the importance of thematic unity. Some tracks – like ‘White Lines’ by Melle Mel (who also appeared on ‘I Feel For You’) and ‘Automatic’ by The Pointer Sisters – had the same jazz/MOBO heritage as ‘I Feel For You’ and were at least musically coherent. I absolutely couldn’t stand Scritti Politti – STOP FUCKING SQUEAKING – but similarly he did seem to have a clear idea of what he was actually doing. ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ is a very irritating song and has the worst title in the history of music, but George Michael was too much of a pop genius not to understand how the genre could be made to work. But 1984 saw an awful lot of uncomprehending cut-and-shuts, like Duran Duran’s ‘The Reflex’ (pick an idea! I don’t care which one!), ‘Sexcrime’ by The Eurythmics, and everything by Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones.

The whole musical year was so unrestful, frantic and acidic, full of static and glare. Cyndi Lauper was singing in a register known only to dogs and Frankie Goes To Hollywood were working through every sound effect in the BBC’s Stereophonic Workshop. It was the year I began to give up on the charts, and started — ever so cautiously — to explore other things: when I commandeered the front room I was hollering along to ‘The Saturday Boy’ by Billy Bragg and trying out dance moves to U2’s ‘New Year’s Day’, which was even worse than that sounds.

‘I Feel For You’ was by no means the worst record released in 1984; obviously, the fact that it annoys me so much is testament to its skitter-stutter power. But it was definitely the record I heard the greatest number of times that year, despite — I just want to make this clear — really not liking it. Still, I’m in good company: Chaka Khan herself says she’s ‘very bored of “I Feel For You”’. I think… I think I love her.

You can get more Melle Mel, meanwhile, by listening to ‘White Lines’ with Adam Frost:

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

It’s 22 September 1982, and Culture Club’s third single ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ is at 38 in the UK singles chart. It is doing better than their first two singles, which had not troubled the charts at all; but it is not doing well enough to feature on Top of the Pops. 

And then – at least, this is the legend – an ex-milkman known to his mum as Michael Barratt changed the course of pop history. ‘We actually only found out we were going to be on Top of the Pops the night before the show’, Boy George told The Guardian in 2007. ‘We were only asked because Shakin' Stevens pulled out.’ George says he stayed up all night thinking about what to wear. 

What a night that must have been. 

At this point – six weeks before the launch of Channel 4 – Britain had exactly three TV channels, and Top of the Pops was a giant presence. First shown in 1964, it had a legendary backstory; it also had media coverage to die for, relentless cross-promotion on the country’s biggest radio station, and an enormous captive audience. By the end of the ‘70s the show was cluttered with vestigial structures, including a full BBC orchestra that insisted on ‘accompanying’ live appearances under the terms of an ancient agreement with the Musicians Union. But in 1980 a whirlwind arrived in the form of a new producer, BBC lifer Michael Hurll. The changes he made allowed TOTP to ride the New Wave. He dumped the orchestra, introduced a new title sequence and a sparkly rota of younger presenters, and ramped up the hysteria with whistles and party hats. Professional dancers and cheerleaders were sprinkled throughout the audience. One of them was a young Londoner who went by the name Boy George.

In its impregnable prime-time slot – Thursday evenings, just after dinner time, 51 weeks of the year – it was watched by doctors and dockers, tabloid editors and MPs, students and shop workers, mums and dads and primary school children and pensioners. Culture Club had been getting some play on Radio 1, but ‘the only way to see George, in 1982, was Top of the Pops’ said Culture Club producer Steve Levine in a BBC documentary about that night. ‘Nobody had seen George in the flesh… I felt in my heart that if the world could see him, it would make all the difference.’ 

Twelve million people saw Boy George that night, and most of us – whether we turned into Culture Club fans or not - have never forgotten it. He looked straight down the barrel of the camera while singing the plangent intro line, and the space between performer and viewer instantly collapsed. He launched himself past the studio crew and the editing suite and the Crystal Palace transmitter, and exploded like a charisma bomb in front of all the brickies and the barristers and the grannies and the teenagers. A couple of minutes later, bassist Roy Hay – always the most straight-looking member of the group, in all possible senses – was caught by the camera looking at George with wonder and a little bit of awe, even apprehension. In these four minutes George changed his bandmates’ lives forever, and I think you can see the moment when Roy Hay realises what’s happening. 

His bandmate and lover Jon Moss said he looked ‘so beautiful and delicate, like a flower.’ Levine described a ‘big coat and Hasidic Jew vibe.’ Smash Hits writer Dave Rimmer, in his early-’80s pop history Like Punk Never Happened, noticed ‘a cacophony of religious symbolism, hearts and swords and flames’. Every British person I know can tell a story about it; one of my friends remembers her dad shouting at the TV. Because whatever else people saw, the thing that we all noticed was that it wasn’t entirely clear whether Boy George was a man or a woman. Everything about his sex was ambiguous, but the ambiguity was precisely engineered. He was called Boy George but had long hair and a full face of make-up; he appeared to be wearing both trousers and a dress. He smiled gleefully. His movements were delicate and fluid; there was no sense of muscularity, no swagger. He danced like your nan at a family wedding and he looked like a silent film star: Louise Brooks in rainbow colours.

In schools and workplaces all over the country the next day there was only one topic of conversation. ‘There were stories of people dropping cups of tea and saying “What is that”’ recounted Moss, but ‘it’s why I fell in love with him. It’s like, “shit”. It looks like a girl. It’s not a girl, it’s a man.’  As well as fascination, confusion and instant adoration, he provoked hysteria in the tabloid press – ‘IS IT A BOY OR IS IT A GIRL?’ squealed The Sun – and fury among the homophobes and traditionalists, like my friend’s dad yelling at the telly. 

George describes himself as ‘an old-fashioned gay man’; but in his autobiography, he says that his gender-ambiguous presentation annoyed plenty of gay people too. He writes that patrons of gay clubs such as Heaven wanted most of all ‘to think of themselves as “normal”, with their James Dean and Marlon Brando obsessions, white T-shirts and Levi’s’... I’ve been turned away from more gay clubs than anyone else, with a statement like “You’re embarrassing to us. Go away”.

I’m not remotely qualified to talk about what it was like to be a gay clubber in the early 1980s. But if the trad-masculine dress code was as strictly enforced as George claims, it’s not difficult to see how that might have come about. At this point, men who experimented with femininity were considered risible in and of themselves. British comedy of the 1970s and the early 1980s was blighted by an uncomfortable form of light-entertainment drag, in which middle aged men snickeringly dressed up in plastic boobs and garish makeup before performing comedy sketches about sexual exhibitionism and desperation. Two deficient identities in one, women and gay men, explicitly elided: what else is a man in a dress if not a poof, and what is a poof, if not a woman? 

After the first AIDS diagnosis in the UK in 1981 gay people were gathering their communal political strength for the fights to come: for public understanding and healthcare, for respect and safety, and for legal and social parity. The perception that gay men were typically effeminate was costly in terms of public support; emphasising ‘normality’ was good political strategy, an example of what Australian election supremo Lynton Crosby calls ‘scraping the barnacles off the boat’. 

But while some of his pop star contemporaries were all-in on the political objective of gay liberation, George had a separate agenda. ‘Let me tell you what I’m doing’, he told Dave Rimmer in 1985. ‘I don’t try to walk around in a check shirt and I don’t try to look normal. What I’m doing is making people accept effeminate men.’ His project was to persuade Middle England that men with a feminine gender presentation were not scary or unpleasant, and could comfortably be brought into the broad social fold. In prioritising this, George barely acknowledged that he was gay at all. Right through the peak of Culture Club’s success, he never spoke publicly about loving other men. 

Wham!’s first appearance on Top of the Pops, on 4 November 1982, came just six weeks after Culture Club’s. The story has a similar shape: a struggling second single wallowing outside the Top 30, a last-minute call because another artist had dropped out. And although their appearance was not specifically astonishing in the way Boy George’s had been, it had a similarly combustible impact on their career. 

It seems ludicrous, now, that we did not notice that George Michael was gay. His clothes that night – espadrilles, tight denim turn-ups, a sleeveless leather waistcoat – didn’t seem remarkable, but in retrospect they were a spin on the James Dean template that Boy George had identified at London’s gay clubs. Interviewed for the Channel 4 documentary Outed, London drag queen DJ Fat Tony remembered meeting Michael at a club, before he became famous: ‘I’m not being funny,’ he says, but ‘all the signs were there.’ 

Wham!’s signature look quickly devolved into a kind of Day-Glo fuck-boy costume: tight tops and sleeveless vests, muscles and tans, languorous oiled bodies in snap-to-fit swimming briefs, a hyper-performance of masculinity and male desirability. This had nothing to do with Michael being gay; Andrew Ridgeley was in charge of the clothes, and he was what you might call a noted heterosexual. But it was worlds away from Boy George, who had taken care to present himself publicly as almost sexless. 

