by Bob Stanley
‘Music isn’t art,’ Waterman said at the team’s zenith in 1989, ‘it’s for enjoyment, and anyone who says it’s art is in the wrong business. Music has always been written for a purpose, be it a wedding, a funeral or a birth, and people have always been paid for it. Mozart, Beethoven and Handel all got paid. I’ve been very poor, I’ve cleaned toilets for Mecca, I’ve slept on Euston station, and I never want to be like that again. I don’t want to go down in history as a great songwriter because I died penniless. If you can use your talents not to stay poor, you should.’
‘We’re a dancing nation,’ sang Mel and Kim on ‘Respectable’ – SAW may have been ridiculed but they understood that much, and their sound was as big an influence on the continent as anything from Chicago or Detroit: Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’ (no. 1 ’94) and Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’ (no. 1 ’97) were SAW melted down and recast in Danish plastic. Waterman, by this point, had largely retired to the very English hobby of steam trains. Not content with a train set, he bought an entire railway line north of Manchester. So he was no Van Gogh – he had never wanted to be – but he got rich and famous.
Ethiopia aside, there was another major world event unfolding in the mid-eighties, another catastrophe, but AIDS was either ignored, trivialised or – if it was mentioned at all – regarded as the disease of homosexuals and junkies. It was seen as equating sex with death, and although pop had glorified poetic deaths in ‘Johnny Remember Me’, ‘Leader of the Pack’ and Terry Jacks’s ‘Seasons in the Sun’ (US and UK no. 1 ’74), it didn’t deal with the real thing very well at all. Jermaine Stewart’s ‘We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off (to Have a Good Time)’ became a major transatlantic hit.10 Chastity was worn like a badge of honour. Freddie Mercury wore a housewife’s outfit in the video for ‘I Want to Break Free’ (UK no. 3, US no. 45 ’84), and MTV banned it; Mercury, in a canny career move, chose to stay in the closet. David Bowie, who a decade earlier had opened up the door to outsiders and the sexually stigmatised, slammed it shut on his 1983 album Let’s Dance. He covered an obscure 1976 single by a group called Metro, ‘Criminal World’, which had originally been banned by the BBC for its bisexual overtones – Bowie changed the line ‘I saw you kneeling at my brother’s door’ to ‘You caught me kneeling at your sister’s door’. The inference was that Bowie was distancing himself from the adventurousness of the sixties and seventies; in the eighties pop’s first bi-guy made the Atlantic crossing that had escalated Rod Stewart’s career a few years earlier and – far more than Rod ever did – dumped on his original fans. He successfully courted the mainstream with ‘Let’s Dance’ (UK and US no. 1 ’83) and the irresistible Pepsi-pop of ‘Modern Love’ (UK no. 2, US no. 14 ’83), but almost wrecked his reputation for good with Tonight (1984) and Never Let Me Down (1987). Both albums were weighted with corporatefriendly moves, entirely unlovable, and sold poorly. He luxuriated, foolishly, in high-eighties gloss, embarrassed about his past. In ’83 Bowie told Rolling Stone that claiming to have been bisexual was ‘the biggest mistake I ever made. Christ, I was so young then. I was experimenting.’
You have to wonder how this new straight conservatism affected emerging pop stars. Aside from Frankie, the other act to achieve superstardom in 1984 was Wham!, and they had considerably more staying power. The T-shirts of the year were Wham!’s ‘CHOOSE LIFE’, designed by Katharine Hamnett, and Paul Morley’s Hamnett homage, ‘Frankie say RELAX’.11 Live for now, beamed the face of Wham!’s shiny-skinned singer George Michael. Prioritise fun. They had broken through in 1982 with ‘Wham! Rap’ (UK no. 8 ’82), an NME Single of the Week that, like ‘Relax’, put its politics on a plate. Its rallying cry of ‘I’m a soul boy, I’m a dole boy’ could have been seen as a libertine cry, with Wham! hailing the leisure time of the individual, but in an era when unemployment nudged three million, this take on dole culture seemed worryingly naive. Wham!’s hedonistic individualism (‘Young Guns’, ‘Bad Boys’, ‘Club Tropicana’, all UK Top 5 in 1983) could also have been read as an excuse for consumerism, encouraging people to define themselves by their own desires. Their hearts were clearly in the right place – they played a miners’ benefit at the Festival Hall in 1984 with the Style Council, and split with management company Nomis when they discovered a dubious South African connection – but the music Wham! produced ended up as the ultimate reflection of eighties selfishness.
