More prosaically, promoting pop through images of luxury, stately homes, swimming pools, the Riviera and other exotic destinations may have had almost as much to do with aping recent iconic
adverts for products such as Martini. Imagery and lyrics were, in any case, not always in sync. With the noticeable exception of the loner Gary Numan, pop acts openly endorsing Thatcherism were
hard to find. Yet even a Sheffield-bred band like Heaven 17 – responsible for the anti-Reagan ‘(We Don’t Need this) Fascist Groove Thang’ and other left-wing sentiments
– was content to embody the new go-getting spirit of the age. For their 1981
Penthouse and Pavement
album cover they were drawn as ‘yuppies’ in City suits agreeing a
business deal. Even allowing for a measure of tongue-in-cheek, the impression was of a band embracing the white-collar world and work ethic, tapping on their electronic instruments with the same
money-making intent as bankers sitting at their computer keyboards. As Heaven 17’s leader, Martyn Ware, explained, this portrayal was really trying to say: ‘Let’s get rid of all
this hypocrisy of “We’re artists, we don’t care about the money.” Let’s strip the facade bare and have a look at what’s underneath – handshakes, signing
contracts, busy-ness.’
5
Money for Nothing
The baroque bombast of Britain’s electro-pop and New Romantic groups drove the country’s greatest cultural export during the eighties, with the United States proving
the most receptive market. There, the ‘English haircut bands’, as they were pejoratively termed, filled the void created by disco’s decline as the natural alternative to the
aggressively heterosexual blue-collar rock scene. Even more than at home, it was in America that the British mastery of pop’s visual dimension proved decisive, because the music video channel
MTV (which did not arrive in the UK until 1987) was launched in the US in 1981 just as the New Romantic movement was gathering momentum. The video chosen to open the new channel was, appropriately,
the Trevor Horn composition ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’. Such was the creative superiority – and quantity – of British pop videos at the time that three quarters of those
aired in MTV’s early years were for
British groups.
6
This was certainly a factor in the extraordinarily successful
promotion of Britain’s youth culture across the Atlantic: by 1983, British pop groups had secured 35 per cent of the US
Billboard
singles and album charts, and at times made up the
majority of top ten acts,
7
an unprecedented level of penetration which exceeded even the glory days of The Beatles and has not come close to being
equalled since. Aware that something was in the air, in November 1983
Rolling Stone
magazine emblazoned its front cover with the headline: ‘ENGLAND SWINGS: Great Britain invades
America’s music and style. Again.’ The accompanying portrait of a demurely smiling Boy George provided the double-entendre to the nature of English ‘swinging’.
The supposedly ‘un-American’ effeminacy of the New Romantic groups naturally triggered a backlash from the same quarter that had castigated disco in the seventies. Hard rock was the
resistance force. Yet even here, it was British acts like Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Saxon that took a significant share of the American market as exponents of heavy metal’s ‘new
wave’, with the emphasis firmly on power chords, a quick tempo and nods to folkloric mysticism and manly barbarism. Tellingly, when the Rob Reiner-directed, American spoof
‘rockumentary’
This Is Spinal Tap
was released in 1984, the eponymous fictional heavy metal band were British rockers touring America to promote their album
Smell the
Glove
. By the second half of the eighties, the joke was beginning to rebound, with American adolescents turning away from imported guitar strummers in favour of the burgeoning heavy metal scene
centred on Los Angeles and its headline bands, Metallica and Mötley Crüe. Nor could acts that originated in Barnsley (Saxon) or Leyton (Iron Maiden) convincingly tap the hometown rock
environment of which Bruce Springsteen became the undisputed champion with his 1984 tribute to American blue-collar values,
Born in the USA
.
