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1979 Pink Floyd: Another Brick In The Wall Part Two

Straddling the decades like the colossus the band was, the last number one of the seventies would also be the first number one of the eighties. And an unexpected one at that - with the punk wars a not too distant memory, few could have predicted that arch proggers Pink Floyd would release a chart bound single twelve years after their last, let alone one that would take the coveted Christmas Number One slot. But they did, and they did.

A taster for their eagerly awaited new album, 'Another Brick In The Wall' both alone and in context mined the seam of rampant misanthropy that Roger Waters uncovered on the band's previous 'Animals' album, a record which in it's own way was as anti-establishment and anti-status quo as anything The Clash managed to snarl. Which isn't bad going for such a deceptively simple schoolyard singalong; a clipped guitar rhythm walks through the song like Nile Rodgers in a leg brace to carry the recurring 'All in all it's just another brick in the wall' refrain, a line that would only become relevant in the context of the album as a whole and of Waters' central thesis that alienation breeds an extreme fascistic outlook and a tendency to look for scapegoats to pin your own ills on (well this is still prog after all).

But never mind the this bollocks, what schoolkid didn't take great delight in the play school anarchism of "We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom, teachers leave them kids alone". Howls of outrage duly followed - just Google the phrase to see how the controversy has resonated over the years, and in an age where the once 'no-go area' of 'Anarchy In The UK' gets played on daytime radio as a 'Golden Oldie', there's still something uncomfortable about this that gets the right people's backs up. And that's why, ultimately, I find there is something wonderfully subversive about having schoolchildren singing 'We don't need no education' in the number one spot at Christmas (it's Waters' own genius to include the 'ill educated' double negative in their saying it). Gilmour's fluid as water guitar solo in the outro is a joy too.

1979 The Police: Walking On The Moon

If 'Message In A Bottle' was a clattering approximation of roots reggae, 'Walking On The Moon' was an excursion into dub. Of sorts. The Clash had already dabbled but The Police were the first (I think) of the new wavers to construct a wholly original song that's part homage to the genre and part collaboration with the world of pop.

A metaphor for falling in love (according to Sting "being in love is to be relieved of gravity"), the density of the former song is blown apart into wide open spaces with each of the band almost broadcasting from the safety of their own separate planet. And yet with rather less going on, 'Walking On The Moon' holds it together far more concisely than 'Message'; Summer's standard reggae skank is punctuated by Copeland's drum rim cracks and Sting's three note bass figure that all skitter shambolically close to the cliff edge of disaster but never fall off. Oh, and lets not forget that glorious sunburst of a guitar chord that shimmers throughout like sunlight on water and gives aural effect to the butterflies in the stomach feeling of falling in love.

'Walking On The Moon' can sound throwaway and almost childish on surface listen if you take it literally. Which is what I did in 1979 (the space rocket themed video didn't help). But I was listening to it with my head back then; I've since learned to listen with my heart and on that front the song's delights are endless. Not for nothing is it my favourite Police number one.

1979 Dr Hook: When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman

Dr Hook had been purveying their own brand of country tinged pop since the late sixties, but even such old hands as them found that disco thang irresistible, and 'When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman' comes attached to a bleached white 'Rock Your Baby' groove that although out of time in 1979, suited their audience and the more laid back barroom vibe of the tune to a tee.

To my mind, Dr Hook have always had an air of mischief about them, but even at this remove I can't tell if that "When you're in love with a beautiful woman, it's hard (It's hard, you know it gets so hard)" entendre is intended or not (though I'd like to think it is). I can give them the benefit of the doubt on that one, but what's less forgivable is the overall 'message' of the song - i.e. that good looking women are a bunch of lying, scheming, untrustworthy bitches who will horse around behind your back with your mates at the drop of a hat, with the corollary being that ugly women will stay faithful and because they're grateful for anything they can get. And nobody else fancies them anyway. Hmmmm.

