On September 5, 1983 I entered the world of work for the first time, starting a career that has had more twists and turns than most! 40 years on, I thought it might be interesting to look back to what the office looked like in the analogue days of the early 80s. Now, this is just my experience of one firm, but, from chatting to people at the time and after, I think it is fairly representative of what we faced in those far off times. Follow me through the doors of my first office.
Lloyds of London
My first job was in the Non-marine section of the famous insurer, based in Gun Wharf in Chatham. I had left the Maths School in July of that year with huge relief, and with one final piece of bad advice from the disinterested careers officer in a school that only cared about university entrants. I had done A Levels so I should look for a job in banking or insurance. Accordingly, I applied for every bank and building society I could and it was Lloyds who were unlucky enough to employ me! I was hopeless as a non-marine insurance clerk as I had absolutely no eye for detail and made mistake after mistake during my 10 months there. Despite this, I actually enjoyed the people I worked with and the opportunities I had on the social side. My pay was the princely sum, at least to me at the time, of £3,600 a year. This kept me in the manner of most 18 year olds at the time, funding pub visits and records quite happily! Savings were not an issue for me at the time, so it was purely spending money after I paid rent to my parents. My biggest purchase was a ZX Spectrum 48K for £175, the equivalent of a whole month’s disposable income! My friends loved it, but I was rubbish at computer games so it was by any measure an irresponsible purchase as it turned out!
The Office
In 1983, the office was a very different place in many ways. First of all, there were no computers of any sort on our desks. The whole idea would have been laughable when the computer rooms were huge spaces containing giant mainframes that had less processing power than the phones we carry in our pockets today. Instead of endless emails we had the post room where letters were sorted and delivered to offices twice a day. The post room staff were extremely efficient and, for the most part, enjoyed their jobs as they were not bothered by management and could work at their own pace fuelled by tea, coffee and cigarettes! In those days you could smoke in the office, and over half of the employees did. Looking back, that seems to be the relic of another age, but at the time we thought nothing of it. Our colleagues were not the chain smoking types, and they often took the chance to go for a walk when they were smoking so there wasn’t a permanent fog of smoke in the place.
The benefits of a computer less office lay in the ability to think, plan and consult with colleagues when they were less busy. If someone had a query for your department, they didn’t expect a reply immediately even if they phoned up. These days, the instant nature of communication means the expectation of instant answers. The effect of that is to reduce the effectiveness of some of those answers and to increase the stress on the employees providing them.
My colleagues were a mix of older time served employees in their 50s and 60s, many of them with 30 or more years of service under their belts, and a large proportion of new employees, hired year after year on the basis that not all of them would stay. I sat opposite a couple of older employees who would regale us with stories of WWII and their experiences of Lloyds during the many years they spent there. They were, as a group, fascinating, caring men and women who had a clear policy of watching the backs of the younger employees. From their own experiences of being new workers, they were able to see the pitfalls way before us and often had a quiet word to help us correct our mistakes before the managers spotted them. It was very much a them and us approach in the office that gave us a bond with each other and made for a very supportive work atmosphere. They shook their heads and smiled on occasions when they saw the younger crowd walk around as if we’d got it sorted out, but were endlessly patient with us. The managers themselves were accorded respect because they had all worked their way up through the ranks. You could go to a manager for help if you needed to, safe in the knowledge that they had the skillset to help you. Our assistant manager and manager in my department had over 50 years between them in Lloyds.
What a contrast to today when being a ‘manager’ is simply a career path chosen by people who in nearly every case have no idea about the field they work in. All they care about is enriching themselves and their opportunity to get even more money in another field they are similarly clueless about. Yes, I know there are exceptions, but the general lack of understanding or interest in the management class is what has led to many of the problems we have today in terms of business stability and relations between junior and senior staff.