The sleepy-eyed Andrew Ridgeley and square-jawed George Michael were from Bushey in Hertfordshire, not far from the birthplace of George’s hero, Elton John. They were managed by a dapper rogue called Simon Napier-Bell, who had once been in charge of Marc Bolan-connected psychedelic mods John’s Children, and had co-written the lyrics to Dusty Springfield’s ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’. ‘I saw something in Wham! that no one else seemed to see,’ he crowed to the NME’s Barney Hoskyns, ‘which is the Hollywood thing of the two buddies, the two cowboys. You know, during the film one falls in love, the other goes to a brothel, but at the end they always ride off together. It’s never sexual, but it’s definitely homoerotic, and it’s never really been done in rock before.’
George Michael turned out not to be quite the happy cowboy Napier-Bell presented him as, or as high on life as he seemed in ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’ (UK and US no. 1 ’84), ‘I’m Your Man’ (UK no. 1, US no. 3 ’85) or the gaudy Wham! videos. ‘The world is so fucked,’ he said in an NME interview shortly after Wham! split in ’86. ‘You look at the acceleration of all the negatives compared to the positives, and you just have to say it’s all going to finish. We have to be drawing ourselves to the end of our natural lifespan because we’re fucking everything up.’ Closeted during the AIDS era, he wrote the racked ‘A Different Corner’ (UK no. 1, US no. 7 ’85) as his first post-Wham! single, and it was an impressive cri de cœur – ‘I’m so scared,’ ran the chorus, and it wasn’t a stretch to imagine it as a track on Scott 3. George said that Joy Division’s Closer was his favourite album, and he became very sensitive to bad press. He wasn’t untalented, but his creamy voice – not unlike Cliff Richard’s – conveyed little soul. This, perversely, meant it was perfectly suited to the times, and his 1987 album Faith was huge with both black and white audiences in the States, selling twenty million copies and reaching number one on the R&B album chart. George Michael was the first white act to achieve this feat.12
Nelson George wrote a book called The Death of Rhythm & Blues shortly after this. He stated that the mainstream had become a blur of black and white influences, pop, rock and soul, with no obvious underground, and this made him sad. He couldn’t see any future for rootsy black music. Quite possibly, he was thinking of Tina Turner as the summation of this grim period. A screamer from way back who had scored major UK hits in the sixties (Spector’s ‘River Deep – Mountain High’, no. 3 ’66) and seventies (husband Ike’s itchy Moog-funk ‘Nutbush City Limits’, no. 4 ’73), while regularly tearing chunks out of rock classics like ‘Proud Mary’ (US no. 4 ’71) and ‘Whole Lotta Love’ on stage, she re-emerged in the eighties as a kind of rock-soul mutant, all lungs, legs and leathered skin – it was no coincidence that she was asked to sing the theme for Mad Max III. In 1987 Turner released an album called Break Every Rule. It was not an appropriate title. Turner’s mega-selling album featured star turns from Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Bryan Adams and king of the rock/pop/soul blancmange Phil Collins. It went Top 5 everywhere, spent twelve weeks at the top of the German album chart, and was so shiny and hollow that no one could recall a thing about it by the start of the next decade.13
Not everyone was happy with this state of affairs, with success measured in terms of cold, hard cash. Pop’s initiative was entirely geared towards sales figures, accreting catalogue, amassing a portfolio. It was no longer as eloquent, informed or demanding; post-punk and new pop had created an audience which was then denied what it felt had been promised. As fanzines went into overdrive, as hip hop regrouped underground, as geeks built new electronic sounds in Detroit bedrooms a
nd independent labels started to become more politicised, a new group reached number one in 1985 who calmly suggested a better future while cocking a snook at high-eighties orthodoxy.
‘When they had that Freddie Mercury tribute concert we were going to offer our services to do “We Will Rock You”. We were going to come onstage with one of those old drum boxes with a little pitter-patter beat and make “We Will Rock You” into this tiny little fey statement. It would have been great if we’d done it wearing dunces’ hats, waving our heads from side to side.’
Neil Tennant became a pop star in 1985 and, gradually, the charts started to become more bearable.
