1984 Music: Other Stuff

Some other albums from 1984 I don't have the energy to write about in-depth, but that were/are on my radar and/or in my wheelhouse: 

The Go-Betweens, Spring Hill Fair 

Biba Kopf in the NME on 6 October: 

Spring Hill Fair? How do you get there? 

Ride in on the tide, the tidal wave flooding the suburbs where civilised streets trail off into the wild, drowning the last livestock, swallowing up liquid assets. And wait, wait for the waters to subside. Then cling like a leech to the mudstained walls, count the damage and latch onto what’s left. 

What’s left are The Go-Betweens, immigrant craftsmen watching helplessly as their dreams are dashed on the rocks, their dreams carried off on successive waves, their lives and loves rent apart. Cling like leeches to them, for if they don’t always seem like good company, there’s plenty of sustenance here. It just takes time for their abundant qualities to surface and shine. 

It’s taken me to this third LP to even notice they’re alive. I would have gone on blissfully ignoring them if it weren’t for the hooks of their current single ‘Bachelor Kisses’ – the LP opener – that affecting male rejoinder to ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’. The mud, it transpires, wasn’t mud after all, but a lifegiving silt deposit, staining everything it touches a rich, melancholy brown.

 

   

Prince and the Revolution, Purple Rain

 

Siouxsie & the Banshees, Hyaena 

This album is the one with Robert Smith of The Cure filling in on guitar, after a run of classic albums featuring John McGeogh in that role. I therefore expected it be inferior, but it's pretty good, and Smith makes a decent lead guitarist:

  

David Sylvian, Brilliant Trees

   

 

The Replacements, Let It Be

   

 

The Alarm, Declaration 

My first 'proper' concert was The Alarm on the Declaration tour at the Royal Court in Liverpool in 1984, and I went back to see them again on the Strength tour the following year. Now the lyrics remind me a little of the scene in This Is Spinal Tap (also released in 1984), where Nigel talks about his amp that goes up to eleven – but whereas Nigel understood this setting was to be reserved for special occasions, The Alarm used it as their default (I'm speaking of the group's emotional register, not necessarily the actual volume). I now find the resulting cascade of cliches and mixed metaphors a little wearing, but when the songs are simpler and more direct, it works better. In their Cliffs Notes summary of Stephen King's The Stand (a book and author I had no knowledge of in 1984), sticking to a script provided by someone else actually gives the lyrics more focus:

   

 

Billy Bragg, Brewing Up with Billy Bragg 

The Falklands War didn't produce too many great protest songs, perhaps understandably, given its scope was whatever the opposite of epic is. The greatest of this meagre haul is undoubtedly Elvis Costello's 'Shipbuilding', in either version (by Robert Wyatt or Costello's own), but the second-best is perhaps this track off Bragg's second album:

 

 

Television Personalities, A Sense of Belonging

And this is perhaps the third-best:

  

 

Cocteau Twins, Treasure 

I bought Head Over Heels, the Cocteau Twins' second album, with my 1984 Christmas money – I think because the cassette version included a bonus EP, so it seemed better value – but I now think this, their third album, is better.

 

 

Bronski Beat, The Age of Consent 

A truly groundbreaking song and album: 

  

 

The Sound, Shock of Daylight (mini-album) 

Something of a comeback for The Sound, after being dropped by their record company after their previous album. A statement of intent. Here's Allan Jones in Melody Maker on 7 April:

This is the way it sometimes goes: a group plays its way into the frame, cheered on by the enthusiasm of the music press, which always likes to think it knows a good thing when it hears one. Albums are championed, success is predicted; record companies look forward to emphatic ticks in profit margins.

Increasingly, however, the public isn’t quite so easily convinced. At first, the group’s supporters stand their ground, berating the public for its cloth-eared insensitivity. But the public refuses to budge, carries on buying Howard Jones albums.

By the time the group releases maybe its third LP, alarm bells are ringing. And, if that record stalls at the counter, heads start to roll: critics become embarrassed by their original declarations, start looking for new favourites. More often than not, the group ends on the heap, its dreams of glory vanquished by the harsh realities of a commercial market-place that demands immediate returns, obvious definitions of success. Crushed by the wheels of industry, the group is simply discarded and the world moves on, not terribly touched by the group’s demise.

