Wired for Sound

Now That's What I Call An Eighties Music Childhood

Tom Bromley

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849833936
• eBook ISBN: 9780857203236
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The eighties was a golden era for British pop: Radio One served as the soundtrack of the nation; the chart run-down on Sunday evenings was compulsory listening - ditto watching Top of the Popsand reading Smash Hits. It also saw the launch of the Now That's What I Call Music series. In the States, the arrival of MTV helped usher in what became known as the 'Second British Invasion', echoing the success of the Beatles twenty years earlier. Wired For Soundtells the remarkable story of the great eighties British bands (and Kajagoogoo) and how their music captured the nation's imagination: the more radical beginnings in the early eighties (the new romanticisms of Duran and Spandau, the 'protest pop' of early Wham!); the full pomp of their mid-eighties success (the worldwide tours, the glamorous video shoots, the ubiquitous 'Choose Life' and 'Relax' T-shirts); and their fall from the top of pop's pedestal (the splitting up of Wham!, Boy George's drug problems). Wired for Soundwill describe the subsequent descent to Band Aid II (Bros, Wet Wet Wet, Stock, Aitken and Waterman), which bookended the low point of the pop music that followed. Wired For Sound will be the affectionate celebration of both a musical youth and the era when young guns went for it. This is a book for anyone who grew up reading Smash Hits, soundtracked their teenage years on C90 cassettes and remembers a time when it really mattered who was number one.

Side One

(1980–1984)

Track One

Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)

The 1980s began with the last band you’d expect to find at Number 1. Pink Floyd, like Led Zeppelin, were one of those ‘proper bands’ who didn’t do singles: ‘We don’t do singles,’ they informed their producer Bob Erzin. ‘So fuck you,’ they somewhat unnecessarily continued to his suggestion that they expand one of their songs, which he felt had ‘hit’ written all over it.¹

The song topping the charts was ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)’, which was the filling in a three-section sequence for their rock opera The Wall. This was the late seventies and, during his time spent in the New York studio next door to Chic, Erzin had heard enough of ‘Le Freak’ pumping through the wall to become a big fan of disco.² He persuaded Roger Waters to go clubbing and hear it for himself, and the result was that the band came up with this Funk Side of the Moon groove. For the lyrics, Waters went back another two decades, recalling his 1950s boarding-school experiences.

There was just one problem: the song was only one minute twenty seconds long. In one of the rare instances of a progressive-rock band being asked to go back and make one of their tracks even longer, the Floyd colourfully rejected Erzin’s suggestion to turn the song into something more radio friendly. Erzin, though, wasn’t to be put off. With just one verse and a chorus to play with, Erzin came up with the fantastic wheeze of repeating the first verse all over again, but this time getting a group of schoolkids to sing it instead. The children chosen were from Islington Green, a gritty, grotty Grange Hill-type comprehensive school close to where the band were recording. The school boasted a maverick head of music in the shape of Mr Renshaw, a teacher who smoked in class, wore tight jeans and got his pupils to hit walls to see what sort of sounds they made. So when Pink Floyd came calling he was more than happy (and much more happy than the headmistress) to allow his class to sing about how crap the whole concept of education was.

I might be simplifying the song’s message just a little there. In fact, the famous line about not needing no education is ungrammatical to the point of suggesting that the children do need at least a lesson or two in English. If you bothered to pay attention, Jones, rather than staring out of the window, you’d realize that the double negative actually suggests the kids would like at least a bit of schooling . . . However, such subtleties are soon lost. All anyone hears are a load of anti-teacher, anti-authority lyrics, a feel reinforced by the song’s Gerald Scarfe video. This stars a cane-wafting schoolmaster whose pop-eyes mutate into hammers, which in turn proceed to march along in unison as if the world is about to be taken over by a Soviet version of B&Q (the video also features a different group of children to those on the record: they didn’t have Equity cards so a selection of stage-school kids got the gig instead).

Bob Erzin’s instinct about the song proved to be correct. For the first time since ‘See Emily Play’ reached the Top 10 in 1967, Pink Floyd released a single – and were rewarded with five weeks at Number 1. Slightly better rewarded than the Islington Green singers, it has to be said, who got a flat fee of £1000 for their contribution. At least they could tell their children and grandchildren that they’d sung on the first Number 1 of the eighties. The single was no doubt there legitimately, but it’s worth adding that in those days no one could quite be arsed to compile the charts in the week between Christmas and New Year and thus the list from the week before was just reprinted instead.

