I’m not sure whether I was still
listening to the Jimmy Savile show but now I wasn’t just listening to past
hits; I realised I could save them for posterity without – er- paying for them.
I do recall being racked with guilt on hearing Steve Wright on a Brit Awards
broadcast admonish illegal tapers. Guilt, but not so much that I stopped doing
it. However, I did start buying a few greatest hits tapes or 12” albums, or
borrow some from the library to – um- record at home. As Steve said at the
time, wagging his finger: “Naughty,
naughty!”
Inevitably 1984 was greeted by a
welter of articles about Orwell and gratitude that we weren’t living in a world
of constant war and surveillance. Ahem.
Weren’t we? The Cold War was playing out in all its grim glory, but a
man called Mikael Gorbachev was approaching the supreme Soviet stage from which
he could finally bring down the Iron Curtain by the end of the decade. At home,
we didn’t have Big Brother, but Big Sister Margaret Thatcher pushed the UK
darned close to a police state during the 12-month miners’ strike.
The long-standing USA-USSR stand-off
was the inspiration behind Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’, which
topped the charts for nine weeks in the summer. Yet that wasn’t even the
group’s biggest hit of the year. Re-wind to January, and that new song
languishing in the thirties. A lot of post-Christmas airplay and a TOTP
performance advanced it to number six, at which point R1 breakfast show
presenter Mike Read observed the record sleeve and, suddenly horrified at the
explicit lyrics and fetishist imagery, priggishly imposed a ban on the song.
The network fell in behind him and ‘Relax’ duly leapt to the top. When ‘Two Tribes’
was released, it crept back up the chart to the point where Frankie occupied
the top two berths around the time of my birthday.
It wasn’t just their music which was
everywhere. The ‘Frankie say RELAX’ T-shirts were commonplace, and the
establishment was in uproar. Here was an obvious hymn to gay sex, just as AIDS
was reaching pandemic status around the world. The video even provocatively
portrayed an S&M orgy, yet civilisation didn’t collapse. Indeed, Holly
Johnson and his mates proceeded to release one of the most beautiful songs of
all time, ‘The Power of Love’.
With its sumptuous Nativity video (angels, shepherds, Magi on camels…!), it was
tailor-made for a Christmas number one, only to be tossed aside when Band Aid
and Wham delivered their charity fund-raising double-whammy. However, it did
touch the top for one week, thus elevating the band to the elite few to have
made number one with their first three releases. The following year, ‘Welcome
to the Pleasuredome’ came within a whisker of making it four in a row, but
within two years the band imploded and in any case the Frankie flame had
already burnt itself out.
Two chart veterans were also enjoying
a new purple patch. Elton John’s ‘Sad Songs’ and ‘Passengers’ continued a good
run of top ten singles while Queen were back to their best on their album The
Works. I couldn’t help liking Roger Taylor’s paeon to the wireless, ‘Radio Gaga’
and Eric Deacon’s ‘I Wanna Break Free’, featuring the infamous but undoubtedly
entertaining cross-dressing opening to the video. I wasn’t so fussed on Freddie
Mercury’s solo material like ‘Love Kills’. The Queen magic was missing.
Two sassy Americans with close
associations with New York burst onto the K music scene. You really believed
Cyndi Lauper when she shrilled ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’.
The official video was deliberately cheap but I mainly remember her miming the
song leading a sort of conga around the TOTP studio! The far more subtle ‘Time
After Time’ also did well in July. And then there was Madonna Louisa Ciccone.
‘Holiday’ had done OK in February, but
surely it should have been released during the summer. Never mind; it would
have another day in the sun. Instead it was the arrival of ‘Like A Virgin’
just before Christmas which really brought Madonna to our attention. While you
couldn’t really believe the sexy singer-dancer was a virgin, that wasn’t the
point. It was a great record which offered something I hadn’t heard before.
There would be plenty more where that came from…..
This
side of the Atlantic, we had a few promising young female vocalists, too.
Alison Moyet lent her big soulful voice to songs like ‘Love Resurrection’ and
‘All Cried Out’ while another product of Essex, Sade, won critical acclaim here
and in the States with her album 'Diamond Life’. I hated her breathy ‘Your Love
is King’ but ‘Smooth Operator’
was more up-tempo and– well – super smooth. She may have been born in Nigeria
but I loved the fact that she we went to school in Clacton.
