It is impossible to convey adequately the continuous excitement that I felt about music between the months of July 1981 and June 1982. That was, in my view at the time and for a long time afterwards, the best year for pop; from the moment when this chimera that some called New Pop began to be regarded as serious currency, to the point where it was audibly and visibly drying up.
All such evaluations are by definition subjective, and I cannot flee from the fact that this period was at one end bookended by the death of my father, and principally consisted of my first bona fide year at university, uprooted and away from home. But it is commonly agreed that New Pop started to be considered an option after Ian Curtis died.
The consensus amongst "post-punk" musicians at the time was: why continue experimenting to the converted when this is where it gets you? Not that it was the music that got Curtis, an adulterous far-Right Conservative voter and diagnosed epileptic who felt profoundly guilty, as the father of a young daughter, about his duplicitous behaviour, where he ended up. But enough of his peers quietly agreed "enough" - we need to become known and successful, and the only way of doing that it to smuggle our art beneath the superficial veneer of commerciality. To prove that "we" can do pop music better, more spectacularly and more comprehensively than the big established people.
Hence the gradual shift towards the mainstream, pulling outliers like Adam Ant, who formed a new band with a new approach to seek his revenge on Malcolm McLaren, into its orbit. The Human League, critically approved but commercially invisible, more or less agreed to split into two complementary factions. The story adds to itself.
All of this made pop music between the summers of 1981 and 1982 a spellbinding place to witness and absorb. Adventure returned to the top forty; minimalist performance art ("O Superman") and free jazz ("Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag") alike easily found their way to the top three. The Associates, nobody's idea of a pop group in 1981, became especially luminescent pop stars in 1982. Everything became exciting, sunny, thrilling and, most importantly, present tense.
Not a week passed without several proposals for new directions in pop materialising. We late-period teenagers had no time for the Beatles, Zeppelin or even Hendrix - all that old, failed music. We were sufficiently occupied being dazzled by the endless inventiveness of 1981-2's notion of "now."
Perhaps we were so dazzled by the shiny yellow New Popness of things that we allowed ourselves to be blinded. All those mock-corporations spearheaded by B.E.F., which were of course intended to be ironic - the public took them straight, as a welcome, colourful relief to the grey drabness of - whisper it - socialism. Pop groups as patented, marketable brands. The Human League pastiching Vogue on the cover of Dare - did we imagine they neither meant nor wanted that status? We liked to think so at the time, in order to cover other, deeper, more dubious concerns.
In 2013 I composed a lengthy blog post concerning ABC's The Lexicon Of Love. This was a major undertaking - I took a week off work to write it and even sought the views of Martin Fry himself. I absolutely meant it when I thought Lexicon the greatest of number one albums, the peak towards which its predecessors had been working.
Today, I'm not at all sure. It remains a subjective truth that the best New Pop albums - Penthouse And Pavement, Dare, Architecture And Morality, Tin Drum, Sulk, Lexicon, New Gold Dream - are "great" records. But I scarcely reach to listen to any of them now. A big part of why that is the case is because I hear so much music from a period when music was more important to me than at any other time in my life...and find it wanting, lacking.
That's the fundamental paradox of nostalgia; when you reach back to certain songs and records to rekindle a memory, it isn't so much the music you want to experience again - what you actually want to retrieve is the feeling that you had at the time when that music was current, and of course that can never be accomplished because the person you were back then no longer exists. You can't unlearn or unlive anyything you've done and been in the subsequent four-and-a-bit decades.
This fruitless craving is also at the root of what is wrong with so much of the world today - a ravenous desire to return to The Good Old Days (a.k.a. the womb) when morality was clearcut and...cough...you knew where you were. And I wonder how much New Pop has done to hasten that process. In Andy Beckett's history of eighties Britain, Promised You A Miracle, Martin Fry admits that, actually, gulp, he did pretty damn well under the Thatcher government.
So much of what occurred now seems so obviously and blatantly Thatcherite that it's a marvel (not in a good way) that we didn't recognise it then. The downsizing and streamlining of pop group personnel, the careful ironing out of awkward figures and facets, the exceptionally dodgy record deals, the systematic filtering out of session musicians in favour of Yamaha DX7 "horn section" buttons, the non-ironic cheerleading for profit, proliferation and material fulfilment. Several key figures in New Pop didn't even bother pretending to be socialists - "Two Tribes" was an exploration of the fascination inherent in the spectre of technocratic warfare, and media's response to same, rather than an anti-World War III howl of protest. "Do They Know It's Christmas?" was studiously and determinedly apolitical. I could go on.
Where do we find ourselves, forty-three years later? In a place for which New Pop had maybe been preparing us all along. Winning is everything. Cult is failure. No more sweaty, soulful, passionate human beings doing messy work and making mistakes; it's all been transferred over to sleek, gleaming, perfect, cold machines, seamless and human-free. The concept that superficial, transient trivia carries more weight than deeply-rooted wisdom. That lies are more fun and get you further in life than the truth. How else do you explain this new First World dictator who revels in his truth alone?
What I now increasingly see in New Pop is a gigantic bill of goods, a way to acclimatise the music-loving public into the ways of Thatcherism and neoliberalism, where fascination is everything - as a kitten is fascinated by a ball of multicoloured string - and meaning means nothing. And it has, as I suggested above, played a major part in making today's world rotten. These are MTV dictators that we have now, people we were invited to giggle at in the eighties, possibly with a view to softening us up, and who, through their systematic and violent rubbishing of "authenticity" and "emotion" in favour of lethal dayglo beads, have rendered life more or less unlivable. It would be easy to claim that New Pop was, in hindsight, a disgrace, but really we have all disgraced ourselves.
Pop has continued, and new things continuously compete in steadily crampier spaces. The audience has been filtered away and any sense of history or perspective has now eroded - they think Freddie Mercury and Fleetwood Mac are still present tense - and the early eighties have been retooled as a jolly era of primary-coloured tinsel when singers wore daft clothes and had daft names. Taylor Swift is perhaps the most important pop star there has ever been, but the world continues to prefer to keep mourning Elvis; these days it's equivalent to calling Jonah Barrington the King of Squash. Why? Because we are not "us" any more, and because, deep down, humanity has always valued obliteration over consolidation. Perhaps we should have just drawn a line after "Ghost Town" and taken up books or cinema instead. It was a fatal mistake to hide where life was "beautiful" and thereby avoiding fighting back.