The Top 10 as the eighties began was undoubtedly something of a mixed selection. Sitting in Pink Floyd’s slipstream were two of the biggest singles bands of the time, ABBA (‘I Have a Dream’) and the Police (‘Walking on the Moon’). ABBA, by this stage, were beginning the descent towards the end of their career. They still had a couple of Number 1s left in them (‘Super Trouper’ and the quite magnificent ‘The Winner Takes It All’) but their main contribution to the eighties would be their final, brooding album The Visitors: a sleek, melancholy record that didn’t sell to the ‘Dancing Queen’ hordes but was by the far the best thing they ever did. The Police, meanwhile, were heading in the opposite direction, taking giant steps towards their own world domination – even if internal band disharmony was approaching ABBA proportions. Drummer Stewart Copeland’s irritation with Sting was famously shown by writing the words ‘Fuck’, ‘Off, ‘You’ and ‘Cunt’ across the tom-toms of his drum kit.

Presciently, that first eighties Top 10 also boasted ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by the Sugarhill Gang. This might not have been the first rap song but was certainly the first one to cross over and make it high in the charts. Here, too, was the influence of Nile Rodgers and Chic again, with a song based around a sample of their hit ‘Good Times’. Not only did Wonder Mike, Master Gee and Big Bank Hank give a flavour of what would become one of the dominant musical trends later in the decade, but the song’s opening line coined the phrase ‘hip hop’ to boot. The Top 10 also offered glimpses of the (then) future in the shape of the Pretenders’ gorgeous ‘Brass in Pocket’, on its way to Number 1, and Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart’s pre-Eurythmics band the Tourists, with their cover of Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Only Want to be with You’.

That first eighties Top 10 wasn’t all fantastic. Several rungs down the disco ladder from Chic were the Gibson Brothers, who, judging by the way they shout the lyrics to ‘Que Sera Mi Vida’, should really have stood closer to the microphone during recording. There were the Three Degrees, the Philadelphia group whose name was appropriated by the then West Bromwich Albion manager, ‘Big’ Ron Atkinson, to describe his trio of black players, Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendon Batson. This being the festive period, there’s Paul McCartney in full Fab-Macca-Wacky-Thumbs-Aloft mode with ‘Wonderful Christmastime’, the sort of saccharine guff to which, had the Beatles still been going, John Lennon would have taken a pair of blunt scissors.

This being the British charts, there’s also the obligatory one-hit wonder thanks to the folking awful Fiddler’s Dram and their ‘Day Trip to Bangor (Didn’t We Have a Lovely Time)’. Even the title of the song is annoying. What is with those brackets? Either the song is called ‘Day Trip to Bangor’ or it’s called ‘Didn’t We Have a Lovely Time’: you can’t be indecisive and go with both. It’s a record so preposterously out of kilter and cheerfully irritating that one could imagine the children of Islington Green Comprehensive groaning ‘Hey! Nonny nonny! Leave those chords alone!’³

I was seven years and a couple of weeks old at the start of the decade – Pink Floyd, as it happened, went to Number 1 on my birthday. The eighties, then, very much dovetailed with my childhood, and my transformation from the spotty, awkward kid at junior school to the spottier and even more awkward teenager at sixth form. These were my formative years, and my affection for them remains strong – to the point that (I would readily admit) my opinion of their cultural importance is no doubt subjectively skewed. For anyone writing about the era they grew up in, being able to comment objectively is tricky because everything resonates so strongly; it’s hard not to be seduced by its Ready brek glow of over-importance.

It was pretty much impossible to be a small child at the start of the 1980s and not like the sentiment of ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. With its depiction of ‘the kids’ standing up to a miserly schoolmaster and, if Gerald Scarfe’s video was to be believed, his plan to grind us all through some kind of child mincer like a Roald Dahl villain, it was impossible not to feel galvanized into classroom defiance. It was no doubt equally difficult to be a teacher at the time and not loathe the song in equal measure as yet another class of previously well-behaved pupils turned round and told you where to stick it.

My own schooling, I have to say, did not reflect the nightmare vision of education that Roger Waters had come up with. The only teacher I encountered who was stuck in the 1950s was the one I had for PE at junior school. He had the sort of temper you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of, but I avoided getting into trouble on account of being a member of his football team – not, I should hasten to add, because I was any good at football, but because I was just about the only child in my year who was left-footed, and could thus play at left wing (a position that I have stuck to politically ever since).