Lloyds, in common with many other places at the time, had a system called flexitime. This involved employees being treated as responsible adults, which was probably not ideal in my case! You had to work a set number of hours each month, and at the end of the month you were required to have a surplus or to have ‘broken even’ by working that required amount of time. In my case, I treated myself as a part-timer for the first 2 or 3 weeks of my first few months and then worked 8 – 6 with 15 minutes for lunch in order to play catch up! This was not the ideal strategy, and one month I was sick for the last two days and ended up with a deficit for which I was rightly taken to task. After that, I was much more responsible and came to enjoy a system that allowed you time to recover from a bad morning or a ‘heavy night’ and, if you built up enough time, take the odd day off. It was a system that both employees and employers benefitted from and a system that would be significantly better for morale than the enforced or zero hours we have now. Holidays in those days meant someone else doing your job for two weeks and no inbox with hundreds of emails to return to. It gave you the opportunity to really relax for two weeks and pick up the work when you returned with no backlog.
Lunch time
Lloyds, in common with many other places had a subsidised canteen. If you just had a main course it was 9p, but if you pushed the boat out and had 3 courses it was the princely sum of 27p – less than the price of a half pint of beer! There was no sitting at your desks eating, you had to leave the office for a minimum of 15 minutes at lunchtime as that was considered essential to maintain concentration. In practice most lunches were 30 – 45 minutes long. Steve Reid, my inseparable work buddy, and I used to spend lunchtimes chatting, playing snooker on the 6 by 3 table downstairs, or occasionally taking part in indoor bowls (More of that later)! On Fridays, however, we went to the Command House nearby and, unless I was playing catch up on my hours, spent sometimes up to an hour and a half drinking and eating with the many of our younger colleagues. Friday afternoon saw very little useful work being done by most of us as we struggled to stay awake, let alone read insurance forms through our self-induced alcoholic hazes! Occasionally, our senior colleagues joined us, or went out with their compatriots to toast the upcoming weekend. It was an accepted part of work behaviour pretty much everywhere as long as you didn’t overdo things, although if my friend Gavin’s drunken Friday afternoon phone calls were anything to go by, the London banks seemed to be a free for all! Yes, it could be one of those privileges that was abused, but we knew what the limits were and for the most part kept within them.
Social Life and your employer
Back in the 80s, we were probably in the last decade or so of the expectation of jobs for life. Many of the post-war generation were reaching the end of their careers and had dedicated their working lives to Lloyds. In return, they were treated very well by the company both inside and outside work. Those of us who were just passing through were also beneficiaries of this approach and probably didn’t really appreciate how lucky we were until later on in our careers.
Lloyds had sports grounds in the Medway Towns and in London with a number of cricket teams in the summer, football, rugby and hockey in the winter and well used clubhouses in both venues. They were not unusual in this respect as other companies such as Lloyds Bank, Barclays Bank and Cuaco (Commercial Union Assurance Company) ran 5 or 6 teams in each sport whilst smaller companies commonly ran at least one team in many sports. This fostered a sense of belonging and gave employees an outlet for their interests that cost very little and was well supported. We had games evenings against other companies which were great fun and definitely competitive! Steve and I played indoor bowls in a Lloyds league organised by a couple of the employees. The combination of Steve’s skill and my brute force occasionally paid dividends, but I definitely wasn’t the most reliable partner, that’s for sure! All of the above examples compare very favourably with today’s employers who, in the vast majority of cases, expect full loyalty from employees without acknowledging a duty of care, mental or social, to those they expect so much from.
Education and training
Finally, all first year employees were working a four day week during college terms as it was considered essential to have a workforce with as much training as possible. We went to the nearby Mid Kent College every Friday to study for our Introduction to Insurance qualifications. At the end of the course, we had to take exams, and, as our part of the deal, needed to pass two out of the three subjects to protect our college day. If anyone didn’t pass two exams, they were allowed to resit them the following year, but they had to study on their own time as they went back to a full 5 day week. Ironically, given that I didn’t last a full year, I was the only one eligible to keep my study day after the exams! It was the perfect combination of incentives, and if you went back the following year and passed the missing subjects you could move on to Stage 2 and get your study day back. Now, that’s what i call professional development!