It wasn’t just Sade wowing them
Stateside. The big Brit bands were coining it in, too. Duran Duran were
starting to go a bit over the top for me. ‘The Reflex’ was a reasonable number one (their last) but ‘Wild Boys’ was pompous rubbish,
with an even stupider video and Simon Le Bon’s wince-inducing attempts at the
high notes. The Human League didn’t soar to the heights in the UK but I enjoyed
the rocky ‘The Lebanon’ and, in particular, ‘Louise’.
It’s such a simple romantic story with a gentle, low-key synth production that
I was entranced. Still am. I didn’t realise at the time that Phil Oakey wrote
it as a follow-up to the characters in ‘Don’t You Want Me’, but that made no
difference. It also transpired that she still didn’t want him.
Melle Mel’s deep rap voice was often
on the radio. His anti-drugs song ‘White Lines (Don’t Do It)’ stayed in the
charts for several months and he cropped up again in the intro to Chaka Khan’s
chart-topping ‘I Feel For You’. I quickly tired of the video on TOTP and the
song wasn’t my cup of tea. It turned out that it had been written by Prince,
whose ‘When Doves Cry’ went to number four in the summer. I know I may be in a
minority here, but his follow-up, ‘Purple Rain’ is one of my most hated songs of
the ‘80s.
Mind you, there was some serious
competition in 1984. Black Lace’s version of an old French ditty sold shedloads
in the second half of the year but ‘Agadoo’ has become a by-word for irritating
pop ever since. OK, so it’s not The Birdie Song, but when you factor in the
bleach-blond spiky hairstyles and cheesy grins of the duo, the result is truly
terrible. I wouldn’t ordinarily associate Stevie
Wonder with crap compositions but when he brought out ‘I Just Called to Say I
Love You’, his reputation took a massive jolt. Not so, his bank balance! Like
most awful pop, it was extraordinarily catchy in melody and lyrics and –
horrors of horrors! – proceeded to sell more than two million in this country
alone.
At Christmas, another giant of
twentieth-century music also blotted his copybook in terms of quality. Paul
McCartney had started the year at the top with one of his trademark mediocre
‘let’s all love one another’ songs: ‘Pipes of Peace’. He then partnered Michael Jackson on ‘The Girl
Is Mine’ and reached two with his ‘No More Lonely Nights’. But when he was
joined by Rupert Bear and a cartoon Frog Chorus in December, the depths were
well and truly plumbed. Yet, of course, it was aimed at the seasonal family
market and Macca struck gold.
Sixteen years earlier he had written
one of the greatest Beatles songs, ‘Hey Jude’, inspired by Julian, the son of
John Lennon. 1984 proved to be the time
when Julian emerged briefly from his late dad’s lengthy shadows to have a hit
of his own. Despite being an odd blend of pseudo-ska, Country and pop, I quite
liked ‘Too Late for Goodbyes’.
The face and voice was uncannily similar to John’s but probably the family
connection was more burden than boon; this single was his only top 10 hit in
the UK.
Two great British bands were at
opposite ends of their major principal chart careers. Madness delivered one of
my favourites in ‘Michael Caine’ a
rarity in that it was Chas Smash and not Suggs on lead vocals. The golden age
of humorous videos had passed, and they were entering a more reflective phase
before their first break from the business.
On the other hand, The Smiths were
garnering rave reviews for their rather different rock sound. They had four top
20 singles in 1984, although one, ‘Hand in Glove’ was officially credited to
guest vocalist Sandie Shaw. Read Morrissey’s remarkably candid and eccentric
autobiography – no phoney phantom ghost writer here - for his less than
enthusiastic opinions on that issue. Of the four, the one appealing to me most was
‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’.
Yes, I know the singer-writer practically invented pop ‘miserabilism’, but
wouldn’t you feel under the weather if you had a bunch of gladioli stuffed down
your trousers?