My schooling (a term that makes it sound far grander than it actually was) all took place in the suburbs of York, as if in a Sesame Street episode brought by the letter H: I lived in leafy Heworth and went to Hempland Primary School and what was then called Huntington Comprehensive School. The latter goes under the name Huntington School these days, though it is still a comprehensive. However, no one ever consulted me on that fact, and I have continued to call it Huntington Comprehensive School – to make the point on my CV in a slightly chippy northern way, and just in case anyone mistakes it for a minor biscuit-tossing private school.

It’s a slightly affected badge of honour because I am about as middle-middle class as they come: that’s what happens when your father is a doctor and your mother a teacher. Keeping up the family tradition, my brother is also a doctor and my sisters both teachers; it’s only me who lets the side down by spending his life messing about writing books on eighties music. It’s also the case that the only reason that I ended up going there was because York was in the process of getting rid of the Eleven Plus: I was the last year to take the exam (I passed) but, rather than find out what happened when a grammar school merged with a secondary modern, my parents opted for a nearby comprehensive instead. Even then they weren’t entirely convinced. When the teachers’ strikes hit in the mid-eighties – a glorious period in which we got sent home every lunchtime and had at least one afternoon off a week for a couple of years – they were sufficiently worried that they considered sending me to a private school. However, I refused to even look round the place, let alone countenance swapping.

That was less to do with some stirrings of early left-wing principles and more because I liked the school I was at. Being OK at football, or being left-footed at least, went a long way towards making my school years easier. I cottoned on early that an interest in sport was important in avoiding getting your head kicked in by the harder kids from the estate. What took me a little longer to figure out was that an impressive statistical knowledge of the Division Four table was not always sufficient to attract the attention of the fairer sex. I use the phrase ‘attract the attention of’: my main goal was getting them to acknowledge my existence beyond ‘Can anyone else smell that?’

The way to impress girls, I discovered, was to know about pop music. Music plays a big part in the course of anyone growing up, and particularly so for me. Its effect on a childhood is subtly different to other types of culture: television, as I discussed in an earlier book (All in the Best Possible Taste, still available in all good bookshops⁴) is more about family. It’s something that you watch at home with your mum and dad, switch off from when you are old enough to go to the pub, and return to when you have children of your own, as small compensation for the fact that you’re never going to leave your house for an evening out ever again.

Music is different. Records were something you listened to on your own, locked away in your bedroom: a teenage rebellion against your parents’ (lack of) taste. What you watched growing up was determined by who had control of the family remote control – i.e., your dad. What you listened to, by contrast, was influenced by your friends. Those early musical choices are, until you know better, all about peer pressure: wanting to be cool, wanting some of that pop-star glamour to rub off on you, and wanting to define your identity. In the eighties that meant wearing a stolen VW badge round your neck to show how much you liked the Beastie Boys, or attaching the top of a bottle of Grolsch to your shoes to prove you really ‘hearted’ Bros. In the pecking order of school and making friends, who you listened to was who you were.

If that was me at school – a slightly gangly individual with red hair, a functional left foot and a head full of Smash Hits-assisted music trivia – what were some of the eighties pop stars like at the same age? Looking back at the early years of the likes of Duran Duran, Wham! and Spandau Ballet, it’s noticeable that they were a pretty eclectic bunch. If you put them all together in one room you’d probably need the cane-waving antics of Pink Floyd’s disciplinarian teacher to keep them in check.

The teenage alpha male in this particular class was probably Andrew Ridgeley. At Bushey Meads School near Watford in the mid-seventies, Ridgeley was just about everything I wasn’t: good-looking, stylish, sporty and a Top 10 hit with the ladies. He was the cool, confident kid boys wanted to be friends with and girls wanted to go out with. ‘He looked good, he dressed good, and he thought he was a good footballer,’ George Michael recalled in his autobiography, Bare: even at that early age, ‘he wanted to be famous. He didn’t care if it was a football player or a pop star or whatever – he just wanted to be famous.’⁵

Andrew Ridgeley’s ambition was matched in Birmingham by a young boy called Nicholas Bates. Bates (who’d later go by the stage name Rhodes) was ten when he told his parents he was going to be a pop star. When he started at Woodrush High School in the mid-seventies he reiterated his intentions to his art teacher: ‘Nicholas knew what he wanted to do at an early age and was one of the few schoolkids who’ve said to me, “I want to be a pop star” and actually achieved his ambition’.⁶ Bates and Ridgeley are similar, too, in having each befriended their respective class ugly duckling – ugly ducklings who later turned into two of the eighties’ biggest musical, er, swans. For Nicholas Bates that duckling was the lanky Nigel Taylor, a boy who had worn glasses since the age of five and liked to spend his spare time painting small toy soldiers and playing war games.