Final Thoughts
So there you have it, work 1983 style. I know I have painted it in a very positive light, but at the time it didn’t seem that positive. It’s only in retrospect that you realise it was a very much better time to be a common or garden worker in an office than pretty much any era that followed it. Did I enjoy it much at the time? No way. Work is work, particularly in a job you are completely unsuited for, and I hated the feeling of not being up to the job. However, even at the time I appreciated my colleagues and my employer for making it significantly more comfortable than it otherwise would have been. These days, I doubt that many modern firms would have the patience or understanding required to do anything to smooth my path.
The Blue and The Green
In the early 70s, ITV was responsible for two fondly remembered science fiction series. The first, from 1970, was the excellent Timeslip which only lasted for one series on TV, but which covered a huge amount of dramatic and scientific ground. The second series, which started in 1973, was The Tomorrow People. Both series were overseen by Ruth Boswell, a leading figure in children’s drama whose approach was never to talk down to her audience, but rather encourage them to stretch themselves. Alongside her two most famous series, she was responsible for Escape into Night in 1972 and the anthology series Shadows in 1976. All four were high quality productions where the ideas were central to their appeal. If you have seen them, you’ll know what I mean, and if you haven’t I urge you to track them down.
The Story
The Blue and The Green is perhaps the best regarded, and certainly the best remembered, story in the series, and it is the story that introduced Series 2. The episode starts with two Tomorrow People in their hidden lab, John (Nicholas Young) and Stephen (Peter Vaughan Clarke). Stephen is attending school, where his art class is being taught by Elizabeth M’Bondo (Elizabeth Adare), a new student teacher. He quickly realises that she is a Tomorrow Person, although she is quite a bit older than the others who had ‘broken out’. John tells Stephen to tread carefully, but soon the new potential Tomorrow Person is a minor problem compared to Stephen’s new classmate. Robert (Jason Kemp) produces a painting he calls ‘The change of weather on Rexil 4’, a name he insists he made up. However, Stephen knows that not only is there a planet called Rexil 4, but that he has painted it entirely accurately. The situation gets much worse when Robert brings a box of badges to school, in two shades, blue and green. When the whole world takes sides, there seems to be little even the Tomorrow People can do. What is Robert’s story? How will Elizabeth cope with becoming a Tomorrow Person? These two questions drive the five episode story as it becomes progressively darker.
Reactions
My first reflection when re-watching a programme I’d last seen when it was first broadcast in 1974, was how well the central concepts still stand up. The way that human nature tends towards inexplicable violence is just as pertinent now as it was then, perhaps even more so. It is one of the programme’s strengths, at least in the first three series which were overseen by Ruth Boswell, not to sugar coat the more controversial elements of the programme. The ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland is referenced, as is racism. Cleverly, the points are not laboured, but they are unsettling and left firmly in the viewer’s minds. The apparently random introduction of the Blue and Green badges is extremely clever, because their effect is immediate and occasionally shocking, but the explanation for that effect is deliberately left until Episode 5. The viewer is left wondering what is going on and even Tim (voiced by Philip Gilbert), the Tomorrow People’s powerful computer is at a loss to explain what is going on. He does, however, mention that the Roman Empire fell after the citizens split themselves into Blue and Green factions. This occurred in the 6th Century and initially took place within the Byzantine Empire, which was centred around Constantinople. This proves to be an important plot point. The denouement is interesting and brings the best story, in my opinion, to a satisfying close.
The weaker points are few, but one of them centres around the uncomfortable marriage between high concept science fiction and children’s television at the time. Robert has a ‘grandfather’ (Nigel Pegram) looking after him who has been brainwashed into thinking that Robert is his flesh and blood. He looks, and acts, like Dick Van Dyke in his role as the manager of the bank in Mary Poppins! It’s a clowning performance that seems to have wondered in from a completely different programme, perhaps Rentaghost. The fight scenes are badly choreographed, but then again they couldn’t be too realistic for a programme shown before 5pm, so some allowances are needed when judging them. That said, there is significant footage from conflicts around the world and that gives a more unsettling feel to the programme which offsets it. Finally, there is a non Tomorrow Person who helps out called Chris (Christopher Chittell). His role is providing the muscle, given the Tomorrow People’s prime barrier which largely stops them from acts of violence. In this episode, Chris gets involved in breaking and entering as well as seemingly random car chases that, once again, seem out of place in the show. Finally, the way the solution is enacted can seem quite amusing in places, but if you suspend disbelief I think it’s actually quite effective.
