1984
Sitting between the heritage of the 70s and the glitzy, big-haired peak to which the 80s would ascend, 1984 was a quietly pivotal time for music, popular culture and the world as we knew it.
Thirty-five years before it came to pass, George Orwell’s foretelling of 1984 was as a dystopian horror story; Big Brother, Newspeak, Room 101 and all that. In reality, the actual 1984 rolled around minus the all-powerful totalitarian Party of Orwell’s nightmares – although a couple of formidable and divisive leaders – Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – were both well into the process of bluntly reshaping Britain and the US respectively to fit their free-market, get-rich-quick dogma.
What Orwell could have set out as far back as 1949 was a prospectus for pop culture in 1984. He put the words into the mouth of one of his lead characters, O’Brien, the scheming Party official. “Our only true life is in the future,” O’Brien tells the doomed Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “But how far away that future may be there is no knowing.”
What is apparent from the distance of another 40 years is the springing up of the first shoots of the inter-connected, tech-dominated, globalised world we all now inhabit. Not that anyone was too troubled by the prospect of this Orwellian future at the time. Indeed, among the most feverishly covered news stories at the dawning of 1984 was the banning of a pop record by Radio 1 (Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s propulsive ode to masturbation, Relax – which promptly vaulted to No.1), and Elton John’s surprise wedding to his studio engineer Renate Blauel (somewhat less unexpectedly, the couple were divorced within four years).
Were one to have conducted a survey of the musical landscape in 1984, it would have appeared reassuringly fecund and fertile. Big and booming. Pleasingly pocked as well, with a variety of shifting scenes and movements. Landing somewhere between the grit of the 70s and the spandex-heavy feel of the latter 80s, rock bands reached turning points. Erupting out of the US were thrash-metal, hair-metal, hardcore and alt.rock, and with bands as diametric as Metallica, R.E.M., Ratt, and Black Flag ascendent. In the UK, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club and Thompson Twins were at the vanguard of the New Romantics. Then again, there were their polar opposites – The Smiths debuting, and the protagonists of the so-called ‘big music’, led by U2 and with them Simple Minds, Big Country and The Alarm.
Yet towering over all else like Himalayan peaks were four artists in the process of redefining the notion of superstardom and towards it being a state of global ubiquity: Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen. Even in spite of it coming out in late November ’82, Jackson’s Thriller turned out to be the best-selling album of 1984. Collectively, it and Princ