Whether as headbangers or haircut bands, the British invasion discernibly faltered during the second half of the decade, a precursor to its devastating defeat in the nineties when its share of
the American market fell towards 5 per cent. One explanation was that British pop, which had been so innovative between 1978 and 1984, simply ran out of steam mid-decade. Aside from the enduring
success of the Eurythmics’ lead singer, Annie Lennox, Britain produced no equivalent to such American female superstars of commercial pop as Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Belinda Carlisle and The
Bangles (indeed it was not until the 1996 breakthrough of The Spice Girls that British female acts really achieved sustained success). What was more, the music scene in the US was undergoing a
revolution of its own, with the rise of contemporary R&B, hip hop and rap. These African-American street responses inherited rock’s ‘tell it like it is’ lack of deference,
crafting an
attitude and delivering a message with which the predominantly white bands from Britain could hardly compete for authenticity. Nevertheless, capturing the trend
just as it was surging in popularity was the 1983 album
Duck Rock
on which Malcolm McLaren, in an unlikely collaboration with Trevor Horn, travelled to Soweto and New York for inspiration
and came back not just with the cheerful hop, skip and jump of ‘Double Dutch’ but, more importantly, ‘Buffalo Gals’. The latter, featuring scratching and hip hop (with
break-dancing by Rock Steady Crew on the accompanying video), was a portent of a revolution in the making, one in which Britain would subsequently play little part beyond second-rate imitation.
Instead, the revolution sweeping British music was more of a technological than a compositional nature. In the first half of the decade, vinyl records remained the most popular format, with the
traditional 7-inch single being supplemented by the 10-inch EP, the latter especially useful for extended remixes. The subsequent assault on vinyl came from two quarters. The launch of the Sony
Walkman, a pocket cassette player with earphones, made viable relatively discreet listening to music on the move. The ease for the listener had repercussions for everyone else inhabiting the public
space. To commuters and passers-by offended by the fashion – much exaggerated by the press – for blasting music from a large portable cassette player (nicknamed a ‘ghetto
blaster’) nonchalantly slung over the shoulder or carried under the arm, the Walkman offered at least modest relief, even if its earphones still leaked low but irritating emissions of
tinny-sounding noise. Meanwhile, during 1983, compact discs (CDs) and their players started appearing on British high streets. Yet until sales reached a critical mass, album releases continued to
be recorded on analogue equipment. What made Dire Straits’
Brothers in Arms
(1985) album special was that it was digitally recorded and produced as a CD first, and in traditional
formats second. The result was an international blockbuster and the first CD to sell a million copies, after which the transition to CD purchasing intensified across the country. Three million CD
sales in 1985 became 41.7 million in 1987, the year in which the format overtook the LP record. Nevertheless, cassettes were still the most popular music medium.
8
By then, the British market had also come under the spell of another craze – the compilation album. The concept was hardly new, but until the early eighties the appeal of compilation
albums had been limited by internecine wrangling between rival record companies and licensing restrictions that ensured that, for instance, the
Top of the Pops
albums were actually largely
the work of session musicians rather than the original artists. This changed in the run-up to Christmas 1983 with the release of
Now That’s What I Call Music!
Behind the
Now!
concept was the Virgin Records boss, Richard Branson, who appropriated the title from a vintage advertising campaign for Danish
bacon. Featuring artists from his own Virgin
label as well as the other leading British record company, EMI, the original
Now!
double album contained thirty tracks, eleven of which had topped the charts. For fans of mainstream pop,
this was a treasure trove of riches and the start of a series that duly became one of the most successful and enduring brands in British pop history. The compilation concept even proved capable of
being shrunk from album to single format, with two disc jockeys from Rotherham – marketing themselves as Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers – responsible for a string of hits that were no
more than segments of Glenn Miller and 1950s rock-’n’-roll classics stitched artlessly together with the bonding agent of a drum machine. It was a sign of mainstream pop’s
declining creativity that Jive Bunny followed in the footsteps of Gerry and the Pacemakers and Frankie Goes to Hollywood in topping the charts with their first three releases. To add insult to
injury, they came within a week of providing the parting number one of the eighties.