Things to look out for include early appearances by those Birds of a Feather Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson, the former immediately recognisable, and their castmate from ‘You Must Be Joking’ Ray Burdis. An interesting aside from Tim introducing himself to Elizabeth is his description of himself as Artificial Intelligence. This reflects the fact that The Tomorrow People, like Timeslip, had a scientific advisor.
Final Thoughts
So there you have it. The Blue and The Green definitely stands up extremely well all these years later. It is thoughtful, intelligent science fiction that is the perfect showcase for this 70s classic. Even if the story hadn’t been as effective I could watch the opening titles on a loop! The combination of music and images still sends shivers down my spine in the same way as it did when I was just 8 years old.
As I have just got back from the capital of Ireland I thought I’d share a few thoughts and recommendations to give you a head start if you’re planning your own trip to Dublin’s fair city.
Getting there
Unless you have lots of time, or you live very much closer to Holyhead than I do, the flight is perhaps the only option. With the usual caveats of it being something of a game you are playing with the airline to keep your costs as low as possible, the budget carriers were our best option. We ended up with Ryanair, and for me the huge plus was the amount of legroom. To be able to actually stretch your legs out on a plane was a real surprise and an element that made the flight far more comfortable than expected. As more experienced travel blogs would tell you, exhaustive internet research is the key so head to the usual suspects and do your comparisons.
Accommodation
We went across as a family for my wife’s birthday so with ourselves, children and partners there were eight of us. This meant that we could look at the self catering options provided by Yugo, whose term time student accommodation is available for the summer months. Now, if you are used to hotels, the accommodation can seem a little basic, but if you are used to hostels it’s pretty good. The kitchen has fridge, freezer, oven, toaster, microwave and hob. It doubles as the lounge and there is a flat screen on the wall which has the terrestrial channels plus Netflix access. All cups, plates and utensils are present and correct, and all in all it’s perfect for breakfasts and your evening meal if you are cooking for yourself at any point as we were. There was a dishwasher but no tablets so if you want to use it you have to buy your own. The rooms are basic in nature, but comfortable, although the beds were three quarter sized doubles which may be rather cosy for two! All in all it was pretty good and a perfect base for 3 nights.
Getting around
From the airport, the best option by far, to my mind, is the Dublin Express Bus, which takes you into the centre of the city within an hour for 5 euros. Once you are in the city itself, most things were in walking distance for us, but there are buses that cover most of the city as well. As someone who never takes taxis I’m afraid I can’t comment on those!
Eating and Drinking
As with any city there are a huge number of options, but as with any city the meals are not especially cheap. However, I want to suggest a couple of pubs and a small but excellent café. The pub that we went to for a couple of meals was O’ Shea’s, and even as a non pub goer I was bowled over by the atmosphere there and the quality of the food and drink. Between the eight of us we tried most of what was on the menu over two visits and all the meals were of the highest quality. On the Sunday night the live music was superb and not at the level where you couldn’t hear each other speak. The pub is situated near Merchant’s Quay and is definitely worth a visit. The other bar, Dillon’s Bar, is a great place for lunch with an excellent sandwich menu and an excellent atmosphere. It is just down the road from Phoenix Park, so it makes a handy stopping off point on your way back in to the city. Finally, for breakfast on my wife’s birthday we went to a little place called The Cheeky Piglet which had a fantastic breakfast menu which was tasty and perfect to set us up for our day of sightseeing.
