I WAS OLDER THEN, BUT YOUNGER NOW

 

Like David Stubbs, I read English Language and Literature at Oxford in the eighties. I went to a different college from David’s but he had to put up with B*r*s J*hns*n two years below him, whereas I made every effort to avoid having to put up with M*ch**l G*ve in mine. I suspect David was as frustrated as me by the Eng Lit syllabus stolidly refusing to progress beyond Tennyson. Strange how we were all “up” there at more or less the same time, albeit with some temporal overlaps; Mark Sinker, Nigella Lawson, Simon Reynolds, Paul Oldfield, Roger Lewis and me. Even Lucy Ellmann was around to some extent, at her father’s big house down Jericho way.

 

I did knuckle down and do my degree, and since I had Another Person to support at the time (none of your business) I had to get a Proper Career as a fallback, since I figured particularly early (and rightly) that, as much as I loved the music papers and magazines of the period, any attempt on my part to maintain a career as a music critic would lead inexorably to spending most of my professional life out of work and skint (to paraphrase the great Bob Sinfield – “Two things I got right”).

 

Nevertheless I did have a fallback job while still a student, namely working in the Music Market record store on Cornmarket Street (hence the name; clever or what? What? Oh, I see…) where I did my best to convert and persuade customers to explore slightly unexpected musical avenues. Not once did I encounter future prime ministers David C or Alexander de P J strolling in to purchase a Smiths or Housemartins record. I think they probably just bought Invisible Touch out of the Virgin Megastore in the Westgate.

 

But music was the thing with me, and it melded expertly with the general colourfulness and exploding newness of the eighties. Also in common with David, I had a penchant for suits in bright primary colours and there were places in Kensington Church Street and certain parts of Chelsea where you could buy them relatively cheaply.  But work (with the NHS, who at the time of writing have gainfully employed me for almost thirty-seven years) was fun – including its social aspect – and life in London (and Oxford) in general was what I’d call affordable fun. Could buy tons of books and records, go and see lots of films and plays, go to clubs and still have plenty left over for food, rent and so forth.

 

I am aware that this all conjures up the spectre of Thatcherism, and perhaps we enjoyed the inadvertent fruits of that too readily. The point was that, in the mid-eighties in particular, it seemed to offer such a blaring diversion from the grey dourness of the towns and villages from which we had mostly come. Coming into Oxford Street was like every day being Christmas. You’d go into the old WH Smiths near Marble Arch and they’d have records by Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel in their racks. You didn’t get that in Hamilton!

 

So I was attracted by the unapologetic Futurism offered by the Monitor people who went almost en masse to Melody Maker (having first been turned down by the NME). Ages of the aerial and fascination-over-meaning seemed so much more exciting and, dammit, sexy than the NME’s Rare Groove bores who said that Mantronix wasn’t proper music and everyone should be made to listen to Aretha for half an hour each morning to teach themselves dignity.

 

But I never fell into the either-or binary trap, which always ends up with its arbiters painting themselves into a corner. Most music in 1986-9 sounded bloody glorious to me. Yes, the Young Gods, a double yes to AR Kane and a Pi to the power of infinity to MBV Mk II, but I also loved the Pet Shop Boys, Wedding Present, Housemartins and Pogues. I eagerly devoured the work of Saqqara Dogs, Gore and Band of Holy Joy, as well as the “big” names (Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, R.E.M.) and “newer” names (Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Muses, Pixies), not forgetting the Antipodean camp, which stretched from INXS to Nick Cave via the Triffids, Chills and Go-Betweens, and jazz of all stripes (except the dreary and counter-productive soulboy-engineered “Jazz Revival”), folk, World Music, WTF-isms like Culturcide, oh and that thing called House music and that other thing called hip-hop which seemed to evolve on a weekly basis…

 

…but also pop. Definitely also pop.  Prince, obviously (and Madonna once Prince got involved), and New Order, equally obviously. But Stock Aitken & Waterman were at their best as unapologetically Futurist as Wilson’s Factory. Something like Mel & Kim’s Showing Out was as symbolic and representative a passage into eighties THIS IS DIFFERENT AND BETTER London; the clanging sounds you heard once you got past the M25 and the Brent Cross interchange, as evocative of that elemental feeling as anything by Janet Jackson, Diamanda Galas, Sigue Sigue Sputnik/Big Audio Dynamite (literally two sides of the same coin; listen to the latter’s Sightsee M.C.! and tell me I’m wrong), Test Dept or Tackhead.