Well I'm not going to dip my toe into the murky waters of sexual politics here - it would be like trying to explain why the anvil floated by a balloon in a Tex Avery cartoon is impossible physics. Suffice it say the whole thing is as tongue in cheek as a saucy seaside postcard and it breezes along at such a clip that you're not really given time to ponder anything too deep. File this under "A harmless enough diversion".

1979 Lena Martell: One Day At A Time

If you look at it head on, then 1979 sets out a number ones stall that's a splendid array of seven inch artefacts and trinkets, much like the Ambassadors in Holbein's painting proudly showing off their worldly chattels for us to envy. Maybe they're not entirely representative of all that was going on in music at the time, but it's a decent stab, and far better than 1977 (when this song was in fact originally released) managed. Even the brash naffness of 'I Don't Like Mondays' pushes its way to the front with an unavoidable 'me too, me too' shout that everybody recognises. Something for everyone in fact.

Unfortunately, just like that painting, if you view it from a sharper angle then a grinning skull of death appears. Cliff Richard is at it's jaw, but it's head is made up almost entirely of 'One Day At A Time'. Because unfortunately, 'everyone' also includes the miserable git next door forever banging on the wall to keep the noise down and telling you to get to bed because there's school tomorrow.

Religious songs are a rare occurrence in the UK charts, let alone at number one, so there's a novelty here from the outset that could have papered over some of the cracks. Not that I have anything against that genre - regular readers will know my long-standing love of gospel, but whereas that particular field is uplifting in its joyousness (even for a non believer like me), 'One Day At A Time' is a sermon of self righteous finger wagging on the trials of a believer down here amongst all us heathens.

Kris Kristofferson's song has been insanely popular over the years, and Scottish (though Scotland via Texas judging by the accent she adopts) singer Lena Martell's version is as good as any of them. By which I mean good if you like this sort of thing; coming across like Dana's mum, Martell's voice fair drips a pious sincerity, but those people next door are sincere too and 'One Day At A Time' has a 'holier than thou' aloofness that's about as welcome and irritating in the 1979 line-up as having those neighbours turn up frowning on your doorstep when you're busy enjoying yourself.

1979 Buggles: Video Killed The Radio Star

Although not quite a common household fixture in 1979, video was marching relentlessly over the horizon as the 'next big thing' in technology and, in the eyes of some, it's arrival was something to be feared rather than celebrated. Not feared by everyone, but by those who saw it as erasing the comfort of the past with the shock of the new. By people like Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, the duo who made up Buggles. Both were professional musicians from disparate backgrounds who would go on to forge disparate careers in music. As Buggles, they weren't one hit wonders but they should have been, though I don't mean that sarcastically; Buggles should have come, made their statement with this song and then departed. Perfect.

Perfect because,as a single, 'Video Killed The Radio Star' is a fully formed creation making a stand alone statement that needs no follow ups or a hastily recorded (and very patchy) album (can you name either)? And that's because it's a multi-faceted song that exists both concurrently and independently on a variety of plains. On one hand it's an elegy for the passing of what Thomas Dolby would soon term 'The Golden Age of Wireless', while on another it's a simple, catchy pop song. Either way, impossible to ignore it's cusp of the eighties setting and the context in which it was operating:

"I heard you on the wireless back in Fifty Two
Lying awake intent at tuning in on you".

Lyricist Horn would have been three in 1952 so there's every chance he's writing from memory, and that use of 'wireless' instead of radio is a clever device that ages his own experience and separates it from (for example) my own contemporary exposure to the likes of Tony Blackburn and the gang. In 1979, only my parents still called radio the 'wireless' and Horn is merely pointing out that the ignorance of my generation was part of the problem. And as far as problems go, I'm not sure what can be read into the title refrain of the song being sung in a broad and comically obnoxious American accent, but it all contrasts with Horn's olde tyme vocal compressed to a mono whine that powers the glow of nostalgia that he's celebrating/mourning.