This is very nearly what happened to The Sound; but The Sound refused to go under. The Sound didn’t flounder on the indifference that followed “All Fall Down”, they reorganised their lines of attack, prepared themselves for fresh assaults. The result is, of course, “Shock of Daylight”; what we call these days a “mini-LP”: six tracks, 30 minutes of bright, highly-charged music that stands as a defiant testimony to The Sound’s resilience, their determined reluctance to exit on cue for premature obscurity. …

The record rattles off the deck with the pneumatic clatter of “Golden Soldiers”, which finds Adrian Borland delivering an impassioned declaration of love over slurred brass fanfares, pugnacious bass and thoroughly hectic drumming. A breathless juggernaut of rhythm, “Golden Soldiers” successfully buries the idea of The Sound as some dreadfully dour old conglomerate. “Golden Soldiers” introduces a new Sound: more alert to the physical nuance of music; frankly, it sounds like The Sound have discovered sex and the arch poetics of yore have been put on hold, indefinitely.

  

 

The Triffids, Raining Pleasure (mini-album)

  

 

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Born in the USA 

It's actually the previous album, Nebraska, that gets a mention in my novel. However, the release of Born in the USA was a big event in 1984, even for the music papers. Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker on 28 July rather oversells the album’s gloom, perhaps in order to emphasise that it is ‘serious’ music he is entitled to take seriously:

All over Bruce Springsteen’s America, the lights are going out. In the bars, in the factories, in the frame houses. On “Born In The USA” Springsteen is older, even more claustrophobic and increasingly desperate.

It seems astonishing that Springsteen’s morbid obsessions – prison, busted marriages and the futility of good times – should have made him such a legend in the American heartlands. The man’s a walking museum piece, conceived and formed in the primeval days before MTV, still adhering to the simple, robust formulae of the rock’n’roll music he grew up with. He has more in common with Henry Fonda than with Boy George.

Armed only with some badly-corroded blue collar dreamscapes (“Blue Collar” director Paul Schrader gets a thank you on the sleeve, coincidentally) and the mighty E Street Band, Bruce has forged a collection of songs here that ranks with anything he’s done, and indeed, “Born In The USA” might be his best record. Nevertheless, the last mythic rocker paints pictures of unremitting gloom. I find this rather odd. …

If you were to boil down the subject matter of “Born In The USA”, you’d end up with death, either literal or metaphorical. Dead relationships, ruined lives, dead-end jobs and dead people. The fifth word Springsteen sings on the record is “dead”. The opener, the title track, blasts off with Bruce accompanied by a funereal snare drum. It’s a veteran’s lament (“Had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong/They’re still there he’s all gone”), a saga of a man who chose the army over prison and ended up with nothing. Springsteen sings it like a wounded bull while the band sound like an avalanche. …

It’s the earthy comradeship between Springsteen and his group which prevents this from being a cultural suicide note. On the inner sleeve the band are pictured in monochrome in a shadowy unfinished house, so deglamourized that Clarence Clemons looks like a plumber, while the rest could be detectives from the 38th precinct. Age has withered them, but they endure. …

Orange Juice, Texas Fever (mini-album) and The Orange Juice

 

 

The Mighty Wah!, A Word to the Wise Guy 

The mysteriously named 'X Moore' reviewed this album for the NME on 11 August:

The parallel between vainglorious Liverpudlian bands and Derek Hatton’s Liverpool Council Labour Group – banging of drums and beating of chests being dead popular with each – has been staring us Marxist pop commentators in the face these last few months, just waiting to be exposed. 

When I finally tracked down the lyric booklet for ‘A Word To The Wise Guy’ I discovered, blow me, that Wylie’s parting line on ‘Come Back’ is indeed “And hats off to Hatton…” and not “Let’s hitch up to Heather!” as had been painstakingly gleaned from weeks spent listening to Radio 1. 

From the sleeve of the album onwards – its logo the City crest overpainted with the cross of Lorraine, the cover painting’s portrait of The Resistance, the City’s motto ‘God Gave Us This Leisure (To Enjoy)’ scratched in the paint, the vision of Free Liverpool and occupation – ‘A Word To The Wise Guy’ is a document of a city in struggle. 

Maverick? Certainly. Magnificent? Possibly. It is unquestionably the best album about municipal socialism I’ve heard in many a year.