There were some cracking ballads
peppering the pop scene in ’84. Lionel Richie not only had the year’s
biggest-selling album (Can’t Slow Down) but also his only UK chart-topper in
‘Hello’. That video of the beautiful blind girl sculpting teacher Lionel’s head
in clay by touch alone became rather annoying on TOTP after six weeks at the
top but it was a winning combination of sentimentality, tunes and Richie’s
peerless voice. He even kept from the top perhaps Phil
Collins’ second finest moment as a solo artist. ‘In The Air Tonight’ had been
an impressive debut but ‘Against All Odds’
was an above-par movie theme song. The film itself was pretty crap, even if it
did star Rachel Ward, one of the most gorgeous stars back then. It also set in
train a second, parallel career path for Collins, who seemed to be ever-present
in the Eighties singles charts either with Genesis or another soporific solo or
duet Hollywood hit. I found it hard to hate him, for all his success, but
nevertheless the run of boring ballads severely tested our artist-listener
relationship!
The Yanks couldn’t get enough of the
chirpy London accent or his lucrative line in cinema lullabies but then there
were quite a few American artists I enjoyed hearing, too. I’ve mentioned a few
already but in addition Kool and the Gang were doing well. ‘Joanna’ represented
a shift towards the Phil Collins market (as was ‘Cherish a few years later) but
‘Fresh’
was more like their old disco thang,
and all the better for it. Sister Sledge sang ‘Thinking of You’, both Van Halen
and The Pointer Sisters were in the top ten with very different songs boasting
the same title, ‘Jump’.
I also enjoyed ZZ Top’s debut record
‘Gimme All Your Lovin’.
It wasn’t just about the Gibbons brothers’ mighty beards; it was the whole
blend of Rhythm and Blues (in its true sense) and those growled vocals by Billy
Gibbons. The videos had a visual brand all of their own, too: long-legged
blondes, scruffy blokes in denim and vehicles with ludicrously over-sized
wheels. It was a winning formula, but the first single was their best.
In 1984, there were a mere four
channels on British television. However, the infant Channel 4 had expanded the
opportunities many-fold to watch pop music. I rarely watched The Tube, largely
because it was too early in the evening but also as it clashed with the News.
However, what made it stand out was the exposure it offered to many new bands,
and that many of them performed live. Barring the occasional three-minute gem
on TOTP, the BBC featured very little live contemporary music. Which is why,
one summer evening in 1984, I managed to get my way with the TV remote and
watch BBC1’s broadcast direct from, I think, Wembley.
The concert was by Billy Joel, whose
An Innocent Man album had yielded a few decent singles including ‘Uptown Girl’.
I’d been aware of several of Joel’s songs without generating much in the way of
devotion, but this hour or so won him at least one new fan! Even Dad watched
with me, but I don’t think Mum was present; must have been her bath night! I think only the first half was
transmitted live, with part two recorded for the following night. Put together,
the programme not only included some familiar hits but also introduced me to
longer tracks like ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’ and ‘Goodnight Saigon’
which made a huge impression on me. Joel’s piano-playing, gift for melody and
observations on social issues and vignettes of ordinary New York lives were
outstanding and I embraced the live experience, albeit from the small screen in
the corner of our lounge. When his
Greatest Hits Volumes 1 and 2 came out the next year, I actually sought it out
to catch up with the songs I’d heard in that TV simulcast or just missed over
the previous decade. In 1990, I grabbed the chance to witness him live for
myself at the Wembley Arena. And a fab show it was, too.
It wasn’t just the Americans invading
our charts. Even Germany supplied some pop songs which appealed to me. Nena was
a kind of brunette Kim Wilde who achieved something that our Kim never did: a
UK number one single. '99 Red Balloons’
toppled the mighty ‘Relax’ with a jaunty synth-heavy song inspired by Cold War
paranoia. In 2016’s German TV spy thriller Deutschland 83, centred on the same
theme, the original hit ‘Neunandneunzig
Luftballons’ was a perfect choice to set the cultural and political scene
for the drama, which turned out to be extremely watchable, even with subtitles.
As for Nena in Grossbritannien 84 I remember at the time the tabloids focussing
crassly on the singer’s armpit hair (!) but that was just their way of
ridiculing anything foreign.
