1980, part two

Is this the age of empires and dance?

This is part 2 of my series on the music of the year 1980, when I was ten years old, inspired by The Album Years, a podcast by Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness. You can find part 1 here, and you can find The Album Years episode on 1980 on your favorite podcast app.

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In the very early 80s (I can't remember the precise year) the seminary where my father taught acquired some cutting edge technology: a new computer. It was kept in a special room, and faculty had to book time on it—essentially using it as a glorified typewriter (not even a "fancy internet typewriter," since there was, of course, no accessible internet).

To me, as a child, it seemed like Star Trek. I would go with Dad to his office sometimes when he had booked time on the computer, just so I could sit there and look at it.

There is nothing that separates Gen-X kids like me from subsequent generations more than this simple fact: we grew up without computers, for the most part. My family purchased our first computer when I was fourteen, in 1984—the first machine made by Compaq—and we were relatively early adopters; I inherited it circa 1989 and took it, along with its floppy discs and a massive dot-matrix printer, to college in my second year, and I used it until it died a few years later.

The computer to my generation still carried with it a sense of mystique and fascination, as if some element from the science fiction novels and comic books that we read as kids had landed from space. We adapted quickly, of course, and within a decade, computers were as much a part of life as cars and refrigerators.

You can hear some of that early sense of fascination with these uncanny machines in much of the music of 1980, especially in some of the more dance-heavy subgenres of the English new wave (Simple Minds, Japan) and German electronic music or "Krautrock" (Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream), though a white kid from North Carolina that year was much more likely to listen to Bruce Springsteen or Van Halen than to Neu or Joy Division.

In fact, many of the English and European offerings were not available in the US except as imports—which were certainly beyond my childhood purview—and these sounds would not make their way to mainstream radio until a couple of years later, as bands like Soft Cell and Depeche Mode began to break through. Indeed, I'm not sure how much of this kind of music I heard in 1980, but I suspect not much. The Scottish band Simple Minds' third album, Empires and Dance, was not picked up by their American record company and so certainly would not have been heard Stateside outside the coolest musical circles and perhaps the more adventurous college radio stations.

Here, once again, is the playlist, in case you would like to listen along:

1980 on Apple Music

1980 on Spotify

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Simple Minds: Empires and Dance

But what a great record we missed in the States! Most everyone knows Simple Minds primarily from their massive international hit, "Don't You (Forget About Me)," which featured in the 1985 John Hughes movie The Breakfast Club. While that's a great song, it was not written by the band. Simple Minds got the chance to perform it only after Bryan Ferry and Billy Idol had turned it down. (Can't you just hear Bryan Ferry singing it in your head? It sounds like it was composed for him.)

What most Americans don't know is that Simple Minds started out as a post-punk band in the late 70s and were quite edgy. They had much more in common with Joy Division than with the American Top 40. But it seems that after their big hit, they started chasing a mega-stardom that they never quite achieved. Empires and Dance, on the other hand, is a stark, bracing, and even experimental album—certainly not made for AOR American radio of the early 80s.

But it may be a masterpiece, and it certainly sounds more interesting to me these days than their best-selling album in America, Once Upon a Time from 1985. The lyrics and soundscapes are much darker on this earlier record, as they seem to reflect a journey through the nightclubs and discos of Cold-War Europe at a time when The War was only a generation past: "The clothes he wears / Date back to The War," sings Jim Kerr on "Today I Died Again." And he goes on:

Back to a year,
Back to a youth,
Of men in church and drug cabarets.
Is this the age
Of empires and dance?
Oh, what a world,
Oh, what a world.

The instrumentation is absolutely drenched in reverb, as if it were recorded in a huge, distant bathroom, as synthesizers and effect-laden guitar tones echo around the listener's head. Like those rudimentary computers, this would have seemed alien to me in 1980, a music of the future—which is ironic, because now it sounds firmly ensconced in the past, on a train moving through a Europe that seems both familiar and strange. Graeme Thomson has written in the Guardian:

What is Empires and Dance about? One can never quite pin it down. It’s a series of vaguely connected encounters and experiences that add up to something more substantial than simply a bunch of songs. Everyone is moving: on trains, on foot, going backwards, heading west. Asia looms; languages meet and confuse.

Confusing, indeed. As I keep listening to the album, however, it seems like music I've always known, even though I'm pretty sure that I never heard it before Wilson and Bowman recommended it. After all, we can remake the soundtracks of our youth in our memories, can't we?

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McCartney II

This album, on the other hand, was absolutely part of the soundtrack of my youth in real time, though it was a couple of years after 1980 when I first heard it. The public library of my small town included a small, eccentric selection of vinyl records, and I checked out this one in 1982, shortly after I had bought Paul's Tug of War, which, as I wrote in the last installment, was the first pop album that I purchased with my own money.

McCartney II, however, was radically different from Tug of War, which had been lavishly produced by George Martin, who had worked with Paul during his Beatles days. This album, on the other hand, Paul had self-produced in his home studio, playing all the instruments and singing all the parts. It ends up sounding like a series of fun, informal experiments, some of them quite successful ("Waterfalls," "Darkroom") and others less so ("Temporary Secretary," "Bogey Music")—but I love even the failures.

This record gives the lie to the notion that John was the experimental Beatle while Paul was the pop singer. If you compare McCartney II to John's (and Yoko's) Double Fantasy of the same year (the year, alas, when he was murdered), it is clear that the latter is much more radio friendly, with more obvious big hits ("(Just Like) Starting Over," "Woman"). McCartney II sounds like Paul making music for himself and allowing us to listen in.