1 ‘Two Tribes’ was one of the few hits of the era to explore the omnipresent threat of nuclear destruction as politics ceased to be part of the post-new-pop agenda. Other notable exceptions were Nena’s ‘99 Red Balloons’ (US and UK no. 1), Ultravox’s ‘Dancing with Tears in My Eyes’ (UK no. 3) and the Human League’s ‘The Lebanon’ (UK no. 11). All of them were hits in the first half of 1984, which suggests Orwell-inspired pangs of guilt. None has much ire.
2 Peel’s tale of humiliation was printed, tellingly, not in a mainstream paper but in the Scottish fanzine Slow Dazzle in 1984.
3 I have a memory of Collins going even further by wearing a Middlesbrough FC football shirt, but can’t find any video evidence to back this up.
4 ‘Rip It Up’ does have one claim to immortality: it was the first hit single to feature a bassline played on the Roland 303, the root source of acid house.
5 Growling Paul Young had been a singer with new-wave act Streetband – who had a novelty hit with ‘Toast’ (UK no. 18 ’78) – then sixties goodtime soul revivalists the Q-Tips before CBS re-marketed him, with a leather tie and a teased-up quiff, as a solo singer of sophisticated soul. In this, Young was the forerunner of brownbread soul, a regular chart feature in the eighties and early nineties, both in Britain (Simply Red, Wet Wet Wet) and America (Michael Bolton, Curtis Stigers). Young’s 1983 album No Parlez was – using the terminology of the era – a lifestyle accessory, one that signified the owner’s good taste (it included a cover of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’), and a charity-shop regular ten years hence when lifestyles had changed somewhat. And so had Young. In 1994, at the Royal Holloway Freshers’ Ball, he performed a set of Jim Reeves cover versions rather than his greatest hits.
6 Former Médecins Sans Frontières president Rony Brauman, who was constantly in Ethiopia during 1984/85, has said ‘aid could be turned against those toward whom it was directed and those delivering the aid integrated into a system of oppression’, and that relief agencies and their funders could be ‘part of the problem, not just part of the solution’. Geldof doesn’t agree and says that he is happy to ‘shake hands with the devil on my left and the devil on my right to get to the people who need help’. David Rieff, author of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, reckons ‘Geldof takes a morally serious dispute, with respectable arguments on both sides … and turns it into a pissing match in an alley behind a pub.’ Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid is also dismissive of the ‘celebrity aid’ model and says many aid organisations and NGOs are more interested in perpetuating poverty in order to justify their own existence. She says ten per cent of Africans were living in poverty in the seventies, compared to seventy per cent in 2012.
7 The Specials’ Jerry Dammers, shocked by the complete absence of African influence on ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, put together the 2 Tone All Stars. They covered the Pioneers’ ‘Starvation’, and Manu Dibango produced it. Released on Madness’s Zarjazz label, it hobbled to number thirty-three in 1985. Geldof was adamant that Live Aid should stay apolitical, hence the inclusion of Quo and Queen, who had both played Sun City, and Eric Clapton, who had notoriously made racist comments on stage in the late seventies, for which he never apologised.
8 After failing to earn even a nomination as Best Producers at the Brits, SAW took out a full page in Music Week, saying, ‘You can love or hate us, you ain’t gonna change us. We ain’t ever gonna be respectable.’ They then turned the jibe into Mel and Kim’s follow-up to their number-three hit ‘Showing Out’; ‘Respectable’ went to number one in 1987.
9 Waterman carried on with the PWL label, signing Dutch act 2 Unlimited, turning Kylie Minogue from TV tomboy into one of pop’s sexiest stars (her Rhythm of Love album is his crowning glory) and overseeing the career of Steps. He still DJs, can’t sit still, wrote an autobiography called I Wish I Was Me, and was awarded an MBE in 2005. Personally, I find him one of British pop’s most interesting and underused characters; his track record is almost without equal.
10 Jermaine Stewart later died of AIDS-related liver cancer, aged thirty-nine.
11 Queen’s Roger Taylor wore another Hamnett slogan shirt that read ‘WORLDWIDE NUCLEAR BAN NOW’ at the 1985 Rock in Rio festival, but sadly it didn’t catch on.