 

 

The video for 'Come Back' has invaluable footage of Liverpool in 1984, and it's a cracking song, whose call to return to the city I followed to write my novel (at least in spirit): 

  

 

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, From Her to Eternity

 

The Icicle Works, The Icicle Works

I'm not sure how much this is remarked upon, but surely the first album of this Liverpool band drew on the example of the Teardrop Explodes? In any case, Helen Fitzgerald in Melody Maker on 24 March quite liked it:

There’s something growing out of season. Something strong and fiery, something new and exciting, something only a fool would ignore. This record is mine and I’m not sure I want to share it. The Icicle Works are more than a favourite band, their music is a germinating seed of a rebellious attitude that isn’t falsely acquired. … “The icicle Works” is more than my album of the year – it might well be the album of my lifetime. You can agree or argue, that doesn’t matter – but the next time someone tells me there’s nothing exciting happening in music anymore, I’m going to laugh in their face.

  

 

Meat Puppets, Meat Puppets II

Not a million miles away from the Violent Femmes:

 

 

The Bangles, All Over the Place

This interview was broadcast on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1984 or 1985, and it was accompanied by the video for the single ‘Going Down to Liverpool’. This was where I first encountered The Bangles – possibly in the same show as the report by Richard Skinner I mentioned in a previous post. The dates are a little uncertain: the YouTube rip of the Skinner report dates it to 1985, and some discussion on a forum dates this interview with the Peterson sisters more specifically to 19 February 1985. But the YouTube post of the interview says ‘circa 1984’, and the release of ‘Going Down to Liverpool’ is here described as forthcoming, which would also mean 1984. And I’m fairly sure I bought the album with my Christmas money at the end of 1984, and not in 1985.

The Bangles were the most commercial of the Paisley Underground bands, and – eventually – the most successful. They are a little poptastic for my tastes nowadays but I enjoyed All Over the Place at the time – especially ‘Going Down to Liverpool’. As Andy Kershaw’s interview suggests, the song was written by Kimberley Rew, ex-member of English psychedelic revivalists The Soft Boys, for his new group Katrina and the Waves, who also recorded it, in several versions. 

In the interview, Kershaw expresses scepticism that the very Californian Bangles even knew what a UB40 was – as any fule kno, it was the form you needed to sign on for unemployment benefit in the UK, and as such the inspiration for the band of the same name. I wonder if even Rew – an Oxford graduate – was self-consciously slumming it a little when he wrote the song, though most semi-professional musicians in the UK at the time were familiar with the Job Centre, since unemployment benefit effectively served as an arts bursary throughout the 70s and 80s. But the date of the song’s composition – 1982 – and the seemingly arbitrary reference to Liverpool suggest to me that it might have been inspired by Alan Bleasdale’s Boys From the Blackstuff, the most talked-about television show of that year (though it was not broadcast until November, so I may be wrong about this). 

I don’t know anything about the milieu The Bangles grew up in, but it’s hard to imagine them dropped down into Bleasdale-world for a musical guest spot in the way that UK bands appeared in the middle of each episode of The Young Ones (the second series of which was broadcast in 1984) – hard to imagine them on The Young Ones for that matter. Certainly there’s none of the scuzziness of The Dream Syndicate in their music, and everything feels very sunny and light – in ‘Going Down to Liverpool’, their delivery of the line about doing ‘nothing, All the days of my life’ is therefore unconvincing. 

Nonetheless I find their appropriation of the song interesting, in that it mirrors the American response to the so-called British Invasion of the 60s. This attitude is made clear by a 1986 performance, in which the introduction describes ‘Going Down to Liverpool’ as a trip ‘far, far away, across the ocean wide, to the land where The Beatles and The Rutles came from’. The inclusion of the latter group with the former feels significant here: the pastiche lumped in together with its inspiration. Both Liverpool and the UB40 are treated as fetishes of authenticity, but entirely detached from their original context. 

 

Echo & the Bunnymen, Ocean Rain 

Yes, yes, I know, I know. But I have nothing to say about it that Donnie Darko hasn't already said better. I admit didn't pay much attention to this at the time of its release. In my experience, you either liked the Teardrops/Cope or the Bunnymen, rarely both.

1984 Music: U2, The Unforgettable Fire

Release date: 1 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Very much so. 

U2 were the focus of much critical ire and jealousy almost from the start of their career, but the Liverpool bands whose thunder they stole were perhaps especially bitter. Head-On, Julian Cope’s memoir of his time in the Teardrop Explodes contains this ironic, self-mocking anecdote: 

Meanwhile, our New York show was a stupid and mistaken ‘double bill’ with U2 at the Palladium in Lower Manhattan. 