Neither am I sure whether the fact that the song's video was the first ever shown on the then new MTV is ironic or not; was MTV meant to be the 'bad guy' in all this? A similar song could have been written circa 1927 to mark the passing of silent films with the emergence of sound ('Talkies Killed The Silent Film Star' maybe), while today there's every chance the young girl dialling up the old valve radio in that striking video is now a woman baffled by MP3 players. My point is that times change, they always will yet the people who get most hung up on it are always those who refuse to change with them.

Hindsight has shown that video no more killed the radio star than home taping killed music. It may have prolonged the careers of those where innate talent took second place to image, but in our brave new world of downloads and virtual music that we can never hold, the very concept of 'video' seems as quaint and distant as rationing (in fact, the "put the blame on VTR" line had almost become obsolete as an acronym before the song was even released).

Which is what music effectively was in 1979, by modern standards anyway - if you wanted to hear this song then your choices were to either buy the single, the album or else wait till it came on the radio. In the course of typing this I've found no less than nineteen different sources where I can stream or download (legal or otherwise) this tune and that's without really trying. "We can't rewind we've gone to far" - that's a lesson that record companies need to learn now that the genie is out of the bottle, but 'Downloads Killed The Video Star'? I doubt it. Music is as alive as it ever was and by that analysis Messers Horn and Downes are a pair of old and in the way party poopers peddling a woefully misguided song.

But isn't all this just a teeny bit pretentious though? On another plain, isn't 'Video Killed The Radio Star' just a novelty song by two jokers with funny hair and big spectacles? Maybe. There was something insanely catchy and comforting in Buggles, something that showed the those keyboard things could be a good laugh in the right hands. M had hit number 2 with 'Pop Muzik' in April and this was just something out of the same mould. Again, maybe.

And ok, if we're taking it on that level then the song has aged well. Any tricks and traces of late seventies electronica are largely absent and the track is straight, gimmick free with an unforgettable chorus that nags in the brain with the faintest hint of a statement of unrest the way Pink Floyd's 'We don't need no education' shortly would too. But I think there's more to it than that and that such analysis does both Horn and Downes an injustice.

Because let's not forget, 'Video Killed The Radio Star' was co-written by Bruce Wooley who recorded the song first with his band Camera Club (with Thomas Dolby on keyboards, to square this particular circle). In their hands it's an unremarkable, typically 'eighties' synth drenched mess that drives a coach and horses through everything I've highlighted Buggles as achieving. So rather than the song itself having any innate power, it's by their re-recording that Horn and Downes made it remarkable and gave it a new dimension the way, say, Jimi Hendrix turned Bob Dylan's lyrical apocalypse of 'All Along The Watchtower' into an aural one.

I think for me, the key has always been in that video. I've always found something faintly disturbing in the blank yet accusing stare of the young girl after she climbs the mound of junked radios, a kind of 'how DARE you fuck all this up for me?' look which has always conveyed (to me anyway) an intent that this isn't just a camp singalong - "I met your children, what did you tell them'? What indeed?

But as I said, times change and, ironically, it's the exact opposite look to the one I get from today's twenty somethings when I try to explain the past joys of buying a seven inch single like this one on a Saturday morning trip to town when nowadays they can listen to it from nineteen different sources without leaving their bed. That's how I understand the song anyway.

But you, of course, can take it anyway you want.

1979 The Police: Message In A Bottle

The fact that The Police were a) a trio of blonde pretty boys who, b) played reggae has always been an anathema to many. As one who was there, I remember the very title of 'Message In A Bottle's parent album 'Reggatta de Blanc' (which loosely translates as 'white reggae') was like painting a big red target on each of their arses for the purist music writers of the time to kick. And kick they did, because how very dare they? But that's not to say that The Police ever made a career of trying to chant down Babylon - true the rhythms of reggae and ska dominate on at least their first two albums, but rather than promoting any kind of Rastafarian message the choppy guitar lines and prominent bass are used to spice up what would otherwise have been largely ordinary pop songs.