Wham! aimed straight at the hearts and hormones of teenage girls. Watching their videos now feels almost indecent, even after the intervening decades of pumping and twerking and grinding, and the acres and acres of bouncing arses. It isn’t just that sex is such an explicit presence; it’s the Barbara Cartland romanticism, the way these young men have such a heavy consciousness of their own allure, the soft-focus Princess Di eyes moving up to meet the camera with aching slowness. As Simon Napier Bell – who went on to become Wham!’s manager – says in Outed, their early Top of the Pops appearances had ‘an incredible erotic intimacy’. The problem for George Michael was that the vision of fuckability Wham! were selling to young women was, in his case, specifically, painfully incongruent. ‘I never realised that I was going to be selling my physical persona. It took me up a road that I never thought I was going to go up.’

Michael didn’t come out until 1998, after the infamous ‘lewd act’ in front of an LA police officer. A lot had changed in that time, and despite tabloid references to ‘secret shame’ and deep pockets of residual bigotry, the public’s response was largely affectionate, especially once they had seen the video for ‘Outside’. Michael understood that merciless piss-taking is the British love-language; as he said on Parkinson, ‘if you can’t laugh when everyone else is laughing, you’re in trouble. And god knows everyone else was laughing.’ Michael had become comfortable with something Boy George had intuited 16 years earlier: the enormous power that resides in a charismatic figure presenting themselves with authenticity and vulnerability, and the culture-shifts that can happen in an instant when you make millions of people drop their tea at the same time.

For more on changing attitudes to gay rights in the ‘80s, try our piece on Withnail and I and Doctor Who:

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

There’s a good argument that Indie music, as a distinct genre, emerged in October 1983 with the release of two singles by two apparently diametrically (and often vitriolically) opposed bands: ‘This Charming Man’ by The Smiths, and ‘Lovecats’ by The Cure.

I mean OK, New Order had released ‘Blue Monday’ in March of that year, which was a pivotal moment in its own right; but it was pivotal in the history of electronic dance music, not Indie. ‘Blue Monday’ built on an array of inheritances - early ‘80s electronic music, New York hip-hop, club culture - to make music white people could dance to. 

The Smiths and The Cure were doing something quite different. In the case of The Smiths, this meant playing an Afrobeat guitar song in the manner of The Byrds while someone strangled an anxious fop in the foreground. In the case of The Cure - who had been making grave goth music since the late ‘70s - it meant suddenly producing madly poppy A-sides to match their recent run of weirdly hummable B-sides. ‘Lovecats’ is Frankenstein’s Jazz, stitched together by a mad doctor who had only ever read about the genre. It’s Halloween honky-tonk, a skeletal pop version of New Orleans funeral music, played by cartoon cats led by a man with a spider on his head. 

Neither record sounded normal, at the time. In the short term, The Smiths had a wider influence. For the rest of the ‘80s the Indie charts became increasingly jangly, until the American post-punks showed up and switched the setting to ‘grunge’. 

It was harder to copy whatever the hell it was The Cure were doing. But in the long run their influence has been just as long lasting; through their mid-‘80s run of million-selling weirdo pop singles they established the visual vocabulary of ‘cute Goth’. In 1983 band leader Robert Smith was freshly clean (from booze and drugs), newly keen, and head over heels in love; he exuded energy and joy, which are not qualities usually associated with his tribe. You can track the influence of Smith’s exuberant Goth affect, his Betty Boop t-shirts and polka dots, through Tim Burton movies, Japanese ‘Gothic Lolita’ fashions and emo. 

The two bands were immediately pitched against each other. Egged on by journalists, the two front-men took to sniping each other in interviews. Morrissey called Robert Smith ‘a whingebag’. Smith observed that ‘Morrissey sings the same song every time he opens his mouth. At least I’ve got two songs: “Love Cats” and “Faith”.’ Like all such pop music feuds this ‘rivalry’ quickly became identity-defining, a way to distinguish yourself from others. You were a Cure fan or a Smiths fan, but you weren’t supposed to be both.

Time to declare an interest. I have a dog in this fight: or rather, a cat. If you can have a lovecat in a fight. As regular readers of The Metropolitan will have probably deduced by now, I was a Cure fan. I spiked my hair up with sugar water, put on lipstick, and bought an undertaker’s coat from Camden Market; the whole bit. 

More specifically, I was a Cure fan who absolutely did not get The Smiths. The ‘80s feud was largely drummed up by the music press, and was supercharged by Morrissey’s willingness to piss everyone off. Both participants appear to be embarrassed by it now. But there was a genuine difference between the bands and what they signified, and in my case at least the bad blood has persisted. I still enjoy a little schadenfreude that Morrissey has turned out to be a problematic piece of gammon, while my beloved Bob Smith has remained an apparently decent middle-aged left-of-centrist bloke. 

I’m a middle-aged left-of-centrist bloke myself now. I’ve stopped listening exclusively to Pussy Galore, I can admit that ABBA are brilliant and I happily listen to disco, but even after Smiths-fan friends have convinced me that Johnny Marr is a genius (hello, Simon), I still don’t really understand the appeal of The Smiths. They could be funny, and their music could be ecstatic and uplifting, but Morrissey was deploying sarcasm and deprecation in the service of preening self-regard. ‘This Charming Man’ appears to be about a gay encounter set in the same grey, imagined ‘50s that featured on the band’s album covers; it embraces repression, and revels in alienation and misery. ‘Lovecats’, on the other hand, is joyful and convivial. Morrisey is a flippant man who takes himself extremely seriously. Robert Smith takes almost nothing very seriously. 

‘Lovecats’ is ‘we’ while ‘This Charming Man’ is ‘I’. ‘I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear’ says the protagonist of ‘This Charming Man’, while Robert Smith urges ‘Into the sea, you and me’. The Smiths is for people who want to sit in their room feeling like misunderstood weirdos; The Cure is for people who want to go out and sit in the cemetery with all the other weirdos, drinking cider and sharing a Silk Cut.

But weirdos are weirdos, under the skin. And at this remove, I suspect most of us have largely forgotten that the bands were ever particularly opposed (certainly Robert Smiths appears to). There is, after all, a fundamental commonality between the bands and their fans. Even while writing this, I played ‘Lovecats’ on Spotify and within a couple of songs it was playing me ‘This Charming Man’, having no doubt switched on the ‘Alternative ‘80s’ algorithm. For many people in ‘83, as the original Blitz Kids began to age out and grow up, both singles were a blessed relief from the all-conquering mainstream. Marketing-dominated commercialisation was just getting going, and even the Indie charts would soon be Rick-rolled by plastic pop technically running on an ‘independent’ label.

Ironically - given how disparagingly both these bands and their fans would talk about ‘branding’ - one of their strongest points of similarity was their strong, clearly articulated images, their logos and their colour palettes and their styles. To mark yourself out as a fan you needed only to wear some NHS specs or smear on some panda eye shadow. In doing so you’d quickly find other fans: your new teenage family. 

Smith and Morrissey were both suburban boys, from the outskirts of London and Manchester respectively, and they made music for their fellow suburban weirdos. Some liked The Cure, some liked the Smiths; some of them liked both. Some of them liked The Fall, but we don’t talk about them. We found each other, which is all that matters.

The Cure are still better than The Smiths, though.

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For more early ‘80s Goth, try our piece on Bauhaus, Bela Lugosi and Striplight Goth:

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

1981

The pop music that comes out when you are twelve will always seem like the very best there ever could be. But I had the good luck to be 12 in 1981, when the charts were dominated by a genre that was not only great but also truly revolutionary: synth pop.

Synth pop is highly memorable and mythologised in pop culture, but it was also a weird little bubble that popped almost immediately. It was so very specific to its moment, and to its combination of Northern and Southern European musical cultures: cold and hot, fire and ice.

Ice

The Undertones weren’t being entirely unfair about their cousin Kevin and his new friends. There was a strong overtone of the archly art school about synth music in that moment. None of the Human League actually went to art school, but in their early years they certainly sounded as though they had. One of the biggest singles in 1981 was performance artist Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’, a record that was pretty much just a repeated sample of her singing ‘Ha!’, with vocodered vocals layered over the top. Less of a pop single, more of a happening.

It was intellectual - no, pseudo-intellectual, pretentious and ‘pompous’, as Andy McCluskey of OMD has put it. These were what Phil Oakey of The Human League has dubbed ‘the alienated synthesists’; they weren’t afraid of the kind of polysyllabic nomenclature that the punks did not grok. They name-dropped William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick: most of Tubeway Army’s first record is a precis of various Dick books (including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was the basis for Blade Runner (1982)), while The Normal’s ‘Warm Leatherette’ is a musical rendition of Ballard’s Crash.