In Liverpool, we thought that U2 was a bad joke, a record company’s idea of a northern group. They talked of passion as if it was their exclusive right. Ho-hum. …

Double Bill, huh? We went on first, did really well and left. I’d seen U2 in the soundcheck. Led Zep, man. Uncool. But they were dead sweet and a bit younger than us, so we gave them some leeway. They weren’t gonna do shit anyway. To quote Gary Dwyer, U2 were really called the Hope Brothers. ‘Cause they’ve got two hopes of making it: Bob Hope and No Hope.’ 

This dismissive attitude is perhaps the only thing on which Cope and erstwhile friend Ian McCulloch agree. The latter has several famous bon mots about U2, but I’ll quote one from a 2011 interview: ‘U2 have never been liked in Liverpool. We know a fake when we see one.’ 

‘Fake’ was of course the direst insult anyone could muster for a pop or rock group in the 80s, although it was flung in all directions – notably against synth bands by fans of ‘real’ music, that is, music made with ‘real’ instruments – like guitars. In the eyes of their detractors, however, it was U2’s obvious straining after sincerity that left them most open to the charge of fakeness. Such are the incoherent politics of authenticity. 

I can only say that for this Liverpool resident and several of my friends, the release of The Unforgettable Fire was the most exciting musical event of 1984 (sorry Ocean Rain). It also received a cautious welcome in the music press of the time. Here’s Paul Du Noyer (another Scouser) in the NME on 6 October: 

It seemed about time for U2 to make their worst album. But they haven’t. 

It seemed like they’d moved from an early artistic peak (‘Boy’) to a commercial peak (‘War’) and what with America sewn up they were set for something rather more comfortable, and rather disappointing. In the old U2 you saw a straining after greatness, and that was the magic. But by 1983 their shows suggested a band who’d now achieved their own notion of greatness, and looked content to re-cycle it for as long as anyone wanted it. 

It got a bit pompous. And I got a worrying suspicion that if you crept up to this magnificent edifice U2 had become, and if you gave it a little rat-a-tat-tat with your knuckle, you might hear something hollow. Just in time, U2 have swerved off to one side. In ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ I think they’ve made the record they needed to make. Swopping Steve Lillywhite for the production team of Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois, they’ve staved off the predictability which threatened to wreck their original promise. The results are generally as welcome as they’re surprising. 

The old four-square rock unit has been de-constructed. In its place there’s a panoramic soundscape, multiple textures, subtle shifts in emphasis. In parts, U2 are scarcely recognisable. String and synth arrangements abound, sometimes replacing the group line-up entirely. 

Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker wrote along similar lines, although with stronger reservations: 

“The Unforgettable Fire” is the other side of the coin from “War”. Where the latter opened with the shattering paramilitary drumbeat of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “Fire” launches into the long shimmer of “A Sort Of Homecoming”, whose sort-of-mystical lyric adorns the romantic maroon-and-gold sleeve: “See the sky the burning rain/She will die and live again/tonight”, sings Bono. It’s all a bit Kerrygold-country. 

We’re a long way from Steve Lillywhite here. In place of the harsh rock attack with which both he and U2 became inextricably entwined, producers Eno and Daniel Lanois have forged U2 into an electronic chamber-unit. The strident belting clamour of yore is virtually absent – the lovely single “Pride” is the closest to it, and even that offers a few different tints – and instead there are interleaving layers of synths, guitars and percussion. Melodic instruments are frequently used as near-abstract tonalities, shedding any distinct identity in favour of producing a wash of sound whose components can’t always be exactly enumerated. … 

My friends and I liked U2 because they were ‘our’ band: their lyrics contained many coded or overt references to their Christian faith. So they are also the favourite band of Robert, the protagonist of my novel, The Angels of L19. But my novel ends in summer 1984, so it doesn’t include any reference to The Unforgettable Fire. As the above reviews suggest, it was rightly seen as a significant departure from U2’s previous sound. To me, it remains a more daring break than the more trumpeted change of direction on Achtung Baby, and – along with Zooropa – it is their most experimental album. All the more remarkable then that it was their greatest success to date, and confirmed their hold on the American imagination, though possibly that had as much to with the accompanying world tour as the album, where the songs were presented more conventionally.