They weren't unique in this either - reggae was big business down at The Roxy too, courtesy of DJ Don Letts who brought in his own record collection when there were no released punk records to play. The Clash, The Ruts, The Members, Stiff Little Fingers, Public Image Ltd et al all incorporated roots reggae and dub into their music to compliment the rebellion of their own genre, albeit to greater and lesser effect (and certainly to lesser critical mauling). And that Roxy connection is pertinent - that's actually Stuart Copeland on the cover of 1977's 'The Roxy London WC2' album; the punks might have held them in high a regard as the weekly writers, but they were there at the outset. For my own part I'm ambivalent. I've written elsewhere here about my distaste of smug white men playing reggae for whatever reason, but I can't say The Police have ever raised any serious ire within me. When they make it work, they make it work well, but even when they don't the results are rarely less than passable.

'Message In A Bottle' at least tries to make it work; Copeland picks out a standard reggae beat on the kickdrum but hammers the Toms double time on an opening salvo while Andy Summer's B G A E riff cascades hand over fist through the whole song like a waterfall. It's busy, it's unpredictable and it has a ramshackle charm that's fun to listen to; if there's a weak link here then it's Sting himself who provides it. On much of their previous output his vocal is a standard new wave snarl cum yelp, but on 'Message In A Bottle' he unwisely tries to inject some patois into his delivery. Unfortunately, it sounds as genuine as a racist comedian lampooning 'The Banana Boat Song' with his 'sea oh' and 'me oh' inflections and irregular modulation ("a YEAR has PASSed since I WROTE my NOTE") providing a comic aura of novelty that fits ill with its subject matter.

Because in its theme, 'Message In A Bottle' is a precursor of sorts to REM's 'Everybody Hurts' but without the reassurance. Sting is lost and alone in a world that doesn't care, but in reaching out with his message 'to the world' the only responses he gets are a 'hundred billion' similar messages from people in the same boat. So tough luck.

And that's where it ends, though in fact, 'Message In A Bottle' doesn't conclude at all; by the fade out Sting is in no better place than he was at the start, and the repeated 'I'm sending out an SOS' drags on and on with all the conviction of a social inadequate signing up to a dating website. It's not that Sting is under any moral obligation to square the circle on his metaphorical song of loneliness with a conclusion, but we just don't care enough to care; desperation is a very unattractive trait and it all goes to make 'Message In A Bottle' an unsatisfying listen at heart and a song I can take or leave. Though mostly I leave it.

1979 Gary Numan: Cars

Just a few short months after 'Are 'Friends' Electric?', Numan ditched the 'Tubeway Army' moniker and went it alone. A risky enterprise on paper, but the Army always were a one man band and the only real change is the name on the cover (the backing band remained the same) - his first solo single, 'Cars', is basically 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' with go faster stripes and shinier hub caps.

I don't really want to labour the Kraftwerk Kraftwerk Kraftwerk, blah blah blah angle, but how can you have the audacity to release an electronic music track called 'Car's without at least namechecking 'Autobahn'? The answer is you can't, or at least I can't, especially as it also makes a cracking point of reference to the previous single. Because whereas 'Autobahn' was a free running song of the open road, Numan uses his own vehicle as a comfort blanket with its mechanical frame shielding him from the real world ("Here in my car I feel safest of all, I can lock all my doors") until it almost becomes an object of fetish plucked from JG Ballard's 'Crash'.

Now, instead of looking at outside through his safe window, Numan is now content to view life through a windscreen, hoping "Will you visit me please, if I open my door"? - you have to come to Gary, he's not coming out to you because "nothing seems right" out there. Alienation, isolation, paranoia - see, I told you Numan was a one trick pony, but after a quick electronic gurgle to clear the throat, 'Cars' races off with sufficient force and melody to stand it apart from 'Are 'Friends' Electric?', though without that song's spoken word passages of heartbreak, this particular car may as well be driven by a robot. Which was kind of the point anyway.