Those are all sci-fi authors, which gives us our second commonality: as well as being performatively arty, synth music was specifically nerdy. This was, after all, a time when sci-fi was still seen as the province of awkward little boys who preferred robots to people. Even synth pop’s musical influences - the electronic score to Forbidden Planet (1956) by Bebe and Louis Barron, and Wendy Carlos’ music for Stanley Kubrick’s film of Clockwork Orange (1971) - came from sci-fi.

It is hard to explain, at this remove, just how extraordinarily futuristic synth pop seemed, in a contemporary pop world that was predominantly guitar, bass, drums and a preening ninny with a tambourine. It was other-worldly, a sound that had dropped through a wormhole to our time. It was like something out of a Philip K. Dick story in which someone accidentally tunes into an alien radio station and infects the Earth with a whole new kind of music.

All of this helps to explain why even clever, literate pop punks like The Undertones - never mind ordinary assembly-line punks - didn’t like it. Its arch pose, apparently cold technology and over-intellectualism made it an obvious antagonist to underdog anti-heroes, true and earthy and honest. It seemed lost in the future, rather than battling in the present.

Still, it wasn’t only punks who hated it: everyone did, from rockers and easy listeners to jazz nerds and classical virtuosos. This wasn’t, they said, ‘proper’ rock n’ roll with a five-minute guitar solo; it didn’t have real musicians with actual talent. These were simply the distortions of sound waves made by tweaked circuits, not the warm sound of a wooden guitar resonator and the squeak of the fingertip on the fretboard. It was just apparently button-pushing; surely the machines did all the work. Gary Numan always claimed the Musicians’ Union tried to get him banned. 

It says a lot about Britain in 1981 that Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ was kept off the #1 slot by Joe Dolce’s offensively stereotypical comedy single ‘Shaddap You Face’. ‘Vienna’ is splendidly ludicrous, sparse and lush by turns, romantically doomladen and cringingly arch. It is the mystique of the dark and ruined city, the vaulting futuristic ambition of the crumbling concrete estate. More importantly it was mostly electronic, apart from the bit where it goes into waltz time for a viola break. 

Unlike punk, which had quickly reduced itself to its ‘50s rock n’ roll roots - even The Sex Pistols recorded Eddie Cochran covers - this was a wholly new kind of music: the music of tomorrow. But not the kind of sci-fi that entranced prog rock and metal, all gleaming spaceships and babes in tin-foil bikinis. It was the sci-fi of the near future, a psychologically queasy vision of what the world will be like in five minutes’ time. Dick and Ballard and Burroughs consciously used sci-fi as a way to talk about the present, and to show, as cyberpunk author William Gibson said, that ‘the future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.’

The biggest influence on British synth music was undoubtedly Kraftwerk, who finally had a UK #1 in 1981 with a re-release of ‘The Model’. Kraftwerk’s real genius had always been their ability to make the music of now, the sound of driving on the Autobahn to your factory or your office; the sound of Germany in the 1970s.

Early British synth music caught this impetus, creating a soundtrack to the grey, rundown cities of ‘70s Britain, the sound of ageing industrial plants. But the ‘70s were over.

Fire

In the ‘30s and ‘40s Raymond Scott was one of the most successful band leaders in American popular music. He presented national radio and TV shows, recorded pop records with singer Dorothy Collins and even contributed to Looney Tunes soundtracks. He specialised in tight, hummable arrangements that the public loved but jazz purists hated, because they left no room for improvisation.

He was also fascinated by electronic music. He built his own electronic instruments, obsessed by the possibility of reproducing the big band sound without an orchestra. He released the extraordinary Soothing Sounds for Baby (1964), a collection of weird little synthesised sketches allegedly scientifically designed to calm infants, and made jingles for advertising. He ended up building a massive, computerised song-writing machine called ‘The Electronium’. In the ‘70s Berry Gordy employed him as Director of Motown’s Research Department, in the hopes of automating his hit-making machine even further.

It’s interesting that it was Berry Gordy who saw the potential of what Scott was doing, because as well as Kraftwerk’s Teutonic input, the other influence on ‘80s synth pop was the party music of the ‘70s: disco and glam.

One man summed up both those genres in one career: the Italian-born Giorgio Moroder; he wrote the music for ‘Son of My Father’, which was covered by Chicory Tip in an early glam style. More importantly and obviously, he gave us, with Donna Summer, ‘I Feel Love’.

‘I Feel Love’ could feel cold and sparse, with its throbbing synths, robotic ticking beat and the high keen of Donna Summer’s voice. But deep in it you can feel the heat. The oppressive dark of the club, the flash of the lights, the thrilling foetid sweat of the dancefloor. It is the pressure of delight, the promise of sex, the sheer release of instinctive physical movement.

In 1980 Daniel Miller, who had been a pioneering electronic artist as The Normal and founded the record label Mute to distribute his own music when no one else would, went to see a new band called Depeche Mode playing live in Canning Town. What struck him, he said, is that the fans weren’t watching the band; they were ‘just dancing’. This was synthetic music that was full of human life.

Also in 1980, the keyboard players Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh left The Human League and were replaced by singers Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley (girls!) just as the band went into the studio to begin recording the record that would become Dare. Meanwhile, Marsh and Ware took their experimental electronic sound to their new band, Heaven 17, who were recording in the same studios. Phil Oakey, the lead singer of The Human League, has always said that they were just as inspired by Moroder as they were by Kraftwerk and by 1981 both had seized those lessons, as synth music blossomed from arty experimentation into pop.

But glam rock gave something to ‘80s synth pop too. What Oakey called the  ‘alienated synthesists’ are also ‘synthetic aliens’. They have made themselves into otherworldly beings: white-faced jump-suited androids like Gary Numan, pod people businessmen like Heaven 17. They were strange, unknowable icons in the tradition of Marc Bolan and David Bowie. They didn’t want to be unvarnished working musicians; they wanted to be fully fledged pop stars.

They had, in fact, taken the punk rock DIY ethos and used it to reinvent old fashioned light entertainment. New cheap synthesisers meant you no longer needed to learn three chords to start a band. You didn’t even need a band. If you were a pop genius like Depeche Mode founder member Vince Clarke, as long as you had a synthesiser and a friend with a good voice you could have a Top Ten hit.  They were recreating, in other words, the model devised by Raymond Scott and Berry Gordy: put together a dependable musical sound, find a good singer, and start banging out the hits. 

This is how you end up with Soft Cell’s cover of the ‘60s Northern Soul stomper ‘Tainted Love’. David Ball turns the chugging, propulsive horns of the original into a metallic, fizzling machine, with the insistent stabs of synth nailing the song down. But the real genius is Marc Almond’s voice, throbbing with all the emotion and desperation of Gloria Jones’s original. More, if anything.

Soon enough the synthesiser revolution evolved into a whole new musical culture with the late-’80s rave explosion and the Second Summer of Love. But the wonder of synth music in the first few years of the ‘80s, suspended in amber, is in this combination of fire and ice: spare electronic arrangement behind a rich, emotional voice, a driving beat and soaring vocals, a moment of unequalled pop brilliance.

Here’s our top 10 of synth pop from 1981 (warning, contains ‘Einstein A-Go-Go’)

For more electronic music, try our piece on another of the great pioneers: Jean-Michel Jarre.

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

Japan’s 1980 album Gentlemen Take Polaroids, track by track.

1. Gentlemen Take Polaroids

I was, as a kid, deeply confused about the relationship between Japan the band and Japan the country. They don’t look Japanese, but surely you couldn’t just go around naming your band after someone else’s country. Do they have some kind of official sponsorship? A note from the Emperor? But they are at least massively popular in Japan; much more so than they were in the UK, to begin with. So maybe I could let them off. 

Japan started out as a cross between New York Dolls and Roxy Music, but a combination of working with Giorgio Moroder on their single ‘Life in Tokyo’ and rubbing shoulders with pioneering musicians like The Yellow Magic Orchestra took them towards a much more interesting, novel sound. By the time they get to Gentlemen Take Polaroids, which was to be their penultimate studio album, their sound has become increasingly experimental: a weird meld of funk, electronic, world and European pop.

Take the opening track, the eponymous ‘Gentlemen Take Polaroids’. Somewhere underneath is a conventional pop song, but David Sylvian’s extraordinary sad, mellifluous voice catches you by surprise; Steve Jansen’s intricate drumming and Mick Karn’s melodic bass complicate it, pushing it off kilter, giving it a strange, unfamiliar edge.

2. Swing

1980 is a pretty good year for records. The actual pop charts are still very ‘70s, dominated by disco and mainstream new wave, but there’s also the nascent goth of The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds, Siouxsie’s Kaleidoscope and Bauhaus’s In The Flat Field; let’s throw in Echo and the Bunnymen’s Crocodiles, too. Punk is still going strong with X’s superb Los Angeles, The Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Birthday Party’s eponymous record, The Cramps’ Songs The Lord Taught Us and The Fall’s Grotesque. There are some ‘80s-defining releases like Adam and The Ants’ Kings of the Wild Frontier and David Bowie’s Scary Monsters. But what Gentlemen Take Polaroids reminds me of most are Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and The Residents’ Commercial Album. 