Reviews of the album are likely to use several words from the following checklist: atmospheric, shimmering, wash, texture, smear, effect (you’ll already recognise several of them from the NME and Melody Maker above). Adam Sweeting’s observation that it was no longer always possible to distinguish or identify individual instruments in this landscape of sound seems crucial. Previous albums had certainly used a lot of guitar effects – this was part of The Edge’s signature sound – but the sounds were still very identifiably a guitar. And any keyboard or violin overdubs were clearly and distinctly positioned in the mix. Here, instead of the astringent folk-inflected violin of Steve Wickham, used on War, there was a full chamber orchestra, and, whereas previously the group’s live sound was just four clearly separated channels, here they needed pre-programmed sequencers to come anywhere near to replicating the album’s sound.

Beyond all the vague adjectives I’ve just listed, I might note that the drum sound here is completely different from the gated reverb on War (or Sparkle in the Rain): it’s more muted and diffuse. And the drum patterns are also different: less of the goose-stepping martial snare and more rolling tom-toms, possibly in several different layers. Less beat, more rhythm. 

Obviously Eno and Lanois were partly responsible for all of this, but they didn’t push the band anywhere they weren’t ready or willing to go. And in fact the tracks that most clearly suggest the influence of Eno’s ambient albums, ‘’Promenade’ and ‘4th of July’ feel insubstantial and pointless in this context. The penultimate song, ‘Elvis Presley and America’, with a backing track of the album’s first song played backwards, is also unimpressive: interminable and lyrically incomprehensible, while the closer ‘MLK’ is just a sketch. So the album’s claim to greatness rests on its peerless opening sequence of four songs, including the singles ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ and ‘The Unforgettable Fire’, and on ‘Bad’ and ‘Indian Summer Sky’ from its second side. 

Is this a Romantic album like The Crossing, or a Futurist one like Sparkle in the Rain? The cover suggests the former, with a ruined castle shot on black-and-white infrared film to render it more unworldly, and a colour scheme of imperial purple and gold. The opener ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ is certainly set in a natural landscape: ‘See faces ploughed like fields … The wind will crack in wintertime’ (‘Kerrygold country’ as Adam Sweeting says), although it seems to be a landscape ravaged by nuclear catastrophe. ‘Indian Summer Sky’ contains the lines: ‘In the forest there's a clearing, I run there towards the light, Sky, it's a blue sky’. But several other songs have no discernable setting at all, and insofar as they are (allegedly) about (someone else’s) heroin addiction, they presumably take place in Dublin (‘These city lights, They shine as silver and gold’). 

Really the landscape here is an internal one, and the songs are about psychological states – in particular, they’re about struggle. The absence of anything resembling a conventional love song is notable – there are relatively few of these in early U2 in general, and none at all here. In ‘Pride’ and ‘MLK’, the struggle is against external agents of oppression, but, perhaps significantly, this is someone else’s struggle (Martin Luther King’s); for the most part, the battle here is against oneself, or ‘the world’ in more general terms. In other words, it is as much existential as spiritual – the lyrics are also notable for the absence of the explicit references to God or the Bible one can find scattered through their previous albums. 

‘Wire’, the third track, tends to be treated rather dismissively, but it was then and remains one of my favourites:

Innocent, and in a sense I am 

Guilty of the crime that's now in hand 

Such a nice day, throw your life away 

Such a nice day, let it go … 

Is this the time 

The time to win or lose 

Is this the time 

The time to choose 

It doesn’t get much more existential than that.

1984 Music: Prefab Sprout, Swoon

Release date: 12 March 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes. 

I remember buying this on cassette very shortly after its release and reading the lyrics on the train home from Liverpool city centre. My god, this is poetry! I knew other people who listened to the Teardrop Explodes (though not, I think, to Cope’s solo records): I didn’t know anyone who liked Prefab Sprout. I then bought the EP that compiled their two early singles and, slightly later, the 12-inch version of the first release of ‘When Love Breaks Down’. I don’t know why I took a chance on Swoon: I didn’t read the music papers regularly, and the reviews quoted below would scarcely have encouraged me to spend my pocket money even if I had seen them. Perhaps Annie Nightingale or Janice Long played a track on the radio (I listened to both more regularly than Kid Jensen or Richard Skinner – I didn’t listen to John Peel at all). But I suspect my purchase was a response to The Tube broadcasting a ‘video’ of ‘Cruel’: 

 

I haven’t gone back into 1982–3 to check the early coverage of the Sprout in the NME and Melody Maker, but I suspect they may have been victims of music-paper syndrome: fawning early coverage, followed by bitter dismissal when they threatened to become successful. In any case, in 1984 their first album fared no better than Julian Cope’s. From Jim Shelley in the NME on 10 March: 

‘Swoon’ absolutely swims in wordplay, coy clues, dumb puns, arch artificiality, smart-alec allusion in a way that is so-so, clever-clever, ham-fisted, high-handed, even half-hearted … ‘Swoon’, in rejecting simplicity and sentiment, does have a definite, caring craft to it, a self-involved craftiness, a plucky capacity for cunning. But for all its deft complication and wordiness, it never excites or excels, is wildly harmless, consistently irksome and virtually passionless. Finally, it doesn’t say much. 