I was a big Gary Numan fan in 1979. I bought this and ' The Pleasure Principle' album and I played them to death, but it also marks the precise point where I lost interest in him. In just two singles, Numan had played every card he held and with 1980's 'Telkon' even the twelve year old me knew the sound of a busted flush when he heard it. But it was fun while it lasted.

1979 Cliff Richard: We Don't Talk Anymore

'Round about the time the first punks were plugging in, a voice from the past was re-booting his own image with a comeback of sorts. Not that Cliff Richard ever went away you understand, his chart singles have always been consistent but for the next few years he would tap back his roots to present a rockier image than the family entertainer he'd become. It was a bit like Elvis' '68 Comeback re-told for a PG audience; Richard was never going to zip into a leather jumpsuit or start spitting anarchy, but 'Devil Woman' was a racy enough affair from a born again Christian to raise eyebrows. That's about as far as Cliff was ever willing to push the boat out though; 'We Don't Talk Anymore' is a soft MOR rocker with the bluntest of bites that keeps Cliff in safe harbour.

It's a song that allows Richard to acquit himself well. He's comfortable with the medium, has fun with the key changes and lets rip with some impassioned falsetto that you wouldn't normally have seen coming in something with his name on it. That's all well and good, but it's the music he's given to sing over that let's the song down. It doesn't share Cliff's enthusiasm and instead drags its heels in a chug-a-lug of synth bursts and muted power chords that ring with the conviction of a pub covers band trying to get down with the kids. Cliff's the star here and nothing around him makes any attempt to steal his thunder, but though he has the connections, he can't perform miracles by himself to make this anything other than plain old average.

Perhaps the biggest handicap for 'We Don't Talk Anymore' is its mid-place setting in a year of some sparkling number ones. Posterity has been kinder by merging it anonymously into the amorphous 'Cliff Richard's Back Catalogue' catch all, but coming in-between the Dury's and the Numan's, it's attempt to make Cliff modern and relevant come across as well as comparing a cassette walkman with an Ipod. True, the walkman will always have its fans, but let's not kid ourselves here.

1979 The Boomtown Rats: I Don't Like Mondays

In January 1979, sixteen year old Brenda Ann Spencer of San Diego, California fired shots at children in an Elementary school playground, killing two adults and injuring eight of the kids. When asked why she did it, the only answer she could give was "I don't like Mondays, this livens up the day." A chilling story, and one that would inevitably attract investigative dramatisation or commentary, though it's doubtful that a pop song was the most fitting medium for this or that Bob Geldof was necessarily the best person to have a stab at writing it.

In terms of its theme of violence born of frustrated boredom, 'I Don't Like Mondays' could have been a great follow up to 'Rat Trap', a sequel to form a kind of punky, two part epic version of 'In The Ghetto' that showed what Billy and/or Judy did next, but by basing it firmly in fact (and very recent fact at that), Geldof paints himself into a corner very quickly - how are you supposed to take this? Or more to the point, what ways can you take it?* Because if you're going to be covering events like a real life schoolyard shooting in any meaningful way then a degree of understanding subtlety is required. Geldof, however, has never done subtle terribly well and true to form 'I Don't Like Mondays' is about as subtle as one of the Banana Splits.

"I wanna shoot he whole day down", "The lesson today is how to die"; if an American punk/new wave band had scowled those lines in a song about the Dunblane massacre then there'd be outrage, and understandably so; they are clumsy, crass and totally insensitive. And just because Spencer herself used the glib 'I don't like Mondays' as excuse for her own rampage, it's no justification to glibly compound its insanity by repeating it throughout the course of the song as the hook of the chorus.

It's not that Geldof is deliberately out to cause offence - he's on record as saying he wasn't using the song to exploit tragedy - but his propensity for overwriting sinks 'I Don't Like Mondays', a song geared solely toward the descriptive, to the depths of the lowest common denominator from the word go; just whose 'side' is Geldof on with all this? He sings the chorus in Spencer's persona and, while he's not sympathetic to her, there's nothing here that could be considered heartfelt or accusatory either. The tune itself is not unpleasant, but the song it's hitched to is blank tabloid reportage of the most sensational kind. And where a level of analysis or comment would have been welcome, Geldof is content to cover the front page with the bold 'TELL ME WHY?!?', a cynical device that helps shift units through shock value but leaves a bitter aftertaste. I'm not suggesting that Geldof should have had the answer, but by the same token this was hardly the time and place to ask the question.