Places to see in Dublin
I don’t want to make this an exhaustive list, so I will just pick three places that I really enjoyed. The main reason for our visit was to take my wife to the Guinness Storehouse. Across five floors and a rooftop bar, you are introduced to the story of Guinness and then invited to sample your own pint. We upgraded our visit to the Stoutly which gives you the rather intriguing option of your picture on the head of a pint of Guinness. It’s definitely worth the extra money in my opinion, because it’s a real talking point and you won’t get it anywhere else! We ended up spending 4 hours there, but you can probably see and do most things in 3.
Dublinia is a fascinating introduction to the Viking and Medieval history of Dublin. The idea is similar to Jorvik in York although there is no ride through a Viking village. It’s a good place to while away 90 minutes, particularly when waiting for the rain to stop!
On our final afternoon, we visited the Irish Whiskey Museum, because we had an hour or so to kill before the end of our visit, and we were so glad we did! You get a tour from a knowledgeable guide. Donal was our guide and he was by common consent absolutely brilliant. His genuinely hilarious asides were cheeky, quick witted and entirely good natured even, or especially, when he skirted the edge of insulting very skilfully. In our final couple of hours in Dublin we saw, heard and tasted the essence of the Irish experience.
Final thoughts
The weather when we went was pretty bad, in common with most of the rest of Britain and Ireland.
Tip Number One – Never go out without a jacket thinking it looks OK! The weather changes insanely quickly and the next belt of rain could be far closer than you think.
Tip Number Two – Layer up so you don’t end up perspiring profusely if you don’t get rained upon.
Tip Number Three – The atmosphere of Dublin is best experienced on a summer’s evening by simply walking around. We went to Grafton Street one evening and Temple Bar area on another, and had a fantastic time. It is a European City in every respect and the café and pub culture comes into its own on a walk around the areas where the locals congregate.
Tip Number Four – It’s expensive but so is any city, and with careful budgeting you can spend a small amount and get a huge amount of value from it.
Tip Number Five – Slow down and let Dublin seep into your soul. My family say I am incapable of slowing down (!) but by my standards I was more relaxed here than on pretty much any other short break I’ve ever taken.
Thank you Dublin, I will be back.
When I first read about the Booker Prize this year and looked at the shortlist, one book stood out. Time Shelter, the eventual winner, was instantly appealing in its central idea of whole countries having referenda to decide which decade of the 20th century they wanted to return to. As you will have noticed on this blog, I would probably quite like to return to the 70s! When I started reading it, however, it was clear that the ideas driving this book were far more wide ranging. It was a reflection, ageing, mortality, nostalgia, dementia, national characteristics and a feeling of wanting safety in an unsafe world. Georgi Gospodinov juggled all these ideas with verve, wit, humour and occasional tragedy in a densely plotted, but never overwhelming, book. He was aided in this by the excellent translation by Angela Rodel which helped the book’s momentum and appeal. At times, it was as if the author was speaking directly to me and reading my thoughts. As I read, I considered all the ideas that were coming at me thick and fast, and every time I put the book down, those ideas stayed with me, forcing me to consider ‘What if?’ as I reflected on what my own approach may be in the situation the protagonist found himself in.
The Plot
As far as the plot is concerned, and as ever no spoilers, the narrator sets up dementia clinics with the mysterious, enigmatic Gaustine. In these clinics, each floor is designed to perfectly reflect a particular decade complete with items from the time, music, newspapers, entertainment, food and even smells. The idea is to give sufferers a safe space in which to immerse themselves in a decade that allows themselves to connect with part of the person the disease has taken away. The details are correct in every respect, and the staff and visitors all dress and act appropriately within that decade, allowing the patients to retain that sense of their own time shelter. These time shelters become ever more popular as the idea is replicated in countries across the world, and younger people who are not suffering from dementia start to visit these clinics to escape from the stresses of modern life. (Doesn’t that sound absolutely amazing in these awful times?) Eventually, the decision is made that across Europe there will be referenda to decide which decade each country will return to. One very short chapter that made me laugh reflected the situation of the UK, but I will leave you to read that for yourself! Anyway, it turns out that returning to these decades may not be the panacea that everyone hoped.