Or Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker on the same day: 

One way and another, this is drivel, mostly of the twee and gutless variety. … it’s rambling, disjointed, strings of devious chord changes toppling into one another without any sense of urgency or consequence. … “Swoon”, apparently an acrostic from Songs Written Out Of Necessity (bullshit), is a gigantic folly, a tour de force of self indulgence. As you can tell, I’m horrified. 

The group also seem to have been dogged by comparisons with Steely Dan, which seem baffling now, but this was obviously a serious black mark against them in 1984, allowing journos to dismiss them as too-clever-by-half sterile musos. 

There is some force to the criticisms in these reviews – insofar as one can identify actual criticisms among the rhetorical flourishes, which are almost as baroque as those in the songs under attack. Swoon is very much a first album by a young man trying to impress: again, I’m no musicologist, but I have no doubt that it’s full of weird chords and time signatures, and many of the songs have a herky-jerky, stop-start quality, with the vocal lines overcrammed with words. As Sweeting notes, ‘Technique’ begins with a 1-2-3-4-5 count-in, seemingly just to let you know it’s in 5/4, while ‘I Couldn’t Bear to be Special’ opens with an irritating scat-line ‘Bo, bo bee, bo’, whose purpose similarly seems to be that it isn’t ‘La-la-la’. The lyrics to the album’s opener ‘Don’t Sing’ are based around an ekphrastic paraphrase of the plot to Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory, about a ‘whisky priest’ hounded to his doom by revolutionaries in Mexico – as ludicrous a conceit as Scott Walker’s mariachi re-telling of The Seventh Seal fifteen years earlier. Even worse: Paddy McAloon seems to be not merely retelling the story, but using the novel’s emotional arc as a parallel for some vaguely defined personal crisis. Similarly with the summary of Bobby Fisher’s dramatic career as a chess grandmaster in ‘Cue Fanfare’. 

But isn’t there something admirable about this throw-everything-at-the-wall overegging? Showing off isn’t always a fatal flaw – if one has something to show off about. And there’s real talent on show here: not a paucity of ideas, but a surplus. 

 

A comparison with the Sprout’s second album, Steve McQueen, is instructive. The production on Swoon is relatively anonymous and, since the indie-label budget from Newcastle label Kitchenware was presumably limited, there are few flourishes, just a basic palette of sounds focused around various guitars (mainly acoustic) and keyboards (mainly electric piano). All the instruments have their own space in the mix. The band get a co-production credit with David Brewis. Conversely, Steve McQueen is very identifiably produced by Thomas Dolby, and while his presence is not as oppressive as, say, Martin Hannett’s on Joy Division’s records, the songs somehow feel simpler and more direct even among the addition of various studio effects. They have a clearer identity despite sharing the limelight with Dolby’s production. 

We all know that pop songs have a Proustian quality, summoning us back to our youth – especially, perhaps those we first heard between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. But I have two later memories associated with this album. In 1994, when I hadn’t heard it for several years, I caught a crackly broadcast of ‘Cruel’ on a pirate radio station on my first visit to Italy to do a language course before starting a doctorate in Italian history – and realised I could still quote the lyrics verbatim (which I suppose makes this a memory of a memory). 

I'm a liberal guy, too cool for the macho ache 

With a secret tooth for the cherry on the cake 

With a pious smile, a smile that changes what I say 

While I waste my time in regretting 

That the days went from perfect to just okay 

Quite what it was about this student-union sexual-politics handwringing that appealed to my goofy, jug-eared, never-been-kissed fourteen-year-old self I don’t know. Probably only that I had so few albums that I knew the lyrics to all of them (I can also quote large chunks of Larry Norman’s Only Visiting This Planet, for example, a 1970s Christian album with a sensibility far removed from Swoon). 

Another memory: in early 2015, when I’d bought the album again to immerse myself in all-things 1984 before starting to write The Angels of L19, I used to listen to it on the bus on my way to work in a call centre. So now it summons in me not just a feeling of teenage nostalgia, but also a sensation of dread and smothered panic attack.