* Bon Jovi covered the song at Wembley Stadium in 1995 and was joined onstage by Geldof himself. The incredulous look on Bob's face as Bon Jovi mimes a shooting action with his fingers on the 'shoot the whole day down' line is a picture, but then in providing no moral compass within the song, he only has himself to blame if it's taken as something celebratory. No wonder Spencer's family were pissed off in 1979 and tried to get it banned.

1979 Tubeway Army: Are 'Friends' Electric?

If 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick' represented the milestone of being my first bought single, then as the first album I ever walked into a shop by myself and bought with my own money, then Tubeway Army's 'Replicas' was another. And I bought it largely on the strength of hearing 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' on the radio. It was a permanent fixture over the summer of 1979, though - confession time - the fact I thought Gary Numan looked rather cool and mysterious on the cover played no small part in this purchase. To my impressionable mind, the shot was every bit as 'alien' as Bowie on the cover of my brother's 'Ziggy Stardust' album, especially when I noticed that his reflection in the window didn't correspond with the way he was looking into it. But whilst Ziggy was to be found roaming around at large in central London, Numan was trapped indoors in a bare room, which made it all the more menacing. And it was 'mine'. Mine mine mine mine. So that didn't hurt either. But I'll come back to that.

'Are 'Friends' Electric?' came to my attention fully formed and vacuum sealed, a whole package of sound and vision unlike anything else I'd been exposed to. For a quite some time it was my idea of what the 'punk thing' I'd been hearing about looked and sounded like. It was my only real point of reference; I'd never heard of Kraftwerk in 1979, but Numan had. And how. That whole tight shirt, tie and sensible hair image came wholesale (I was soon to learn) from their 'The Man Machine' era, but whilst such peripherals were easy enough to appropriate, the music was less so; Kraftwerk always ran on oiled ball bearings but in comparison, 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' has a wooden leg fashioned from a minimoog.

But wait, that's not a criticism per se, and the Kraftwerk comparisons are a bit one eyed on my part - after all, the Germans were hardly working in isolation as the be all and end all of electronic music. My point though is that, suffice it to say, most of the music of this type I'd come across at that point tended to be melodic, almost novelty affairs that exploited the metronomic precision that synthesisers could bring to a tune (like Hot Butter's 'Popcorn', or Space's 'Magic Fly' to give two rather perverse examples), or else they were ambient, synth mood washes of sound that did nothing but wash ambiently (side two of Bowie's 'Low' and Tangerine Dream on Virgin were my main reference points at this time). I think it's fair to say there's nothing light or ambient about 'Are 'Friends' Electric?'

If I'm going to maintain the comparison, then Numan's song is the sound of Kraftwerk as played by Black Sabbath - huge, two fisted slabs of doom laden slog wheezing along like an unstoppable steam driven machine, so much so that Numan has to shout to be heard on his own song. Numan had already namechecked sci-fi author Philip K Dick's work on Tubeway Army's debut album, and the menacing paranoia of what Numan was shouting could have been cribbed from one of Dick's later novels. In fact, I could fill volumes with the various interpretations that the angst filled adolescent me gave to these lyrics over the years, but all of them concerned alienated outsiders lost in an indifferent world that didn't understand them and offered no place for them to call home (I've repeated some below, for all our amusements).