 

So it was with a mixture of excitement and apprehension that I tuned into Pick Of The Pops this Saturday past. Gambaccini was away on holiday for a week, so Scott Mills was brought in as understudy. This is not as unlikely or desperate a gesture as it might superficially sound; Mills came with many years’ experience of hosting a peak-time chart show (Friday afternoons on Radio 1 with the new Top 40) so this prospect wouldn’t have fazed him at all.

 

And indeed it did not. Some online listeners were astonished by how well and enthusiastically Mills handled the proceedings, complete with audience interaction. Compare that to the airless cod-liver-oil sterility of Gambaccini’s recent presentations. The two years were apparently of his own choosing – 1988 and 1996.

 

1988 was at the time hailed as The Best Year For Music Ever and how could 24-year-old me have possibly disagreed with that? And the Top 20 picked by Mills – or as much of it as could be fitted into an hour of radio time - was exciting and thrilling. Noticeably female-dominant, was that chart; Hazell Dean, Taylor Dayne, Adele Bertei, Natalie Cole, Patsy Kensit, Tiffany, Bananarama – and it all sounded as fresh as the blooms then still allowed in Hyde Park. Bananarama’s I Want You Back IS Perfect Pop, you doughnuts, and so is I’m Not Scared. Even songs I wasn’t too keen on then – for instance Love Changes Everything (Climie-Fisher, not Michael Ball) – sounded astute and reasonably compelling (tip: most pop sounds better coming through a decent stereo system on headphones). The only one I couldn’t quite get down with was Drop The Boy by Bros – Caroline Sullivan’s favourite single of that year if I remember correctly – mostly due to Matt Goss’ ceaseless growling as though Michael Jackson had just sat on a wasps’ nest. But Heart, a song the Pet Shop Boys never anticipated as being a hit (fourth single off the album, doesn’t everyone have it already?), sat with polite majesty at number one (always get a remix).

 

The hour escorted me right back to those frankly fantastic days (it certainly helped that the afternoon was warm and sunny). And I’ll lay you down a Last Exit, Skinny Puppy, Napalm Death, Negativland or Neubauten as recourse to any indications of embryonic poptimism. The second hour was 1996, which was imperfect but overall really revelatory – as with 1988, most of this music appears to have fallen down the back of the metaphorical sofa in the living room of oldies radio, hence its relative freshness. I would have skipped the Take That and Oasis ones but some relevant reminiscences were conjoined with both (actually, the solution of the eternal why-don’t-POTP-play-the-whole-Top-20 riddle – apart from there simply isn’t enough time to play 40 songs in two radio hours – seems elementally logical to me; do a podcast version of the show where all twenty songs actually do get played?). Scott didn’t play Sick Of Drugs by the Wildhearts or Salvation by the Cranberries – great records both, which weave very well into each other, but lyrically perhaps not compatible with a sunny Saturday mid-afternoon Radio 2 – but a great range was covered, from California Luv to the X-Files theme.

 

How good it was to hear Walking Wounded by Everything But The Girl as opposed to Missing for the millionth time – and Scott even played Firestarter (reputedly the late Sir Des O’Connor’s all-time favourite single)! Gina G, Mark Morrison, Alanis Morisette, even the Presidents of the United States of America with their “peaches.” Great to hear them all. And I suppose this is how I have come through; I never drew a line in anyone’s sand but kept on going, listening and being eager and enthusiastic about what comes next. Oh, and the new SAULT album, bugger me, Simon Mayo should be playing it on Scala; it’s an epic.