Remain in Light is Talking Heads’ last collaboration with Brian Eno, folding Afrobeat into their New York City collage of disco, punk, new wave, hip hop and funk; a sound that is both inescapably art school metropolitan and global pop. It’s also brilliant. Remarkable as Steve Jansen and Mick Karn are as a rhythm section, there’s no one better than Weymouth and Frantz.

The Commercial Album, on the other hand, is one of the most frightening records I have ever listened to, a record I remain both awestruck by and terrified of. The Residents are a shadowy art collective, their faces hidden by the giant eyeballs they wear on their heads. The Commercial Album is 40 tracks long, all exactly one minute in duration. 40 tiny stabs of industrial electronic and distorted alien voices. It is, in other words, resolutely uncommercial, a cargo cult version of popular music; pop made by an artificial intelligence, a non-human art.

3. Burning Bridges

Remain in Light, The Commercial Album and Gentlemen Take Polaroids are all examples of music for an increasingly globalised and electronic moment, as the world shrinks under a tightening digital net. They look forward to a distinctly ‘80s future, which is both hopeful in its vision of an urban interconnectedness and dystopian in its environmental and psychological fallout. You could imagine ‘Burning Bridges’ taking a place among the epic synth washes of Vangelis’s Blade Runner (1982) soundtrack, or the music for Japanese anime like Akira (1988). It is, in many ways, cyberpunk music.

The term ‘cyberpunk’ first appeared in 1980 in the title of a short story by Bruce Bethke, but it came to refer to a whole movement in ‘80s sci-fi: stories set in a digital future where the virtual has edged out the real, and alienated characters struggle to survive in dystopian megacities, like William Gibson’s classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. What’s neat about this is that cyberpunk - which was deeply influenced by the postwar Japanese economic miracle - envisioned a future shaped by Japanese cultural and corporate power. As the name for a band ‘Japan’ slotted into a specific ‘80s zeitgeist, as did their embrace of Japanese style and musicality.

4. My New Career

I doubt Japan ever thought of themselves as ‘cyberpunk’; they certainly didn’t think of themselves as New Romantics, of whom Sylvian said: ‘For them, fancy dress is a costume. But ours is a way of life. We look and dress this way every day.’ But, as that quote illustrates, Japan had one thing in common with the New Romantics: they were very, very pretentious indeed. (The cover of Tin Drum - an album named for Gunther Grass’s classic satire of fascism -  shows Sylvian is sitting in a mock Chinese setting, eating rice under a peeling portrait of Mao.)

Right from the beginning, when Catford brothers David and Stephen Batt rechristened themselves David Sylvian and Steve Jansen, they were pretending to be something else (in this case, Sylvain Sylvain and David Johansen of The New York Dolls.) But pretending is practising. Pretending is trying. Without pretension you’re stuck with the same orthodoxies, the same approaches and outcomes. Pretension offers something you haven’t thought of yet, which can be dynamite for an impressionable young music fan.

Of course, it also leads to you dressing like a complete prat, but this was London in ‘80s; lots of people were dressing like complete prats. And lots of people were pointing and laughing at them.

5. Methods of Dance

Gentlemen Take Polaroids is a very London-in-the-‘80s record. A night-time ‘80s London, in fact. The cover appears to show lead singer David Sylvian caught in a rainstorm at night, in full Blitz Club make-up and black leather raincoat. On ‘Methods of Dance’, Steve Jansen’s polyrhythmic drumming rattles like trains and crates and gates, Mick Karn’s bass slides and growls like traffic, and Richard Barbieri’s keyboards glisten like neon reflected in rain-slicked streets. This is the sort of vision of metropolitan night-life for which every suburban adolescent yearns.

6. Ain’t That Peculiar

And they did yearn. It’s easy to forget that Japan were actually popular. It helped that they were all spectacularly beautiful young men; they graced the cover of Smash Hits several times and many were genuinely shocked when they split in 1982 on the verge, it seemed, of proper fame.

Japan’s weird pop music didn’t sound quite so weird in the context of some of the other things in the charts. ‘Ain’t That Peculiar’ - an appropriately odd setting of a Marvin Gaye track - is of a piece with Soft Cell’s re-invention of ‘Tainted Love’. Electronic bands were reaching back to soul and funk to distinguish themselves from ‘70s punk and rock and establish themselves in a new pop tradition. The melding of glam stylings, punk do-it-yourself attitude and electronica felt like a new sound for a new decade.

7. Nightporter

The first single room I had at boarding school was on the third floor of a Victorian house on top of a hill that looked west over Metroland suburbs, across the serried streets of Ruislip and Ickenham to the distant Chilterns. As the year lengthened the sun would take a long time to die, the sky deepening purple, the last blaze flickering an inscrutable Morse off the windows of a disappearing train. The light would thicken, becoming grainy, the dusk visibly collecting under trees and in unlit rooms. Directly below my window, in the housemaster’s garden, there was a may tree, and the blooms would hoard the light, glowing in the twilight with an ice-cream whiteness.

On those long evenings, when I was supposed to be doing ‘prep’, I would, instead, sit in my darkening room, watching the night unfold across the London suburbs and listening to music. And the music I listened to was, invariably, Gentlemen Take Polaroids. Japan’s aching, self-consciously romantic reworking of Satie in ‘Nightporter’ is the perfect soundtrack for a dimming summer evening, as streetlights flick on down distant streets and the city disappears into darkness.

I was a dark, melancholic youth; my suburban, muscularly Christian boarding school was very much not where I wanted to be. Gentleman Take Polaroids offered an alternative world; a sophisticated, international world, a place where lonely, sensitive young men wandered city streets, thinking big, inchoate thoughts and enduring big, inchoate sorrows. It offered a vision of a kind of young adulthood just about to roll in, like the night, full of promise and strangeness.

8. Taking Islands in Africa

I’m not quite so dark and melancholic these days, but I’m back in the suburbs. The sun has set over the semis and I’m sitting in my shed listening to Japan, and still nothing else sounds so much like night-time London, with all its lure and horror and mystery, as Gentlemen Take Polaroids.

Actually, nothing else sounds like it at all. Japan were an evolutionary dead end: no one was influenced by them, no one has tried to revive them. (When they briefly reunited in the late ‘80s they adopted the name ‘Rain Tree Crow’ rather than have to be themselves again.) Marooned on this insulated Madagascar of pop, they have avoided all nostalgic associations and genre hang-ups. I discovered them in the mid-‘80s, after they had split up, but they didn’t sound dated then, and they don’t sound dated now. Their music may conjure an image of a fantasy ‘80s, but it remains extraordinary and unexpected, full of promise and aching with a nostalgia for a future that will ever recede into the west, golden in the setting sun:

For more in depth musical analysis:

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

1979

I bought my first single in 1979, and it was not a disco record. I did not like disco in 1979.  If I had heard about the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago in July of that year I would probably have approved (but I suspect John Craven did not mention it). Organised by shock jock Steve Dahl, the night - supposedly a promotion for the White Sox baseball team - involved disco records being thrown onto the pitch and blown up with actual explosives. The audience later had to be dispersed by riot police.

Dahl had been a DJ at a station that had fired him when it decided to veer away from rock towards disco, and he consequently held a grudge against the whole genre. I can see the event now for what it largely was - an adolescent, vindictive spasm with nasty undertones of racism and misogyny - but at 10 years old, I was not the target audience for disco. I was not down Studio 54 with a head full of cocaine and trousers full of urge, strutting to a 4/4 beat with the Manhattan demi-monde. I lived in the Home Counties, and was usually to be found in the school library arguing about how many hit points a goblin had. I liked precisely Dahl’s kind of music: that first single I bought was Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, a pristine piece of middle-of-the-road album-oriented rock. Although also, to be fair, a banger.

Another thing I liked in 1979 was a Japanese TV adaptation of the sixteenth century Chinese novel Journey to the West. Which sounds terribly erudite until you realise I am describing Monkey, a goofy adventure show featuring a monkey-man with Noddy Holder sideburns, dubbed into English by a cast including Manuel from Fawlty Towers. Monkey was blessed with one of the all-time great theme tunes, a piece of disco-rock (by the Japanese band Godiego) that summarises the myth of Sun Wukong - Monkey King and spirit of anarchy - in inventive broken English:

(It's hard to describe how happy the end of the second verse makes me. It’s the incredibly awkward addition of the word ‘west’ at the end of the line: the lyrics and tune make the ‘kindly priest’ and ‘pilgrimage’ a perfectly scannable and almost acceptable rhyme, but then ‘west’ is squeezed in an tremendous hurry before the chorus crashes upon us, causing the whole thing to jolt and stumble before it takes off again. Amazing work.) 

