1984

My novel The Angels of L19 is officially released in August. It's set in 1984, and its protagonists are fully engaged with the music of the time. The novel therefore includes discussions of U2, New Order, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen (and, in passing, the Teardrop Explodes and Simple Minds). It is, in a sense, a story about the interpretation of texts (hermeneutics). For the characters, that mainly means the Bible, but I also wanted to show them reading and interpreting other, more contemporary texts. So I thought I would complement this aspect of the book with a series of posts on albums released in 1984, which I'll be putting up twice a week for the next two months.

This was a significant year for me. My fictional characters are 15 and 16: I was 14. But it was the year I joined an evangelical church and (perhaps not coincidentally) the year I became interested in music and films as things with a history that could be researched and excavated. One of the themes of the book is how seeing yourself in relation to eternal truths and an ancient and continuous religious tradition enlarges rather than constricts your sense of the world around you. It also makes you aware you’re part of history.

I was aware of things beyond the charts before 1984: I already liked Revolver and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club, and I'd been through a rock phase and listened to music by Deep Purple and Rainbow. But 84 was perhaps the year I began to think in terms of ‘I liked this. What else has this creator done before or since?’ Or, even more importantly, and beyond just thinking about music: ‘What has this creator been influenced by? What texts have shaped the kind of stories it is possible to tell in this tradition?’ And I pursued these lines of enquiry even when this involved some effort (i.e. beyond getting a series of books by the same author off the library shelf).

It may seem against the spirit of this sense of discovery to restrict my discussions here to a single calendar year, but of course that year has now itself become historical. In the course of writing the book, I discovered several bands I hadn’t paid any attention to at the time (e.g. The Fall, Siouxsie & the Banshees), but I think in the next post I’ll begin with two albums I was a fan of in 1984: Julian Cope’s first two solo releases, World Shut Your Mouth and Fried.

In subsequent posts I'll combine my own observations with quotations from contemporary reviews published in 1984 issues of the NME and Melody Maker, the two largest music papers at the time. 

 Above: 'Liverpool Groups with Stupid Names, 1976–1984' from the NME, 21 April 1984.