My reflections
When you read a book like this, you can’t help but think where you might want to go back to and why. One very minor character, when asked where she would return to, replies that she would just like to be 12 in whichever decade she was living, reflecting on that age as one without responsibility and open to new experiences day after day. It reminded me of the marvellous BBC series, Back in Time for the Weekend, featuring the Ashby-Hawkins family where it was twelve year old Seth who had a fantastic time in every decade whilst his parents Rob and Steph found the social requirements of the time more restrictive, especially Steph who was pretty much chained to the kitchen, and his sixteen year old sister Daisy found the restrictions of the 1950s gradually loosen throughout subsequent decades. The idea that twelve is the age to be in every decade seemed to hold true if that programme was anything to go by. I wondered where the Ashby-Hawkins might vote to live, and decided that like me it would be a toss-up between the 70s and 80s. For my part, I would want to be nine or ten in every decade with secondary school always in the future and never in the present.
For the story the referenda are reflected through the prism of the national situations that existed in each decade, and it’s a very interesting whistle-stop tour through 20th century history. A large section of this middle part of the book quite naturally takes place in Gospodinov’s own Bulgaria, but the way that he brings the country to life means that you are captivated and immersed within the borders of a place that I have never visited and know very little about. The research for the time zones and the individual nations felt integral to the book but at no point did it feel like a historical or cultural lesson to me, merely an unfolding of the narrative. I have never read a book like this, and it is definitely one I will return to in the future – or perhaps in the past!
So, let’s start Part 7 with a set of classic tracks from a whole range of genres. Haircut 100 were a short-lived but very good band fronted by Nick Heyward. His excellent song writing and fresh faced appeal made them irresistible to female record buyers in particular. Over the years I have grown to appreciate their records more and more, but at the time I only picked up Favourite Shirts (Boy meets Girl), a typically catchy and sunny track. Hall and Oates were an American duo who had a Top 10 single with I Can’t Go for That followed by a Top 5 smash in the UK with the brilliant Maneater. They had a real feel for a chorus, and could inject attitude into the simplest phrases. They had more success in their native land but their 80s singles definitely bring memories flooding back. The quiet Beatle George Harrison had a massive hit with Got My Mind Set on You, a brilliant track accompanied by an equally brilliant video. It was a track produced by Jeff Lynne, and this collaboration led a year later to my favourite supergroup of all time, The Travelling Wilburys. As with a lot of Jeff Lynne’s productions, the kitchen sink is thrown in, followed by the bathtub but it all works somehow! Heart had their biggest hit with Alone, a record that reached Number 3 in May 1987. It is an archetypal power ballad, and I was, and remain a huge fan of power ballads. You will spot a good few of them in the singles collection! Much as I enjoyed Temptation by Heaven 17, it was Come Live With Me that really captured my imagination. Glenn Gregory sounded excellent on both tracks, but his world weary delivery just took this song to another level. With memorable lines like ‘I was 37, you were 17’ and ‘If half the things they say are quarter true of me’ it got me dancing and it fascinated me as a piece of storytelling, the perfect combination. Is there a more perfect American summer song than Boys of Summer? As soon as you play it, your imagination puts you in a car travelling down a long straight American road with the top down. It is atmospheric and simply exudes cool as befits Don Henley, perhaps the most effortlessly cool member of The Eagles. It is an incredible piece of music. Finally, we go from 80s cool to 60s cool with the classic ballad from The Hollies, He Ain’t Heavy (He’s My Brother). It finally reached the top of the charts in September 1988, 19 years after its first release, when this song featured in an advert.
Well, this was a massive surprise! How have I only got one Housemartins single? It is my favourite track of theirs, a fantastically melancholy look at the price of ‘progress’. Build is the cry of the people not so much left behind by progress, but treated as collateral damage. Next time you listen have the lyrics or lyric video to hand. Whitney Houston is simply an icon and I have two of her singles, along with both of her albums on cassette – now sadly unplayable as I no longer have a cassette player! Anyway, The Greatest Love of All and I will Always Love You are the tracks that to me epitomise her brilliance. Neither require any further introduction, but I always feel that the former is perhaps unjustly overshadowed by her other tracks.