Which I suppose wasn't really that far off the mark, and this is where that album sleeve became important to me - there was never an official promotional video for 'Are 'Friends' Electric?'* but to my mind one wasn't needed - that cover shot illustrates the song (rather than 'Replicas' as a whole) well enough. When Numan sings:"It's cold outside, and the paint's peeling off of my walls. There's a man outside, in a long coat, grey hat, smoking a cigarette"** and: "Now the light fades out, and I wonder what I'm doing in a room like this" then he's singing it from that room while gazing at (rather than out of) that window.***

And the dirge-like tune of 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' seems a fitting soundtrack to that particular landscape, (I like to imagine Numan has it playing loudly on a stereo just out of shot). To an extent anyway - 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' is over five minutes long and there's only so much anybody can take of that major/minor opening riff, but just at the point where you might start thinking about reaching for the off button, it shifts key into a bridge of a cascading synth motif where Numan abandons his android squawk and provides a monologue that allows an element of humanity to creep into the song. The device is repeated again toward the end and each are section is bookended by the "I don't think it mean anything to you/You see it meant everything to me" complaint that lies at the heart of the track - 'Are 'Friends' Electric? is just another 'my lover's gone' song dressed up as a sc-fi B movie . It seems that even if androids do dream of electric sheep, they can have their hearts broken like the rest of us.

So at heart nothing new, but on the surface it's arguable that the image conscious, synth driven/New Romantic haunted 80's started here and with this. And not only that - it's also arguable that its obscure and angsty tone made Numan a forbearer of the black raincoat, Camus reading indie scene that was just around the corner. Not that I'm claiming any prophet status for him, but the level of critical abuse that has always hurtled his way has been a tad unjustified. Time may have shown Numan up to be something of a one trick pony on just about every front with the ideas first heard on 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' plundered, stretched, re-interpreted and just plain repeated for many years to come. But just as all tricks are at their best when you see them for the first time, the multiplicity of source material and general ham-fistedness struck lucky by generating an originality of its own and a weirdness that doesn't often find itself at number one. Another song that I rarely tire of listening to.

* Adolescent, angst filled interpretation #1: I placed great significance on the inverted commas around 'friends'. To my mind, Numan was saying people only let you down and you'd be far better off with a robot for a mate. Only they wouldn't be a proper mate because they were robots. So a 'mate'. Then.

** Adolescent, angst filled interpretation #2: We can't see the man in the hat outside the window, but that's because he isn't there in the physical sense at all. It's just a manifestation of Numan's conscience that wouldn't let him rest. Rather than sourced from any paperback philosophy, this little bon mot was born from hearing Cheap Trick's 'Dream Police' that year. Which incidentally was also the title of a song on the first Tubeway Army album - hey, maybe P.K. Dick was on to something after all.....

*** Adolescent, angst filled interpretation #3: An outsider looking out at a world that he's alienated from - blimey, what a pretentious twat I was, but to my eternal shame it would get a lot worse before it got any better. But I'm OK now.

1979 Anita Ward: Ring My Bell

Anita Ward's one hit wonder is versatile in its very simplicity; 'Ring My Bell' could easily have been (or could be still be) cast as a bass heavy Northern Soul thumper, but Ward's take is a sharp disco tune that stresses its upbeat lightness from the sensuous electronic pings and pongs on the backing to Ward's excitable schoolgirl high vocal. It's frothy stuff that bubbles like lemonade, with most of the froth coming from Ward herself; her work is done her man is home and now she wants her bell seriously rung. Ahem.

Actually, that's one of my favourite bits of in-song innuendo since Nina Simone pouted 'I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl', with the tone made all the racier by Ward's obvious delight at the thought. And her delight is infectious - there's nothing particularly clever or complicated about 'Ring My Bell', but it's this very paucity of ambition and general unfussiness that makes it such a pleasure. It's mined from the same seam as the earlier 'Tragedy', but it's a far better example of the hedonistic pleasure that, after all, disco was meant to be all 'about'

1979 Blondie: Sunday Girl

The fourth single off Parallel Lines and the least interesting - from the inverted 'Then He Kissed Me' riff in, Blondie are back from the disco and in familiar fifties/sixties pop pastiche territory. Nothing wrong with that, it was their stock in trade over their first two albums, but in comparison 'Sunday Girl' lacks any bite, and though the choppy guitar chords and swirling Hammond try their best the end result is pop candyfloss saved from total anonymity by Harry's vocal.