12 He followed it with Listen without Prejudice Vol. 1 – possibly the worst album title in pop – and spent a good few years badly overplaying his hand as a serious artist. Then, with the mature years out of his system, he partied hard and made headlines by repeatedly crashing his car and being arrested in toilets. As a career arc it was all back-to-front; the previously prematurely middle-aged George now started to act like an errant teenager with an unhealthy love of weed. It’s hard to believe he was born in the same year as Jarvis Cocker and Ian Brown.
13 Break Every Rule sold largely on digital compact disc. A product of Philips’s and Sony’s laboratories in the seventies, the 4.7-inch, crackle-free compact disc had been launched in 1982 and was vigorously promoted in the mid-eighties: by 1986, there were some 10,000 titles available on the new format. Sony’s Norio Ohga claimed the CD ‘removed a heavy winter coat from the sound’. The perfect vehicle for high-eighties pop, it was seen to have no frailties, no weaknesses. Yet without that ‘winter coat’ the sound, especially on early, poorly mastered CDs, was noticeably too bright, as if you were listening to music with all the lights on. There were prominent objections to their perceived sterility: Morrissey compared the CD to Shake ’n’ Vac; Neil Young claimed, ‘All you have left is the semblance of sound.’ Sales of CDs would surpass vinyl in 1989, and the cassette in ’92. Many people replaced their entire vinyl collections with CDs, to the music industry’s delight.
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WE WERE NEVER BEING BORING: PET SHOP BOYS AND NEW ORDER
On ‘West End Girls’, the Pet Shop Boys’ transatlantic 1985 number one, Neil Tennant spoke in deadpan RP of the dead-end world that pop had become. It was a set of verbal snapshots, a photofit of entertainment in the high eighties: ‘How much have you got? Do you get it? If so, how often? And which do you choose, a hard or soft option?’
The Pet Shop Boys and their Mancunian counterparts in arch, lyrical electronica New Order were chart-friendly radicals – harbingers of another world that would irrevocably change the stasis of British pop, one which was kept cocooned in the mid-eighties. In a way, they were a mirror image to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, groups who had hidden in the shadows before becoming a huge influence on pop. What’s more, New Order and the Pet Shop Boys were how new pop actually triumphed in the end, not by building on the bangs and crashes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood but by setting Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat. New pop hadn’t died, after all. It had bided its time, shed its unhelpful genre name and, by the late eighties, opened up modern pop to thrillingly anti-muso forms and possibilities.
New Order and the Pet Shop Boys would be the only British pop acts to link two worlds that, in retrospect, seem light years apart: the early-eighties post-disco explosion in electronic dance music (electro, hi-NRG, freestyle), and the house and techno scene at the far end of the decade which would have such social significance that the British legal system had to be amended. Both groups had elegance, an English mix of restraint and hedonism, and a deep understanding of the importance of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. Both groups shunned pop’s b
urgeoning obsession with celebrity, helmed by Madonna and, in his role as sage and insightful commentator, Morrissey. New Order, especially, refused to do interviews for years, and didn’t appear on their sleeves, claiming (quite rightly) that there were far more appropriate and attractive images to reflect their music.
It’s one of pop’s most unlikely stories that ‘West End Girls’, the Pet Shop Boys’ breakthrough hit, was meant to be an English take on Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’. In reality it was closer to John Betjeman backed by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s melancholy Mellotrons.
Their album titles were the marrow of Englishness: Please, Actually, Behaviour, Very. Their electropop-duo look was a few years past its best; unlike Blancmange or Erasure, though, front man Tennant was as motionless as keyboard player Chris Lowe. Straight man and straight man. They were as personality-free as Pink Floyd. Tennant did what little talking there was, standing stock still, like Roy Orbison in eyeliner, while Lowe hid beneath a peaked cap and pretended to play a synth. ‘Chris likes to eat during interviews,’ Tennant told the NME. ‘Normally, there’s a request for a fried egg sandwich. If he doesn’t get what he wants he’ll suddenly snap.’
What they had, what was so sorely lacking in 1985, was a sense of humour and a sense of proportion. ‘Most dance music is terribly banal,’ sighed Tennant, ‘which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.’ In the by now musically segregated States, they confused everyone but sold a ton of records anyway. Were they pop? Urban? Po-mo? Was there any category they didn’t slip into?
‘Well,’ sniffed Tennant in the NME, ‘we certainly don’t slip into rock.’