So here we have a small boy who thought he didn’t like disco while loving the disco-inflected Monkey theme. This apparent paradox is explained by one critical fact: disco was everywhere in 1979, and I was already internalising the hipster imperative of sneering in the presence of the popular. (For the same reason, I would shortly ditch Rainbow and AC/DC for Adam and The Ants and The Tubeway Army.) 

Disco was simply too ubiquitous, too popular to be liked. In 1979 it was the global standard for pop music, the world’s default soundtrack in background muzak that no one was actually listening to. It was everywhere, and consequently felt as though it was from nowhere: international and interchangeable, an indistinguishable parade of floor-filling one-hit wonders.

It grew over other music like syncopated knotweed. It was the pulsing undergrowth in Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ and Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’: punk and hip-hop, new genres that (like disco) emerged in the late ‘70s from the developmentally moribund, financially bankrupt and culturally febrile New York City. The big hit of 1978 had been Grease, a musical about ‘50s rocker culture that inexplicably sported a disco-inflected theme tune. In 1979 the art-pop outfit that was about to become my favourite band ever - Japan - teamed up with disco legend Giorgio Moroder to make the throbbing ‘Life in Tokyo’. 

The utility of disco - that it is available and useful to everyone, from mainstream musical theatre to hipster synth tweakers - is one of the things that is so loveable about it: at core it’s musically pretty simple, and inherently democratic. Almost anyone with access to a drum machine can make it, and almost everyone enjoys it. Andy Warhol described Studio 54 as ‘dictatorship on the door, democracy on the dancefloor’ and that mixture of exclusive nightlife and communal celebration is key. Punk and hip-hop might have better articulated the difficulty and pressure of urban life, but disco was release, a few sweaty hours of bliss. It insists that anyone can have a good time, and that everyone deserves one.

Meanwhile, the way disco spread internationally, like a novel virus (resulting in an inferno temperature and a severe Saturday Night Fever), gave it a sense of exoticism; it was the music of New York, of Mediterranean islands and European discotheques, and of Japanese kung-fu TV shows. By the mid-’70s Benidorm had the largest number of skyscrapers per head in the world, and all of them full of bright pink British tourists with digestive issues and Aimii Stewart’s disco version of ‘Light My Fire’ going round and round their heads. Disco gave everyone symbolic access to the glamour of the jetset, gently frugging to Chic in the fur-lined bar of a custom 747 on their way to Macau. It is the sound of the smoked glass and velour ‘70s, a music composed of orange nylon and glitter balls, dark brown sports cars, cigarettes on aeroplanes and LED watches with multiple time zones, all those cheesy little geegaws that seemed to promise a peculiarly ‘70s kind of sophistication.

This ubiquity - not the Demolition Night - killed disco. Punk claimed the ‘80s and hip-hop claimed the future; disco didn’t survive the ‘70s. But that is also why ‘70s punk and hip-hop don’t spark nostalgia in the way that disco does. Album-oriented rock (like Queen) was long ago sanctified by Q magazine; Grandmaster Flash still sounds startling and I’ve never stopped listening to Talking Heads. But Chic. Chic and the Bee Gees and Gloria Gaynor: that is the sound of the ‘70s, the sound of my childhood, a sound the nature of which is irrepressible, the sound of… Monkey.

From the coked up ‘70s to the gloomed down ‘90s:

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

1978

A side: Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick

In 1978 I thought ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ was a comedy song, or at least a novelty song. There was a lot of that about in the ‘70s: that year alone we had ‘The Floral Dance’ and ‘Matchstalk Men’, ‘The Smurf Song’ and ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’? The charts were insistently stupid.

The title held a promise of schoolboy-friendly slapstick violence, and the phrase ‘rhythm stick’ was pleasingly meaningless. The music was fundamentally comic, upbeat and resoundingly squelchy, combining the jangling pub joanna of Chas ‘n’ Dave and the tipsy boogie-woogie of Squeeze. I knew what hip pop music was supposed to sound like; copies of Tubeway Army and Kings of the Wild Frontier were beginning to circulate at school. I knew the noise you made playing along with the art school boys, and this was not it.

Dury’s distinct London accent seemed inherently comic too. (In ‘Move their body to and fro’ he pronounced the ‘fro’ as ‘fwo’.) While Gary Numan was trying to transform into a Philip K Dick android and Adam Ant was being whatever the hell he was being (a Burundi pirate fop?), this was just a geezer chattering away in the corner of a pub. A London pub. A London geezer in a London pub, making London jokes.

We weren’t used to hearing London accents in the charts. Northern working class accents, especially Scouse, had been mythologised, and all those ‘70s rock berks - Rod Stewart and the like - sung in blurry transatlantic drawls, but this was a clipped, staccato Cockney, chanting out a simple, singable chorus:

The phrase is, of course, ‘Two fat ladies’: the bingo call for the number 88. But this is the late ‘70s and Dury is too sophisticated to be that sexist. Because Ian Dury is one of the art school boys - he studied at the Royal College of Art under Peter Blake - and ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’  isn’t a novelty song.

It is funny, though; that ‘Arapaho/to and fro’ rhyme is delightful. And it is splendidly odd; the saxophone wails into a high note of hysteria after the second verse before resuming its honking, prodding riff.

And then that final verse:

Our vision clouding into a distant blue, the whole world opening before us. It’s like those chapter closings of which Thomas Pynchon is so fond, as rambling paragraphs, full of fractal sub-clauses, slowly run into each other, fading into a hypnagogic sense of a meaning felt but not yet quite apprehended.

You find this tension between the matey vernacular and the revelatory in all those pub rock/New Wave London bands: in Difford and Tillbrook’s poppy potted lives in songs like ‘Up the Junction’, and Madness’s grimy cheerfulness in ‘House of Fun’. Songs that cram the banalities, horrors and delights of everyday life into three minutes of pop genius.

It is a tone quite different from the pretentious sixth form poetry of the New Romantics and Goths I went on to idolise as a teenager; a frank, crafty songwriting style that doesn’t wear its brains on its sleeve, which is perhaps why I didn’t spot them at the time.

B Side: There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards

One night in the mid ‘90s a friend brought his father home to our shared house in North London. They had been out for the evening and weren’t yet ready to stop drinking. In an effort to keep his father amused we played him some records, including the b-side of ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’: ‘There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards’.

At which point my friend’s father became furious. Why had this been kept from him? Why was he only hearing this now? Why had he been forced to live for twenty years in a world that he didn’t know contained Ian Dury and The Blockheads?

Like ‘Rhythm Stick’ and the following year’s ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’, ‘Clever Bastards’ is a list song full of smart patter. Pairing ‘Brahma’ - Cockney non-rhyming slang for ‘very good’ - with the cocktailed languour of ‘pyjama’ is a genius miniature of knowing bathos. ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ is a list of, well, reasons to be cheerful, a gloriously eclectic and generous itemisation of everyone from the Marx Brothers (in the right order: ‘Harpo, Groucho, Chico’) to indie queen Nico and obscure B-movie actor Bonar Colleano. Dury is playing curator, offering up names and ideas to chase down and get acquainted with.

He does the same in ‘Clever Bastards’. Here, he’s measuring out cleverness: Coward, van Gogh, Einstein. Entertainment, art, science. Cleverness is not just intellectual capacity, but also wit, artistic talent and  - in an aside, as he remembers halfway through the sax solo - craft, in the shape of guitarist Andres Segovia.

Remarkably, Dury does this without appearing to show off. This isn’t the heavy-handed pseudo-intellectual references of Sting (‘He starts to shake and cough / Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov’). This is light-footed and wittily self-deprecating. He’s simply offering up these names and ideas for our edification and enjoyment.

What I caught on to between the ‘70s and the ‘90s - between me thinking that this was a comedy record, and passing it on to a man two decades my senior - was something my friend’s father grasped immediately. Glee.

Dury wrote ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ after his roadie was almost killed in an on-stage accident. He was literally trying to cheer the band up. And us. He lays out before us an ordinary world that is full of extraordinary things. It's there in the Blockheads’ music, the cheerful funk and the sudden lurches into jazz; it’s there in Dury’s lyrics, the rattling rhymes, the jaunts into French and German when his enthusiasm escapes the English language. His determinedly non-U enthusiasm for learning contributes to the sense that this is a fundamentally democratic enterprise: a hummable tune, comprehensible lyrics, a cheerful, welcoming sound. 

Underneath it all, he emphasises that cleverness, like rhythm, can come from anywhere: ‘the deserts of Sudan / And the gardens of Japan / From Milan to Yucatán / Every woman, every man’. A boy from an ordinary family from an ordinary London suburb can become a nationally beloved entertainer, a purveyor of witty little ditties and singable songs. Still, probably got help from his mum.

