Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Heath’s attack left Mrs Thatcher seething. On the 28th she gave an interview to Independent Radio News’s political editor, Peter Allen, who inevitably quoted the line about the ‘party of unemployment’. At that, she opened up with both barrels. ‘Unemployment rose very sharply in Ted’s time as well,’ she said bitterly.

  He tried to overcome it by pumping money into the economy. We got an artificial boom, and do you know where the money went? It did not go into investment or expansion; it went into the biggest property boom we’ve ever seen … And in the meantime inflation rose and rose. And the moment inflation goes up you are much less competitive, and eventually unemployment rose again.

  What about Heath’s suggestion that she did not care about unemployment? At this, her temper flared again:

  I hope that he will admit that unemployment has gone on mounting for the last twenty years. What I will not accept is the policy of those who want to spend more money. We haven’t got more money; we’re already over-spending. If you were to say to a family that was over-spending and in difficulty, ‘Never mind, go on spending, borrow it from where ever you can, let the future take care of itself,’ the future will not take care of itself. That is the morality of a man who has his hand in someone else’s pocket.

  ‘Compassion seems to be the element missing from everything you’ve said,’ Allen observed. ‘Of course I’m thinking about the people involved!’ Mrs Thatcher snapped, before reaching for her beloved medical metaphor:

  It’s like a nurse looking after an ill patient. Which is the better nurse? The one who smothers the patient with sympathy and says, ‘Never mind, dear, there there, you just lie back and I’ll bring you all your meals. I’ll bring you all your papers. Just lie back, I’ll look after you’? Or the nurse who says, ‘Now, come on. Shake out of it. I know you’ve had an operation yesterday. It’s time you put your feet to the ground and took a few steps. That’s right, dear, that’s right. Now get back and take a few more tomorrow.’ Which do you think is the better nurse?

  ‘I know which one sounds more like you, Mrs Thatcher,’ Allen said with a smile. But she was in deadly earnest. ‘Which is the one most likely to get results?’ she demanded. ‘The one who says: “Come on, you can do it.” That’s me.’55

  Yet although the Tory press remained loyal, the front pages made for grim reading. Almost every day there were mutters about splits, rifts and plots. With the Autumn Statement generally seen as a disaster, there were widespread rumours that Howe’s position was crumbling. On 10 December his deputy, John Biffen, told the Tory backbench finance committee that the monetary strategy had completely failed and that even he struggled to understand the MTFS. ‘It is all a foreign tongue to me,’ Biffen said gloomily, adding that their M3 target had ‘lost its credibility’ and ‘there is nothing we can do about it’. Unfortunately, his words were leaked to The Times, which saw them as proof that the government had no idea what it was doing. Mrs Thatcher’s ministers, wrote the columnist Geoffrey Smith, were ‘contemplating a scene in which they do not know how to control the money supply by means of their favoured instrument, in which they have anyhow lost confidence; public sector borrowing is beyond their grasp; public spending cannot be cut much more; and direct taxation may have to be increased.’ To put it another way, they were in a hole, their spade was broken and they were probably digging in the wrong direction anyway.56

  Christmas came, and the headlines were awful. On Christmas Eve the latest figures put the unemployment total at 2.24 million, almost a tenth of the entire workforce. Never had any post-war recession destroyed so many jobs so quickly. For fifteen months each new set of figures had been worse than the last. Every thirty seconds a new claimant joined the dole queue. And now not even the most bullish ministers pretended that unemployment would come down any time soon. In private, almost everybody admitted that they could see no end to it. As The Times remarked, this was an ‘exceedingly bleak end to what has been a grim year for the economy’.57

  Across the country, the mood could hardly have been gloomier. When Gallup asked people about their expectations for 1981, three-quarters thought things would get worse. And even Mrs Thatcher was feeling the pressure. Three days before Christmas, the economist Brian Griffiths went to see her in Downing Street. On his way in, Howe took him aside and asked him ‘not to be too critical – “She’s in a very odd mood.”’ Griffiths was with her for an hour, during which she twice came ‘near to tears’. She was ‘speechless’ when Gordon Richardson’s name came up, and made no secret of her belief that Howe had ‘lost grip’. Above all, though, she wanted Griffiths to answer the question that was bothering most people in Britain: ‘What had gone wrong?’58