For Andrew Ridgeley the friend in question was Georgios Panayiotou. Georgios was ‘the embodiment of adolescent awkwardness, a podgy, gangling figure whose intimidating height was immediately rendered irrelevant by the comic shock of curly hair and the thick-rimmed spectacles which perched precariously on his nose’.⁷ In the school playground Ridgeley goaded Georgios into a game of ‘king of the wall’: this essentially involved a preening Ridgeley sitting on top of said wall and showing off his athletic prowess by pushing off all challengers. If you were a betting boy you wouldn’t have put your Panini stickers on Georgios, but to everyone’s amazement he unseated Ridgeley to become ‘king’. Ridgeley, rather than attempting revenge and reclaiming his crown, instead insisted that Georgios sat next to him in class and the pair became the closest of friends.

A short car ride down into North London, meanwhile, were two young brothers with an early taste of the stardom Ridgeley craved. Martin and Gary Kemp were both members of the Anna Scher Theatre and found themselves appearing in TV shows such as Jackanory, Dixon of Dock Green and Rumpole of the Bailey. They were having a better time of it than nearby Tony Hadley, who, having passed his Eleven Plus to go to Dame Alice Owen’s Grammar School, found himself struggling and getting into trouble. (Not the greatest idea he ever had was to have a hosepipe fight with a friend in the middle of the science block. So badly did they drench the corridor that water seeped through to the dining room below and caused the wallpaper to peel off; the damage repair ran into thousands of pounds.)

Joining Tony Hadley in detention would undoubtedly be young Adam Clayton. Clayton had been born in Oxfordshire but moved to Dublin when his father, a pilot, got a job with Aer Lingus. Clayton got into and was then removed from the private St Columba’s College. He was bright but no doubt infuriating to teach: when he didn’t want to play a cricket match, he resolutely sat down for the duration of his fielding duties; he also thought nothing of turning up to school wearing sunglasses, Arab head-dress and billowing caftan (come on, we’ve all done it . . .). When he ending up at the local comprehensive, Mount Temple, Adam’s same disregard for authority continued: he’d drink coffee in class from a flask he’d brought with him (‘I’m having a cup of coffee, sir,’ was his polite explanation to his exasperated teacher); he was also prone to streaking along the corridors (though presumably not at the same time as the coffee drinking – that could have been dangerous). Before he was removed from school for a second time, Adam had at least, along with Dave Evans and Paul Hewson, answered the message that the drummer Larry Mullen had pinned to the school noticeboard about wanting to form a band.

Across the Irish Sea in Liverpool, Holly Johnson gave a prescient taste of his future band’s shock antics by writing ‘sex’ and ‘shit’ on the primary-school blackboard. Such profanity was a world away from the apparently angelic boy who sang the solo to ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ for the church choir. Holly, like Tony Hadley, found himself getting into grammar school and not enjoying it. He couldn’t pursue his interest in art, because art was taught only to those boys in the bottom streams, so instead ended up acting the class clown.

Steven Morrissey found himself up against a similar culture-free environment at St Mary’s Secondary Modern in Manchester. He liked reading, music and drama, but music and drama weren’t on the St Mary’s syllabus and there wasn’t even a school librarian. The young Morrissey was relatively athletic and could have run and jumped with the best of them, had he so desired. Sport, though, wasn’t exactly his bag (he insisted on batting one-handed when playing cricket). Throughout all of this, Morrissey’s love of music remained undimmed: in June 1974 the NME published the first of several letters by ‘Steve Morrissey’, this particular one in praise of the new LP by Sparks.

George O’Dowd, meanwhile, didn’t have the best time at school: ‘Eltham Green School was like a back-street abortion – it happened, I wish to forget it ever did.’⁸ In the years before George en...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-title Page
• Also by the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Intro
• Side One (1980–1984)
• Side Two (1985–1989)
• Outro
• Sleeve Notes
• Notes
• Sources and Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index