For more lyrical examinations:

The Metropolitan

Something like a phenomenon

It starts with those pulses, as regular as a heartbeat, juddering like a ruler pinged off the side of a desk. Then the backing singers kick in, singing those ahhs in an ascending scale - stolen from the bridge of ‘Twist and Shout’, and also stolen in the same year by David Bowie for the start of ‘Let’s Dance’. When the…

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3 years ago · 12 likes · 3 comments · Adam Frost

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

1977

News of the World

At the end of 1976 the rock band Queen were booked to appear on the Today show, a local London news show produced by Thames Television. However, Freddie Mercury, the lead singer, needed emergency dental surgery and the band had to pull out of the engagement.

A hurried replacement was needed and someone thought that it would be a good idea to get a trendy young ‘punk’ band in. Which is how the Sex Pistols appeared drunk on live TV, ruined Bill Grundy’s career by telling him some of the dirty words they knew and changed popular culture forever.

They also changed Queen.

The band was best known for their proggy, cod-operatic glam rock, hyper-produced mini epics like their daffy and hysterical hit single ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. But for their new 1977 album, News of the World, they decided they needed a change.

They tried to strip down their sound, dispensing with all the over-dubs and multi-tracking, but the result is not very punk. The song ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ aims for raw fury but comes out sounding like a slightly upbeat Thin Lizzy track. Queen were famous for their debauched parties and extravagant live shows; they couldn’t do anger and spontaneity. 

The clue is in the name. It suggests royalty: pomp and circumstance and establishment, things that punk was pushing against. Like the Queen, the strength of the band lay in their immutability. The continued existence of the royal family under Elizabeth II can be attributed to her instinct to do as little as possible, her understanding that it was her role to be a figurehead rather than a person. On the few occasions that the royal family has tried to be trendy, it has been an unmitigated disaster. Freddie and the boys could have learned something from Brenda.

There is a persistent strain of the music hall in British pop. You can hear it in McCartney’s most infectious choruses, in Bowie’s most ludic lyrics, even in the Sex Pistols’ pantomime villainy. You can certainly hear it in Queen. Right from the start their marriage of Edwardian seaside to psychedelic prog rock produced deranged fever-dreams like ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ on their first album, the first in an epic quest that led to the transcendent lunacy of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. But that put them out of step with the music of 1977 and they quickly start to sound ridiculous. Songs like the hamfisted ‘Get Down, Make Love’ are more Spinal Tap than Sex Pistols. This is Dad Rock for middle-aged people who can’t understand why anyone would put a safety pin through anything other than a nappy.

But even punks have Dads, and they got their music taste from somewhere. News of the World opens with the most stripped down track of them all, the monolithic stomp-stomp-clap of ‘We Will Rock You’, followed by the stadium sing-a-long of ‘We Are The Champions’. These are songs that have become so universal that it's hard to believe they were ever new. They have become folk tunes, belted out on the terraces and in the underpasses. They are popular (low brow), mainstream (obvious) and time honoured (old fashioned).

As you may have detected by now, I have history with Queen. They made the first record I ever bought (‘Don’t Stop Me Now’) and they were the first band I ever saw live, at Knebworth (well, technically the first band I ever saw live was Status Quo, because they were supporting, but that was by accident, as with the rest of Quo’s career). In the nature of adolescents, then, the moment I discovered punk (though much later than 1977), I immediately decided that Queen were far too embarrassing to ever admit to really liking. This was music for children and old people and not the urgent, exciting young person I hoped to be (and have been failing to be ever since).

Day at the Races

But for all their Ford Mondeo, middle-manager-in-a-leather-blouson affect, there is a moment in ‘We Will Rock You’ when Brian May’s guitar starts to feedback into the triumphant solo, and the pulse quickens, the hairs prickle and Queen come good on their mission statement of rocking us.

May has said that the ‘we’ in ‘We Are The Champions’  is everyone who has ever sung it. It is intentionally unifying and uplifting, lending a transcendent pomp to the most quotidian and low stakes event. And pomp, as the name suggests, is what Queen are good at.

1977 started with a series of singles from their ‘76 album A Day At the Races, which was the accompaniment to their ‘75 longplayer A Night at the Opera, which contained (if anything can contain) ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. A Day At the Races is full of excess: over-produced, overwrought and overblown. On tracks like the mangled Japanese of ‘Teo Torriatte’ they are in danger of straying from pomp to pompous.

But A Day At the Races and A Night at the Opera are not just Queen albums; they are also Marx Brothers movies. These two ludicrous monuments of ‘70s rock are named after two of the funniest comedies of the ‘30s (or, indeed, ever). Queen are ridiculous, and they know it; they are in on the joke. A jaunty little music hall confection like ‘Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy’ cannot possibly be serious. Indeed, it's delightful partly because it is so silly.

Queen are, most of all, a British band - all the more so for featuring Zanzibar-born immigrant Freddie out in front. There is something peculiarly British about their mixture of pomp and parody, the deep desire for the solemnity and majesty of ceremony combined with the impulse to poke fun. Britain is structured and corroded by class but revels in mocking the posh and saying rude words on live TV, just as Queen can combine the arch ‘The Millionaire Waltz’ with the cock-rock ‘Tie Your Mother Down’. Britain is resolutely anti-intellectual and yet delights in sesquipedalian and needlessly rococo language, just as Queen can go from the bone-headed ‘We Will Rock You’ to the light-footed wordplay of ‘My Melancholy Blues’. Britain’s default mode is the bathetic, with a national epic form - the sitcom - that focuses on the hilarious agonies of bourgeois failure, just as Queen reach for the heroic glory of ‘We Are The Champions’ and topple into the idiocy of ‘White Man’. Queen encapsulated multiple images of Britain, with all its fatuous middle of the road, middle-class nitwittery and its larkiness, good humour and grandeur.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett suggested in Good Omens that the glove compartments of British cars naturally spawn copies of Queen’s Greatest Hits, one of the best selling albums of all time. Queen is the UK’s background music; they were and are indisputably establishment, a term that signifies ‘cosy’ and ‘reassuring’ as much as ‘stifling’ and ‘coercive’; thousands of years of ritual and tradition, and also a group of self-importantly humdrum suburbanites huddled in the snug of a three hundred year old pub. 

You can see these resonances in the band members themselves. Brian May - part-time rock god, part-time astronomer and defender of badgers - is the picture of the deranged suburban hobbyist. Unable to afford a new electric guitar as a child, he made his own out of bits of an old fireplace and a dining room table. The Red Special, as the guitar is known, gives Queen a unique sound, not least because May insists, in another Pooterish touch, on playing with a pre-decimal sixpence instead of a plectrum. The feedback that begins the solo in ‘We Will Rock You’ is not screeching, feral or frightening; it is warm, embracing, uplifting. 

And did anyone ever choose a more appropriate name for themselves than Frederick Bulsara? Mercury. Quicksilver, flowing, an ever-changing solidity; a metal that responds to the human touch; named for the messenger of the gods; trickster, enforcer, a god of magic.

And what a kind of magic. The next time I saw them play live it was an extraordinary experience. This shy, awkward, largely closeted gay immigrant held an enthralled audience in the palm of his hand. Or rather, he held their hands and led them; he brought them together. He was a high priest, congregation member and object of worship all in one.

Take ‘Somebody to Love’ from A Day at the Races. It’s Queen’s attempt to do an Aretha Franklin song, an attempt that very much fails because while Freddie might have soul, the only funk the band ever had was stolen from Nile Rogers. But it becomes something else. 

It begins vaguely bathetically, with an overdubbed chorus of voices narrating a boring day in the life: ‘he works hard’, ‘he goes home’. For a while it finds its rock heart in a solo from the Red Special. And then it suddenly transforms into a building chant, over which Mercury’s voice soars, full of an insoluble ache. Instead of a triumphant climax, there’s a downbeat coda and an odd little piano figure that closes on a quirky, jokey little flourish. It is the whole of Queen in one song, the whole of a culture: the reach that exceeds the grasp, the pomp and ludicrousness and the winking good humour and, under it all, a deep and true emotion. 

And still, forty years on, it makes me cry.

For more on the questionable music choices of our youth (and how we were probably right all along):

The Metropolitan

I know what boys like

‘This one is for your girlfriend’ Alex Turner introducing I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor When I was 10, my older brother and I pooled our pocket money to buy our very first single: Ebony and Ivory by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, a song that is powered entirely by earnestness. I resented my adored brother’s leap in…

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4 years ago · 8 likes · Rowan Davies

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

1976 (reprise)

SIDE 1:

1. ‘Morningtown Ride’, The Seekers (1966)

2. ‘Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini’, Sergei Rachmaninoff (1934)

3. ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’, Matthias Claudius and Johann Schulz (1782)

4. ‘Spring’, Vivaldi (1725)

5. ‘Sirtaki (Zorba Dance’), Mikis Theodorakis (1965)

My mother was a confident woman: confident in her opinions, confident in her place in our affections. Beautiful, whip-smart, tiny, vivacious and indefatigable, she thought self-doubt was for losers. So I was surprised when she told me - I was well into my thirties - that she had been jealous of my attachment to my Year 1 class teacher, Miss Crowson.