I also enjoyed a record by New Wave
band, Alphaville. Unbeknowns to me at the time, ‘Big In Japan’
was apparently about heroin-addicted lovers longing for a drug-free future but
to my naïve ears, it was simply an addictive four-minute slice of mid-tempo
electro-pop It sold zillions across Europe but unsurprisingly peaked only at
eight this side of the Channel. Only in doing some research on the band have I
discovered that Alphaville were the composers of the classic power ballad
‘Forever Young’, a track I’d always associated with Laura Branigan.
Surprisingly the original barely made a scratch on our Top 100.
Other random songs that floated my
boat that year included Blancmange’s ‘Don’t Tell Me’.
Perhaps best known for ‘Living on the Ceiling’, their Indian-influenced sound
transferred quite well to mid-80s electropop. So did Bronski Beat’s. They made
a stunning arrival with the dreamy but sad ‘Smalltown Boy’. A
serious tale about homophobia and bullying (“Alone on a platform,
the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face”) its
memorable synth riff, minor chords, lovely tune, dance beat and Jimmy Somerville’s
falsetto were irresistible. It was far more than a gay anthem, and took Europe
by storm.
Paul Weller has made a career of being
a miserable git but even he has his romantic side. This came to the fore with
‘You’re the Best Thing’, a
top five hit with Mick Talbot as The Style Council. They made quite a few chart
appearances around that time but, just ahead of ‘Shout to the Top’, this
soulful ballad has to be the highlight. Much as I like ‘Long Hot Summer’, I
wish he’d chosen to perform instead this 1984 love song in his Cardiff show I
attended in 2015.
Whilst ‘Smalltown Boy’ and The Style
Council were necessarily short of laughs, there were some conspicuously
shameless comedy records in 1984. To such a degree that the 1985 Brit Awards,
forerunners of today’s Brits, featured a Best Comedy Song award. Surely the first
and only time that happened. Weird Al Jankovic’s Michael Jackson parody, ‘Eat
It’ and Alexei Sayle’s manic ‘Ullo John, Got a New Motor?’ (best line: “What’s that button there for? What’s that
button there for? Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!”) were nominated,
but the deserved winner was Neil’s very funny version of hippy anthem ‘Hole in My Shoe’. Nigel Planer’s character from BBC’s cult comedy The Young Ones let rip, and even John Peel seemed to like the
subversive performance on TOTP.
Neil/Nigel was thwarted by ‘Two Tribes’ but he did eventually top the chart,
along with the rest of the Young Ones – plus Cliff Richard – two years later.
Heavyyyy!
Paul Young may have won the Brit Award
for Best British Male, but in my mind Nik Kershaw was robbed! A talented writer
and multi-instrumentalist, his look of a teenage boy rabbit caught in the
headlights may have held him back. Early releases flopped but when the
wonderful ‘Wouldn’t it Be Good’
soared to four, the re-releases made him one of the most successful artists of
1984.
‘I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me’, a
jaunty appeal against nuclear war (“forefinger
on the button” was a genuinely scary and real prospect in ’84) went to
number two, although his haunting ballad ‘Human Racing’, written as a teenager,
was less successful. Stupendous chord changes and vibrant vocals clearly
weren’t enough for the wider public. Their loss! Nik proceeded to finish the
year on another high, releasing an even better song, but what was it about?
Contemporary commentary had it that it was about the Northern Ireland Troubles.
I couldn’t fathom that interpretation, but the lyrics seemed to mean nothing. I
guess that’s why Kershaw called it ‘The Riddle’.
Who cares? It’s a brilliant song. A few more hits followed, my favourite being
the little-remembered ‘Elizabeth’s Eyes’. I was delighted to find him
supporting Elton John several years later at Wembley Arena. The venue was
mostly empty at the time but I preferred Nik’s set to Elton’s.