We now come to a piece of my personal history, the first single I ever bought. I am sure that some people did strike gold with the first single purchased with their own money, but I bet most people actually bought a record with a cringe factor like Billy Howard’s King of the Cops and try not to admit it. I loved it at the time, or I wouldn’t have bought it, but looking back now, it is a gimmicky song that is objectively awful with Howard performing poor impersonations of American cops from TV shows of the era. As it is, there are two things very much in its favour. The B Side, Bond is a Four Letter Word is very funny even now with a very good Sean Connery impersonation. More to the point though, it introduced me to the thrill of deciding which single to buy, taking it out of its cover and watching it spin on that turn table for the very first time. That still lives with me every time I get a new single or album.
Red River Rock by Johnny and the Hurricanes was a permanent fixture on the jukebox at the Crispin, my local pub, and when I saw it on the trusted Old Gold label I snapped it up. It’s a Rock n Roll instrumental with virtuoso guitar work that is extremely infectious. It got played pretty much every night my friends and I were at the pub and we all loved singing along to the tune. Take a listen and you’ll see what I mean. Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick was probably my gateway into punk with its funny lyrics, the utterly unique Ian Drury and the fantastic work by his band The Blockheads. During their career they produced song after song steeped in the London experience as their predecessors The Kinks did and their successors Madness would do.
Rebel Yell was Billy Idol’s biggest hit along with White Wedding, both of which made Number 6 in the charts. The chorus was a proper singalong and it’s still a song that makes me smile. Imagination were one of my favourite funk bands of the 80s and their biggest hit Just an Illusion was a Number 2 hit which was kept off the top spot by the Goombay Dance Band! Shades of Vienna and Joe Dolce there! It was a song that had a brilliant tune and a superb performance from Leee John (yes there were three ‘e’s in his first name!) which made it one of the most instantly recognisable dance tracks of the time. In the Heat of the Night was released 6 months after their biggest record, and although it stalled outside the Top 20 it was another excellent track from a band that really deserves to be better regarded. Jermaine Jackson, like the rest of the family was very much in the shadow of his younger brother MIchael, but Do What You Do is smooth, beautifully sung and a song that Michael himself would have been happy to put his name to I would think. Only one single from 80s Mods The Jam, but what a single. Going Underground is an absolute belter of a track with a thumping bassline, excellent drumming and socially conscious lyrics delivered with real passion. Swing the Mood has none of those attributes, but it was definitely interesting to hear big band jazz in the charts!
Now we come on to Billy Joel, the Piano Man himself. All five of the singles released from his Innocent Man album were Top 30 hits, and the album itself reached Number 2 in the album charts. To say I was obsessed with the album was something of an understatement. I had all five of the 7 inch singles as you can see, the first three Uptown Girl, Tell Her About It and An Innocent Man on 12 inch singles and the cassette version of the album itself! If we had had different coloured versions of any of the above I would have bought those as well. When CD came along I collected all of his studio albums on that format, and I would almost certainly pick up the vinyl of Innocent Man for a reasonable price nowadays! He is quite simply up there with The Boss in the pantheon of American artists of the 70s and 80s for me, and up there with Elton John as the best piano player of his era.
Speaking of Elton John, I have a number of his singles as you can see. My two favourite tracks of his in the 70s are there, in the shape of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and the original version of Candle in the Wind. (As an aside I do wish he hadn’t rewritten it, let alone released the 1997 version which was frankly mawkish in the extreme.) From his excellent 1983 album Too Low For Zero perennial favourite I’m Still Standing and the rather overlooked Kiss the Bride which only reached Number 20 in the charts, believe it or not. It was the start of a run of tracks that sent Elton John back to the charts on a regular basis. The three other singles here include perhaps my favourite song of his, the gorgeous Nikita. Sad Songs and Passengers were also very good, but Nikita just stands out for me as one of the pinnacles of his career as a balladeer.
See you next time for Part 8!
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 