Miss Crowson was the personification of Britain in 1976; or, at least, Britain as it appeared to me, aged six. She personified it not in a Miss England sort of way, but in the way of Californian hippy aesthetics, blissed-out and mellow: summer sunshine and rainbows and soft, yellow light, like the reflection of a buttercup. She had long, thick, poker-straight blonde hair, parted in the middle and reaching down to her waist. She wore circular cotton skirts and simple t-shirts. She had freckles and wide grey eyes, and the calm, beatific attitude of a Buddhist monk. 

According to my mother a quarter of a century later, I would not bloody shut up about Miss Crowson.

Every afternoon, as the school day drew to a close, she gathered our class into a semi circle, sat herself on one of the miniature chairs, and led us in song. It will probably not surprise you to learn that she played - very nicely - an acoustic guitar.

Rocking rolling riding, out along the bay

All bound for Morningtown, many miles away

Morningtown Ride, The Seekers, 1966

Perhaps she only played Morningtown Ride once; perhaps we sang it a hundred times over the course of that school year. What I think I know for certain is that she played it on a hot afternoon in the glorious summer of 1976, when the classroom was drowsy and the dust eddied and sparkled in the sunlight. 

Morningtown Ride is a lullaby in which sleep becomes a train journey, with children bundled safely in carriages that travel gently around a wide ocean bay on their way to morning. I mean, when I put it like that, it sounds terrible. But my childhood home backed onto the main commuter line into Waterloo, and the lyrics made me think of being safe in bed as late-night trains thundered past. The song also represented my grandmother, whose visits from Wales began and ended (from my perspective) with a visit to the powerful vastnesses of Paddington Station.

In the jumble of infancy, food becomes weather and clothes become smells, and music grows around memories like a vine. My brain cannot meaningfully distinguish between the smell of my mother’s perfume, the wooden chair beneath the radio in our old kitchen, and Rachmaninoff’s ‘Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini’. Emotionally and cognitively they all produce the same response, and a fragment of any one of them summons the others; in some senses, for me, they are all exactly the same thing. My brain also insists that Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini was the theme tune for Radio 4’s Listen with Mother; but Google - which has no soul - refuses to confirm it.

What else summons this childish sensory confusion? We PLOUGH the fields and SCATter the GOOD seed on the LAND! (We don’t, at all. We live in London, between the river and the South Circular, next to the trains and beneath the Heathrow flight path. But it doesn't matter.) This is the smell of the polish on the herringbone parquet floor of our assembly hall; it’s the red ridges that the floor pressed into our crossed legs; it’s the squish squish squish of our headmaster’s down-at-heel leather brogues, a soft aspiratory hush that I coveted wildly. Why did I covet - literally want to own - the sound made by an ugly pair of shoes? What synaptic chaos was this?

‘Spring’ from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is the walk across the playground to my classroom, and the rough nylon of my winter uniform. Zorba Dance is the hysterical excitement the night before our first Mediterranean family holiday and the smell of my first pair of flip-flops, laid out on my bed as a surprise by my mother, who was secretly very glad to reach the end of the school year and see the back of Miss Crowson.

SIDE 2

1. ‘Dancing Queen’, ABBA

2. ‘Save Your Kisses For Me’, Brotherhood of Man

3. ‘Under the Moon of Love’, Showaddywaddy 

4. ‘Rodrigo's Guitar Concerto De Aranjuez’, Manuel and the Music of the Mountains

5. ‘In Dulci Jubilo’, Mike Oldfield

1976 was a year of absolute bangers: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Young Hearts Run Free’, ‘Love To Love You Baby’, ‘You See the Trouble With Me’, ‘Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel’, ‘Let’s Stick Together’; that’s the opening of great wedding disco right there, and that’s before you add the three other ABBA tracks in that year’s top 100 (‘Mamma Mia’, ‘Fernando’ and ‘Money Money Money’). Even the second-raters are pretty good: ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’, ‘If You Leave Me Now’, ‘I Love To Love’, ‘You To Me Are Everything’, ‘December ‘63’, ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing’, ‘Livin’ Thing’, ‘Play That Funky Music’. 

But I didn’t hear any of these songs that year: or, at least, I don’t remember hearing any of them. My parents didn’t listen to music radio or, indeed, very much music at all. My brother and I were too young for Top of the Pops, so chart music came to me only in snatches.  

I watched Brotherhood of Man performing ‘Save Your Kisses For Me’ (‘Even though you’re only three’) on Eurovision and found it disturbing. Young children are forever being forced to kiss people, and the ‘70s - as ‘60s permissiveness curdled into louche beery entitlement - were a particularly coercive time. I was unhappy about this bearded, twinkly man addressing me directly through the television, insisting on his right to kisses. I feared he would turn up one day on our doorstep to make good on the deal and that I would have to comply out of politeness. 

(Oddly, I had a similar anxiety about John Craven, who (bear with me here) was somehow the same thing as Cardiff. Whenever we drove down that section of the M4 I would hide in the footwell; when asked what I was doing I would say ‘I’m shy of Cardiff’. My parents were baffled, and I couldn’t explain. My perception - of the raw alpha male sexual energy of John Craven, and of his essential conceptual and physical union with Cardiff - was so concrete and overwhelming that it didn’t occur to me that nobody else shared it.)

I happened across Showaddywaddy - this must have been on some light ent show, maybe the Generation Game - performing a glittery pastiche of rockabilly, all stack heels and beetle eyebrows (again, disturbing). The Concerto of Orange Juice, as it was inevitably called, flooded the summer and, as we approached Christmas, you heard Mike Oldfield everywhere.

None of these songs are meaningful for me: they’re just the ones I know I was aware of at the time. The only one that summons the indelible synaptic jumble of infancy - the only one I liked then and still like now - is Dancing Queen, playing on my cousins’ record player as they got ready for a night out in their local pub. Five (five!) slim, blonde, blue-eyed beauties, pushing in and out of the bathroom, throwing out jokes, singing along randomly, carelessly including me: blue mascara and hairspray and short skirts and jeans, a euphoric essence of Saturday night that still brushes past me every week, a cloud of perfume and a clatter of heels, and then the song ends, and the door closes behind them.

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For an alternative look at the music of 1976:

The Metropolitan

The music of 1976

Strange how potent cheap music can be. Like a whiff of Blue Stratos on the night air, all it takes is a few bars and there we are, forty years ago, dripping extruded ice cream product on the vinyl seats of a Morris Marina while the rain falls on a pebbled beach. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives…

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4 years ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Tobias Sturt

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

1976

Zopf: Giles Farnaby’s Dream - The Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Obsession and obsolescence are twin features of music listening. You find a new exciting record and play it to death, and then it dies. You forget all about it until, years later, while looking for something else, you unearth an old mixtape and suddenly remember how you wore the oxide off the plastic with relistening. But that person is gone now and the music is just the sound of a memory.

But there is music that you never stop listening to. That even as you change, and the music changes, the connection and pleasure still remains. The Penguin Cafe Orchestra is one of those for me. From the moment I first discovered them in the ’80s, their music has soundtracked my life.

Simon Jeffes’ weird, parping, jiggling minimalist folk jazz ensemble released their first album in 1976: Music from the Penguin Cafe. It’s almost impossible to describe the Penguin Cafe Orchestra to someone who has never heard them, but there are very few people who haven’t heard them, even if purely unconsciously, because they manage to be both omnipresent and invisible.

In this early 1976 incarnation they’re like an English folk rendition of Krautrock: German minimalist pioneers Neu! by way of New York jazz weirdo Moondog. But instead of driving down the autobahn to Dusseldorf, we’re gavotting monotonously round a knot garden. This is dinner party music, if you’re an artist holding a dinner party in a half-renovated Spitalfields weaver’s house.

Oxygène, Part 4 - Jean Michel Jarre

The British had cod-Baroque minimalism and the Germans had the pulsing beat of modern industry; the French had the sci-fi soundtrack of the psychedelic future. Synth pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre’s first album, Oxygène, was also released in 1976, and it’s like a bande dessinee by the comic-book genius Moebius turned into music: all clair ligne alien landscapes in sunset colours and intricate neon renderings of skyscrapers.

It sums up the indescribable dorky coolness of ‘70s and ‘80s France: the home of technological marvels, like Concorde and Minitel, but also creaking traditions, such as inept pop music, the forced feeding of geese and the 2CV. Oxygene is futuristic music for a very old-fashioned future, a future in which lasers were cool (especially when you made a harp out of them, as Jarre did).