Much as I loved Nik Kershaw’s
material, 1984 gave me what was, and remains one of the tracks I most enjoy
hearing. I mentioned U2’s ‘New Year’s Day’ contribution to 1983 but when ‘Pride(In the Name of Love)’
entered the chart at eight in mid-September, the Irish band ascended to an
altogether higher plane. From The Edge’s chiming guitar intro
to the anthemic “Oh oh-oh oh” chorus for the fade-out, via Bono’s impassioned
vocals, Larry Mullen Jnr’s heavy drums and Adam Clayton’s insistent bass,
everything I could ask for in a rock classic is there. And then there’s the
subject itself. Stevie Wonder’s ‘Happy Birthday’ had been a memorable appeal
for Martin Luther King’s birthday to be commemorated as a national holiday. And
with ‘Pride’ on his side, there was no doubting MLK’s elevation to true world
icon, not just a troublesome US civil rights leader of the Sixties.
I bought the album The Unforgettable
Fire off the back of the single. The title track and ‘Bad’ also worked for me,
and of course there was plenty more from U2. Their Live Aid performance
transformed them into stadium superstars and also into my new favourite band.
Nobody I knew could possibly admit to
loving Wham. Nevertheless, George Michael and Andrew Ridgley (plus backing
singers Pepsi and Shirlie) were just as part of the 1984 pop scene as Frankie
Goes to Hollywood. They topped the chart twice with ‘Wake me Up Before You
Go-Go’ and ‘Freedom’ and came close with the perennial Christmas weepie ‘Last
Christmas’. That wasn’t enough for George. Even hearty heterosexuals like me
couldn’t fail to be impressed by his solo effort, ‘Careless Whisper’, and then
he took one of the most important segments of Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s
Christmas’. Given that he wrote most of these hits, Mr Michael was becoming a
very rich young man indeed, as well as a sizzling sex symbol amongst teenage
girls…. More than that, his 1984 soundtrack
singles combined to encapsulate everything that pop is supposed to be about:
two up-tempo, apparently throwaway dance numbers, a mature ballad, consummate
Christmas perfection and perhaps the most politically and financially successful
humanitarian musical venture in history.
Of course, George didn’t write ‘Do
They Know….?’. That accomplishment belongs to Bob Geldof and Midge Ure. Their
respective bands had been experiencing different career arcs. The Boomtown Rats
were no longer the force they had been in the late Seventies, but Ultravox were
still selling singles, including ‘Dancing With Tears in My Eyes’ and – a guilty
pleasure of mine – ‘Love’s Great Adventure’. Band Aid was certainly the most inspiring collective – and
song – I can remember. Geldof’s anger at the injustice of the Ethiopian famine
resulted in the roping in not only the Ultravox front man but also dozens of the
biggest names in UK contemporary pop.
Bob’s job was to harangue the names in
his contacts book and rattle cages throughout the industry, not to mention the
incumbents of the House of Commons. However much she tried, Prime Minister
Thatcher could not sweep this scruffy, potty-mouthed Irish rock star under her
luxurious deep pile Conservative carpet. The last thing she wanted to do was
encourage giving money to millions of poor black people. Third World poverty
merely helped support military dictatorships friendly to her own regime. But
she under-estimated Geldof. Meanwhile Midge was left to handle the back-room
musical roles, and his contribution to the Band Aid enterprise should never be
forgotten.
After all, it was actually quite a
good song – a million times better than the Jacko-Richie composition that
followed the next year, which just sounded cheap and exploitative. Perhaps I
shouldn’t be so critical. Anything that gets Yanks to spare even a solitary
thought for people beyond their own borders, let alone raise $63 million,
deserves some credit. The era of the charity single had
begun. There have been many feeble, yet well-intentioned imitators. The
initiators and humanitarian pop campaigners like Bono and Geldof have been
pilloried in the Press. Why? I have no problem with musicians using their fame
and influence to support worthy causes. Better that than lazy journos and
politicians trying to ignore or belittle issues we should be angry about! If
the music itself merits repeated listening, it becomes even more powerful.
With so much free publicity and
promotion on every radio station, TV channel (all four of them!) and in all
kinds of retail outlet, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ could easily have become
tedious, turning such a force for good into a negative. Yet it made us feel
good about ourselves and, as a musical soundtrack to December ’84 will linger
for ever. What could Geldof and Ure do to top that? Surely they couldn’t
develop the theme from a three-minute single into a massive, multi-artist
concert? It could never be done! Such negativity was simply a red rag to the
stubborn bull that was Mr Geldof. The seeds were already sown for the
extraordinary extravaganza that was to be Live Aid.
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