Of course, I recorded the album from the library (including a great packaged single of a live version of "Coming Up") onto a TDK cassette tape and played it until it wore out.

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Peter Gabriel: Self-Titled Album ("Melt")

While I did not hear this extraordinary record when it first appeared in 1980, it was one of the first CDs that I bought circa 1985, when I got my first CD player, mostly because of the strange single, "Games Without Frontiers," which got a lot of airplay on the local AOR station that I listened to.¹

I contemplated an entire post on this one album, because it is so rich and holds up so well almost 45 years later. It remains, in turn, discomforting, poignant, passionate, and ultimately defiant, moving from states of lonely psychosis through desire for human connection to, finally, a call for community in the wake of tragedy. Indeed it sort of follows a track-by-track trajectory through these modes, though it is not a "concept album."

It begins with a thundering drum sound on "Intruder," including the notorious "gated snare" that would eventually become the tired wallpaper of much 1980s production but was still new when this album appeared. Gabriel's voice enters in a contrasting hushed tone, almost a whisper:

I know something about opening windows and doors,
I know how to move quietly to creep across creaky wooden floors,
I know where to find precious things in all your cupboards and drawers.
Slipping the clippers,
Slipping the clippers through the telephone wire,
A sense of isolation inspires me.

This is a terrifying opening, which immediately establishes a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia, and which then feeds into the desperate self-awareness of the next track, "No Self Control," with the realization that "I don't know how to stop." It is not as not as though the two songs feature the same fictional character, but rather that we are moving through various positions of social isolation and instability, from the sociopathic to the neurotic and obsessive-compulsive. The frantic production of both tracks reflects this discomfort, with various jittery percussion and synthesizer tones bouncing between stereo channels, and Gabriel's voice growing increasingly tortured.

After a brief instrumental respite ("Start"), "I Don't Remember" abolishes identity completely: "I have no memory of anything at all." But the erasure of memory may be a defense mechanism, as we see in "Family Snapshot," in which the narrative voice plans an assassination of a politician, apparently triggered partly by childhood memories:

All turned quiet,
I have been here before,
A lonely boy hiding behind the front door.
Friends have all gone home,
There's my toy gun on the floor.
Come back, Mom and Dad,
You're growing apart,
You know that I'm growing up sad,
I need some attention,
I shoot into the light.

Side one of the original LP ends with "And Through the Wire," which, unlike everything else on side one seems to at least consider the possibility of a human connection, though it may be accessible only through a telephone wire, and still must be approached with caution: "Be careful where you tread / Watch the wire!"—a lyric that is followed by a crunching, punishing guitar riff.

But at least the wire, which the "intruder" cut with his clippers in the first track, is once again intact. Communication is possible.

Side two begins with the radio mainstay "Games without Frontiers." Some time in the mid-80s, during a request hour on the local AOR station, a woman came on the air asking for "She's So Popular" by Peter Gabriel. She was, apparently, mishearing the opening falsetto vocal, which repeats "jeux sans frontières," or "games without frontiers." And what a strange song for the radio. It imagines games between children of different nationalities, but it is a thinly veiled allegory for high-stakes international diplomacy. So, finally here on side two, we are imagining community, but it is an international community filled with tension.

Indeed, while side one is all about mentally unstable loners, side two is about the challenges of living together, from the diplomacy of the first track, through the tribalism of "Not One of Us," to the social pressure on the mentally ill to integrate and "Lead a Normal Life”—the title of the penultimate track.

The final song, however, is a desperate cry for international community. "Biko" majestically towers over the rest of the album, an anthemic demand for an end to social injustice. Steve Biko was an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, who was tortured and murdered by state police in 1977. The song opens with African song, which is followed by an ominous drum pattern and guitar drone, and then a wailing bit of guitar feedback that sounds like a human scream. And then these lyrics:

September '77, Port Elizabeth, weather fine,
It was business as usual in police room 619.
Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko,
Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko,
Yihla Moja, Yihla Moja,
The man is dead, the man is dead.

"Yihla moja" is Xhosa for "come, spirit"—an invocation of the departed martyr in the wake of his murder. And so Biko's death does not, ultimately, drive his followers to despair but, rather, to defiance:

You can blow out a candle,
But you can't blow out a fire,
Once the flames begin to catch,
The wind will blow it higher.
Oh Biko . . .

It is a song of tremendous power, which ends with the promise that "the eyes of the world are watching now." Here, at the beginning of the 1980s, is Peter Gabriel giving notice to the South African apartheid government: the world is finally paying attention; your days are numbered. He was right.

What a great album. Go and listen to it.

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Much more from 1980 to come in this series: Prince, David Bowie, the Cure, Kate Bush, Blondie, Joy Division, Bruce Springsteen, and more. And the next installment of our Jonathan Swift survey is coming soon as well.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet TDK cassette to yours.

1. By the way, for those not in the know, “AOR” stands for “Album-Oriented Rock,” a popular radio format beginning in the 1970s. I have mentioned this before—specifically in this post on Prince—but I am retrospectively angry with AOR radio of the 1980s for its unspoken racism. AOR stations presented themselves as the radio for music fans with good taste, who liked to dig deeper than the top 40. The problem was that the musical selection was limited to mostly white, male artists, and so I missed out on so much great music from the time. How could they not play Stevie Wonder or Parliament or even Prince, for heaven's sake? Where were Joni Mitchell and Joan Armatrading and Kate Bush? What's more, the repertoire of these stations became frozen in amber, and to this day they continue to play the same "classic rock" from about 1967 to about 1985, as if no worthy music were produced before or since.