  Yet as the Prime Minister wobbled, two of her closest confidants were scribbling letters of encouragement. One came from Howe himself. They were, he wrote, ‘not off track: but we are less well on track – and less far down the track – than either of us would have wanted’. The problem was that so few people grasped the scale of the mess into which Britain had got itself. ‘Industrially and economically we are a relatively backward nation, and becoming more so.’ But they had one thing going for them, ‘and that, basically, is the Thatcher factor’. For the first time in years, Britain had a Prime Minister who was trying to change the course of the national story, and who had made it plain that she would not be discouraged. That could make all the difference. ‘We have made a start – but only a start,’ Howe wrote. ‘To carry things through to the next stage, we need a considered plan – and soon. The hopes of very many people are still with us.’59

  The second message came from a man on whom Mrs Thatcher was becoming ever more reliant. On the last Sunday of the year, her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, spotted a story in the Observer, which he forwarded to his boss. The latest edition of Old Moore’s Almanack was out, with the usual bizarre predictions about the year ahead, from ‘crop failures in the Soviet Union and riots in Paris’ to a ‘boom in adventure holidays and a growth in Open University summer schools’. Old Moore had long been a fan of the Prime Minister, but now the almanac had outdone itself. Almost uniquely among economic forecasters, its soothsayers believed Mrs Thatcher’s medicine was working. By 1983 inflation would be under control, interest rates would be coming down and ‘the nation’s prestige and reputation in the world’ would be greatly improved. And Old Moore knew who would deserve the credit:

  There are rare moments in history when one man or woman can, almost alone, shape the future of a nation.

  Now is such a moment. Margaret Thatcher is such a woman.

  The compelling pattern of her fate is so intimately interwoven with the present destiny of the United Kingdom that it is impossible to imagine that she will pass from power before her mission to heal and regenerate Britain is complete.

  This was stirring stuff. But as the bells rang in the New Year, not many people believed it.60

  12

  Nice Video, Shame about the Song

  When you’ve opened the door of your council flat, when you go to a comprehensive school with 2,000 kids there, you don’t want to merge into the background. You want to stand out from that background. You want to look good just individually, yourself.

  Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, interviewed on BBC1’s Nationwide, 6 March 1981

  None of us want to blow the money. We want to be – I don’t know – substantially wealthy. I mean ridiculously wealthy, rolling in it.

  Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon, interviewed in Sounds, 11 September 1982

  At the turn of the 1980s, Top of the Pops was in its pomp. Every Thursday evening some 10 million people tuned in to BBC1, keen to see which of the nation’s favourites had taken the coveted number one spot. But when, on the evening of 24 May 1979, David ‘Kid’ Jensen welcomed the audience to the latest edition, few could have guessed what was coming. The line-up was reassuringly familiar: Roxy Music, Donna Summer, David Bowie, the Electric Light Orchestra, Blondie … and of course the inevitable dance troupe, Le
gs & Co. But then, directly after Roxy Music, an unknown band took the stage. Their name was Tubeway Army, their front man called himself Gary Numan and their song was ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’

  As Gary Numan admitted, he was a very unlikely candidate for pop stardom. Born Gary Webb in 1958, the son of a Heathrow baggage handler, he had drifted through various jobs without really settling down. In 1977 he and his friends formed a punk-influenced band and secured a record deal, but failed to make the slightest impact. But then, by chance, Numan began experimenting with a Minimoog synthesizer he had literally found lying around in the recording studio. The result was something entirely different: an electronic blast of modernity, but modernity of an extraordinarily cold and claustrophobic kind.