My experience with Jarre’s music is different from my experience with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra; I loved it, then lost it. I listened to Oxygène and its follow up Équinoxe over and over again in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, spending endless evenings in deep electronic reverie, lost in visions of gleaming starships plunging through nebulae in a shower of scintillating stardust. Until, that is, I discovered less hallucinogenic occupations, like taking drugs.

The Sound of Someone You Love Going Away And It Doesn't Matter - Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Those reveries, dreaming along to the images the music conjures, are a kind of clue to what kind of music this is (as well as what kind of listener I am). 

Jarre and Penguin Cafe Orchestra have both been used liberally in soundtracks and as theme music. This explains their invisible omnipresence: they are in the background but uncredited, unless you recognised Oxygène noodling away under Peter Jones’ narration in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or Penguin Cafe Orchestra introducing bourgeois brain-scrambling boffin-off Round Britain Quiz on Radio 4. They are, to a certain generation, the sound of Television for Schools and mildly educational documentaries on BBC 2.

Both of them lend themselves to soundtracks admirably, melding ‘tunes the people can hum’ (as Tom Lehrer once witheringly described Mozart) with a minimalist Satie background throb that fills space without occupying it too noticeably.

This makes them perfect personal soundtracks as well: music that does not demand to be listened to, that can accompany another activity. Like writing this, for example.

Oxygène, Part 2 - Jean Michel Jarre

What they are, in other words, is a higher form of Muzak. Muzak is a corporate eponym, like Hoover, another instrument of good suburban housekeeping. The company’s name was a deliberate elision of music and Kodak: music that is effortless, the aural equivalent of a holiday snapshot with the heads cut off.

The mission of the Muzak Corporation was to pipe music into workplaces with the express purpose of encouraging different styles of work. Different genres were matched to different tasks; specific kinds of music were chosen to tune employees’ minds to specific goals. Fordist capitalism with a catchy beat.

But we also use Muzak on ourselves: to catch our moods, calm them, enhance them. These are ‘lo-fi hip-hop beats to study to’ as YouTube has it; music that does not insist on us being anything other than ourselves. Music that can drown out the internal monologue even as it can help us dream.

Penguin Cafe Single - Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Background music is often derided, mostly because it’s often easy to deride. But there is a deep snobbery in that derision. We’re supposed to ‘enjoy’ music in the same way as Tibby in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, following along with the score on our laps, not like his sister Helen, imagining all the goblins that Beethoven conjures for her. But not all music is Beethoven. In fact, very little of it is, statistically speaking. 

And yet, in its own quiet way, even this kind of music can be innovative. Even a light classical composer like Eric Coates incorporated jazz or contemporary classical into his work (there’s invisible omnipresence: you all know Coates’ music because it’s used as the theme for Desert Island Discs but how many of you knew his name?). Mid-50s composers like Martin Denny raided the traditions of the Pacific for their albums of ‘exotica’.

This is 1976, after all, an era of progressive rock for university students, jazz for pro musicians and modern classical for people who hate themselves. Even pop music is full of storytelling lyrics that demand attention. To compose music that is just tune and rhythm, that does not impose: this is revolution.

In a couple of years’ time, Brian Eno will release his first Ambient record, leading us on down to the hauntological theme tunings of Belbury Poly and the unsettling dreams of Boards of Canada. This is a revolution, but a quiet one, in the background, almost unnoticed.

The playlist for 1976:

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Previously in background music, we wondered what the poor old ukulele had done to deserve to be in so many ads for insurance:

The Metropolitan

Corporate ukulele

We once had a client – a global drinks manufacturer – who wanted to make a series of videos. They got a lot of questions from customers, they said, about the ingredients in their drinks. Some explainer animations would give them some quick and interesting answers to the most common questions…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · Tobias Sturt

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

1975

Side A

1. ‘Funky Gibbon’ - The Goodies

2. ‘Ugly Duckling’ - Mike Reid

3. ‘Last Farewell’ - Roger Whittaker

4. ‘Whispering Grass’ - Windsor Davies & Don Estelle

5. ‘Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ - Laurel & Hardy

There are a lot of comedy songs in 1975. There are songs that are meant to be funny and aren’t, like the two funkies, the Goodies’ ‘Gibbon’ and Jasper Carrott’s ‘Moped’, as well as Billy Connolly’s ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’. There are the songs that (probably) aren’t meant to be funny and are, like Telly Savalas’ ‘If’ and Roger Whittaker’s histrionic ‘Last Farewell’. There’s light ‘humor’ from Loudon Wainwright III with ‘Kings and Queens’ and even career weirdo Tom Waits is still doing his barroom hobo schtick with ‘Better Off Without a Wife’. There are novelty songs like Mike Reid’s ‘Ugly Duckling’ and Jonathan King’s ‘Una Paloma Blanca’ - which is a deeply unnerving thing to listen to now, knowing what we know about him. But there are plenty of others that aren’t explicitly ‘novelty’ but still elicit a nervous chuckle: the squeamish creepiness of ‘Girls’ by The Moments and The Whatnauts, or the admittedly body-positive ‘Fattie Bum Bum’ by Carl Malcolm.

In the blasted real world these were serious times. The verdicts were being handed down in the Watergate trial; the Vietnam war was coming to an end. The Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia and started the killing, while all over Europe terrorist organisations like the Red Army Faction and the IRA were bombing and shooting and kidnapping. In Britain, the Conservative party had just acquired a new leader: Margaret Thatcher.

A little light entertainment was needed, and in 1975 pop music is definitely little, light, family entertainment. The grandparents can sing along to ‘Whispering Grass’, the kids can dance along to The Wombles and everyone is stirred by The Band of the Black Watch wheezily piping out ‘Scotch on the Rocks’. This is good time music for kids aged 9 to 99, and consequently not everyone is taking it entirely seriously.

In other words, pop music in 1975 was a frivolous business. All the frowny, beardy types were over on BBC2 taking The Old Grey Whistle Test, which you could only pass if you had done some serious music theory revision or had a note from your prep school headmaster. On Top of the Pops - the official celebrant of records that had actually sold by the truckload - you had sitcom stars blotting the Ink Spots and brickies in stack heels.

Side B:

1. ‘Fox on the Run’ - Sweet

2. ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)’ - Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel

3. ‘Love Is the Drug’ - Roxy Music

4. ‘Space Oddity’ - David Bowie

5. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ - Queen

In a grim political and social context, the only serious thing about both the stomp of Glam and strut of Disco is their dedication to the art of having a good time. Both genres are intrinsically silly, all outrageous outfits, outrageous tunes and outrageous dancing, and both are delightful for it.

Anyway, silliness can be subversive too. Laurel and Hardy’s rendition of ‘On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ from Way Out West was in the charts because the BBC had been packing the daytime schedules with their movies all year (leading to a whole generation incongruously well versed in Hal Roach silent comedies). But it got air play largely thanks to universal indie uncle John Peel, also an early champion of Roxy Music; in 1975 the Peel show featured a session from Ivor Cutler with his quiet weird tales from ‘Life in a Scotch Sitting Room’. Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, a re-release, is as awkward as it is brilliant, with incredibly arch arrangements and sci-fi dialogue.

There is a persistent strain of the odd and slightly silly in all the best art school and outsider music: something out of place, something too contrived. It’s a strain of pop music, inherited through Lennon and McCartney from the music halls, that displays a peculiarly British character: a reserved discomfort about sincerity and passion, a need to puncture pomposity even as it harbours grandiose ideas of its own importance.

1975 gives us one of the most silly, most splendid, most British songs of all time: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. It is glorious and it is daft, it is operatic and rock n’ roll and singalong, it is ludicrous and heart wrenching, and it contains, in its exorbitant length, all of the parts of the 1975 hit parade, from Freddie’s power ballad through the jaunty gibberish of random Renaissance namechecks to Brian’s electric wigout.

Under the surface of frivolous jollity there is a deep seam of twisted weirdness running through ‘70s Britain. At any moment those light ent larks might turn into something more interesting. The next year is going to bring a novelty record by a novelty band that is going to change pop music forever: ‘New Rose’ by The Damned, the beginning of punk.

A Metropolitan track listing for 1975:

1. ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ - Glen Campbell

2. ‘Lovin’ You’ - Minnie Riperton

3. ‘Isi’ - Neu!

4. ‘Golden Years’ - David Bowie

5. ‘I Keep a Close Watch’ - John Cale

Previously in The Metropolitan - Rowan Davies reflects on who decides what music is cool anyway:

The Metropolitan

I know what boys like

‘This one is for your girlfriend’ Alex Turner introducing I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor When I was 10, my older brother and I pooled our pocket money to buy our very first single: Ebony and Ivory by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, a song that is powered entirely by earnestness. I resented my adored brother’s leap in…

Read more

4 years ago · 5 likes · Rowan Davies