Instead, that honour fell to another derivative performance – a reworking of Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ As a tribute to the period’s most
celebrated attempt to improve the lives of the less fortunate (and to keep the charity money flowing), there was much to be said for the decade ending on this recurring note. Unfortunately, it did
so with a version of the song that, put together by the leading producers of the moment, Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW), represented the formulaic and predictable sound to which mainstream British pop
had degenerated by the eighties’ end. The success of the producing trio of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman had begun with Dead or Alive’s 1984 hit ‘You Spin Round (Like
a Record)’, though their period of chart dominance only really took off in 1987. Four number ones for SAW acts in that year were followed by an astonishing seven chart-toppers in 1989. This
magic touch led to their business being dubbed the ‘Hit Factory’ – a double-edged compliment since it also conveyed connotations of an assembly-line approach to the craft of
music-making. In a similar vein, though rather more flatteringly, the trio’s ability to knock out hits also garnered comparisons with Tin Pan Alley. The comparison was one of product as much
as song-writing method. The songs, albeit carried along by a typically eighties quick-tempo drum-machine beat, retained the feel of 1950s skiffle tunes, complete with a wholesome quality to the
performers selected to be SAW’s ventriloquists. A world away from the rude intrusions of punk and heavy metal, the blazer-wearing Rick Astley gave voice to old-fashioned, clean-living
sentiments of uncomplicated fidelity and romantic constancy. Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue had already attracted a considerable television following as the fresh-faced love interest in
Neighbours
, the Australian soap opera that had been airing on BBC 1 since 1986, and Kylie proved to be the only one of
SAW’s signings with the staying power not
only to outlive the Hit Factory but to move on to greater stardom beyond. Apart from Jason, Kylie and the already established girl band Bananarama, those whom SAW promoted were not obviously
burdened with talent or innate charisma. In this respect, SAW’s acts foreshadowed the reality-television celebrity scene that all but defined popular culture in the first decade of the
twenty-first century. While punk had encouraged the idea that anyone could stand up and perform, regardless of training or technical ability, there was at least the presumption that they would make
the effort themselves. The Hit Factory relieved them of this burden, since the producers chose whom they wanted, provided them with a look and a song to sing, marketed them and then dropped them
back into the obscurity from which they had been plucked. Such instant and brief gratification helped ensure that by the late eighties, SAW’s label, PWL, had become the largest independent
record label in the country. The commercial rather than artistic imperative seemed the only objective – which to its enemies perfectly encapsulated what they believed to be the essence of
Thatcherism. The embodiment of all that was dispiriting came when SAW, hoping to repeat their early success with Mel & Kim, signed another couple of sisters, The Reynolds Girls. The song
written for the two permed-haired Liverpudlian teenagers had as its hook the refrain ‘I’d rather Jack than Fleetwood Mac’, and was billed as a youthful rebuke to radio
stations’ preference for playing well-established bands. When performed live, the protest might have carried more weight if the Girls had not had to mime the words.
The Rise and Fall of the Indies
There was another way of doing things. Although PWL was an independent label, the highly commercial, unchallenging music it promoted might as well have come from one of the
major record corporations, like EMI, CBS or PolyGram. Yet while so many of those who took pop seriously despaired of the alleged taste-debasing power of the ‘majors’, the reality was
that the 1980s were also a golden age for ‘indie’ music. The latter tended to persevere with the traditional instruments of drum kits and electric guitars rather than newfangled
synthesizers and drum machines. Where the New Romantics paraded like cockatoos in colourful, shiny clothing and puffed-up, hairsprayed coiffures, those signed to independent labels were more likely
to be wrapped up against the cold in unpretentious, shapeless garb – drab, dowdy and unapologetically ordinary – or, in the case of the Goths, heavily made-up in funereal style. This
was part of a conscious rejection of the optimism implicit in synth-pop’s embrace of futurism. Indie bands tended to be pessimistic and backward-looking, siding with the millions
who felt marginalized by the onward march of Thatcherism rather than with those flaunting the fact they were doing very nicely out of it. In particular, the indie bands helped
perpetuate folk music’s legacy of meaningful lyrics rather than the predictable boy-meets-girl simplicities of the mainstream acts. For their focus was on the craft of writing songs with
‘something to say’ and embodied the supposed purity of impoverished idealists struggling for their art against those who had sold out to corporate money, with its glib cheerfulness,
heavy marketing and ostentatiously expensive promotional videos.