  Numan had always been a troubled boy. At school he had been sent to a child psychiatrist and prescribed anti-depressants, and later he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. ‘All my early songs’, he said later, ‘were about being alone or misunderstood.’ Like many lonely teenagers of his generation, he had become obsessed with Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard, with computers, cyborgs and cities of the future. His new album, Replicas (1979), was based on his vision of a dystopian London, thirty years into the future. ‘These machines – “friends” – come to the door,’ Numan explained. ‘They supply services of various kinds, but your neighbours never know what they really are since they look human. The one in the song is a prostitute, hence the inverted commas.’1

  In the summer of 1979, a song about a robot prostitute was not an easy sell. Nor was Numan, gawky, shy and acutely self-conscious, an obvious heartthrob. But as he and his friends stood there that Thursday evening, dressed entirely in black, sweating beneath the television lights, they looked extraordinary. They barely moved; even Numan remained fixed to the spot, pale, impassive, like an android himself. By his own account, he carried himself like a robot to hide his terror and had whitened his face to mask his acne. His make-up artist told a slightly different story. He was ‘otherworldly’, she remembered:

  I imagined him as someone who never saw the sun – not because of lots of partying, but because he seemed so disconnected from nature. I wanted his skin to look pallid, so used a very light base. To make him look weary, I put on lots of dark, heavy kohl. He had to seem like a very complicated character: dark and remote, but not sinister, just cut off from his emotions.2

  Even today, ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ sounds like something from the future. To most listeners in May 1979, the jolting electronic opening, mesmeric rhythm and inhuman vocals were absolutely extraordinary. And quite apart from what Smash Hits called its ‘dark, threatening wall of synthesised sound’, there were the lyrics: lonely, paranoid, utterly bleak. ‘It’s cold outside’, intones Numan’s remote, reedy voice, ‘and the paint’s peeling off of my walls.’ The light fades. There is a knock on the door; the singer opens it to find the ‘friend’ he left in the hallway. He asks himself: are ‘friends’ electric? His model has broken, and now he is alone, with nobody to love. ‘Gripping,’ Smash Hits said breezily, ‘but cheerful it ain’t.’3

  Numan’s appearance on Top of the Pops changed his life. On 19 May ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ had been at number seventy-one. By 30 June it had reached number one, where it remained for four weeks. Then Numan released his next song, ‘Cars’, a paranoid hymn to the sanctuary of the automobile, inspired by J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash (1973).fn1 It ought to have been a disaster. Within a month it had reached number one, too. Numan had now topped the singles chart twice in just three months. By mid-autumn he also had three records in the top twenty of the album chart. Only a few months earlier, nobody outside his friends and family had ever heard of him.4

  On Fleet Street, Numan was that familiar story, the boy next door made good. ‘The pasty-faced 21 year-old, who picked his new name from a Yellow Pages directory, has emerged in the last three months as THE face of 1979,’ declared the Mirror. But to the paper’s surprise, ‘the pallid pop star, who still lives at home with Mum and Dad in the tiny village of Wraybury, Buckinghamshire’, was not enjoying life at the top. ‘I got into all this originally because I liked the idea of being rich and famous, and now I know what it’s like, I don’t think I like it that much,’ Numan explained. ‘I don’t like a lot of the people I’ve met … A lot of my fans aren’t that nice, either.’ His interviewer thought that was a bit sad. ‘Despite his apparent remoteness he’s really quite a friendly chap at heart,’ she wrote. ‘And his show is pretty impressive – even if Gary doesn’t seem to enjoy it as much as everyone else.’5

  There was an obvious reason why Numan was not enjoying life at the top. He had always dreamed of stardom, yet the music press treated him like an interloper. In an industry that prized authenticity and masculinity, he seemed contrived, robotic, androgynous. He had not courted papers like Melody Maker and the NME; he was shy, difficult, a loner. He was not politically progressive; worse, he admitted to having voted for Margaret Thatcher. Above all, he made electronic music, ‘sinister and frigid’, the kind of music you might expect to hear on a space station in the twenty-second century, not the kind of music most critics valued in the summer of 1979.

  Not everybody hated him. Melody Maker’s young writer Jon Savage, formerly a champion of punk, thought people should take Numan seriously as the ‘aural equivalent of other late ’79 obsessions: the ubiquitous computer game, Space Invaders, and the latest filmic sensation, Alien’. But his voice was drowned out by the chorus of contempt. The Guardian’s Robin Denselow dismissed Numan as a ‘cheap and nasty gangster’, producing music of ‘numbing, pounding monotony’. The NME’s Danny Baker claimed he was ‘just a ham with a synthesizer … making intelligent music for people who aren’t intelligent’. But it was another old NME hand, Charles Shaar Murray, who plunged in the knife. ‘Just what is it, I wonder, that makes Gary Numan so repulsive?’ he began one review. ‘Is it his whining voice, his tawdry little fantasies, his ridiculous appearance, his endless stream of clichés, or is it some other, previously unconsidered factor? … Numan still seems utterly corpselike … a man spiritually three-fourths dead and proud of it, too. What’s soft and white and numb all over? Gary Numan!’6

  In the end, the critics got what they wanted. Although Numan followed ‘Cars’ with three more Top Ten singles, his fortunes soon entered a deep, irreversible decline. As electronic music moved into the mainstream and the spotlight shifted to more media-friendly bands – Ultravox, the Human League, Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran – he rapidly faded from view. The irony was that Jon Savage had been absolutely right. In his electronic futurism, his pervasive paranoia, his love of dressing up and his androgynous persona, Numan had perfectly anticipated the cultural mood of the 1980s. But he paid a heavy price for being a pioneer. Few pop stars had ever risen so fast; few had experienced such a precipitous fall from grace. In the summer of 1979, Gary Numan had been the voice of the future. But within just three years he was yesterday’s man.7

  There was a good reason why Numan’s music had struck a chord with millions of listeners. Three years after the Sex Pistols had exploded into the headlines, punk’s diabolical energy had long since evaporated. As early as 1977, critics were complaining that it had become a formulaic self-parody, and when the Sex Pistols broke up the following February, the Evening Standard declared that ‘punk is dead’. Even its supposedly shocking look – leather jacket, ripped T-shirt, dyed spiky hair – was now just another kind of dressing-up, memorably parodied by Adrian Edmondson in the BBC sitcom The Young Ones. These days, wrote the journalist Peter York in 1980, the typical punk was ‘a nice little fifth former’ from affluent, suburban Muswell Hill. ‘It was always in the fine old provincial towns and county seats’, thought Paul Theroux, ‘that one saw the wildest-looking youths, the pink-haired boys and the girls in leopard-skin tights, the nose-jewels and tattooed earlobes.’ Even Adrian Mole’s spotty friend Nigel is a punk, though only at weekends. ‘His mother lets him be one’, records Adrian, ‘providing h
e wears a string vest under his bondage T-shirt.’8

  Most British youngsters never bought a punk record. Despite its impact on fashion and design, its presence in the charts was vanishingly small. In fact, the general picture at the end of the 1970s seemed one of nostalgia to the point of total stagnation. The bestselling albums of 1978 were the soundtracks of Saturday Night Fever and Grease, with Nat King Cole and Buddy Holly not far behind. A year later, Blondie and the Electric Light Orchestra led the way, but the success of greatest hits albums by Leo Sayer, Barbra Streisand and Rod Stewart told its own story. Even in the singles charts, the bestselling songs of 1978 and 1979 came from Boney M, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, Art Garfunkel, and Cliff Richard. Meanwhile, the NME, Melody Maker and Sounds seemed to have sunk into terminally dreary, point-scoring earnestness. ‘A lot of the articles’, complained the young journalist Craig Brown, ‘are hardly about pop stars at all, but full of discussion about how to change society’. Even the photos told the same story. Once pop groups had been photographed leaping about and having fun. Now they were pictured ‘in very grainy black and white, looking miserable on a motorway or sad under a subway’.9

  It was no wonder, then, that people were desperate for something new. Many teenagers at the turn of the 1980s could barely remember Johnny Rotten and Ziggy Stardust, let alone John Lennon and Paul McCartney. ‘Teenagers who are picking up on pop for the first time should have a fresh, changing choice, not a stiff handed-down one,’ lamented the pop writer Paul Morley. It was time, he wrote, to bring back ‘colour, dance, excitement … intelligence, intrigue, a love of the little things in life, re-applying and reinforcing the essentials of the pop spirit for the new age … This doesn’t mean escapism. But you can’t moan all the time.’10