Never the most versatile of singers, she flexes her full range over 'Sunday Girl' from the innocence of "I know a girl from a lonely street", the yearning drawl of "She can't catch up with the working crowd" to her New York snarl on "Baby, I would like to go out tonight" - it all adds up to a song you never quite know how to 'take'. It's a bi-polar listen for sure, but it's one that keeps the listener on their toes, which is more than the pedestrian backing does. My favourite version of the song is the English/French vocal hybrid that Mike Chapman mixed especially for the original 'Best Of Blondie' album where Harry's Francophile coos add another unexpected dimension to the tune, a whiff of the exotic amongst the ordinary. That's not the version that got to number one, but maybe it should have been.

1979 Art Garfunkel: Bright Eyes

Written by Mike Batt of Wombles fame, 'Bright Eyes' concerns a different set of underground/overground creatures altogether, namely rabbits. First, I should point out that though this is from the soundtrack of 'Watership Down', I've never actually seen the film. And that's because I'm the sort of person who can happily sit through any amount of Italian splatter or Japanese torture porn without batting an eyelid, yet show me some talking, cartoon animals suffering any kind of misfortune or harm and I crumble. Tom and Jerry violence yes, but rabbits killed and hounded from their dwellings then persecuted to death by man and beast for 90 minutes is not my idea of entertainment - just the promo video for this upset me in 1979 so I've stayed away from the film ever since.*

Does that fact spoil my appreciation (or otherwise) of the song? I think not - even when divorced from it's original setting it remains a gloomy prospect with Garfunkel's angelic vocal carrying a hint of the afterlife and a conviction of dread and impending doom in this one that's applicable to any living entity about to go gently into that good night. "How can the light that burned so brightly suddenly burn so pale?" - you don't need to have any knowledge or love of 'Watership Down' to appreciate the sentiment behind the song and in that respect its hovering on the cusp of life and death lyric is a companion piece to 'Seasons In The Sun'.

Which means it's something that will draw the usual 'soppy', 'mawkish' criticisms from the usual people, but to my mind 'Bright Eyes' is an unsettling, mildly disturbing ("Following the river of death downstream" - Art's voice makes dying sound welcome, much like the tone of Blue Oyster Cult's '(Don't Fear) The Reaper') song with a genuine power that needs that big deep breath hook of the chorus to warm up the chill. Befitting perhaps for a song that played at number one the week Margaret Thatcher first won power in the UK.

* Which is more than I've seen of it's spiritual sequel 'The Plague Dogs'. Just looking at the picture on the poster of that is enough to set me off.

1979 Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive

I once read a review where 'I Will Survive' was touted as a seventies version of 'Respect'. It's a neat idea, but it's one that misses the mark - 'Respect' in the hands of it's author (Otis Redding) is a thinly disguised whinge from a bloke wanting his woman to open her legs on cue when he gets home in return for the money he earns. Aretha Franklin's far superior version turns the tables and recasts it as both a plea for racial tolerance, a call for female empowerment as well as a wagging finger to keep her man in his place. It's a multi-focussed assault that you won't find in 'I Will Survive', a song that can only really be taken one way.

What's always appealed to me about 'I Will Survive' is the conversational tone of the lyrics. Yes they have meter and rhyme, but in essence Gaynor is addressing her former lover in words that could have been overheard through a thin wall, written down as prose and then set to music - "I should have changed that stupid lock, I should have made you leave your key. If I'd known for just one second you'd back to bother me" - it's meat and potatoes, soap opera script, but its directness when married to the thumping disco beat gives 'I Will Survive' energy and clout. And to cement that particular score, Gaynor puts in a bravura vocal of gutsy determination that, after the uncertainty that intimates false hope for reconciliation on the fractured opening ("At first I was afraid I was petrified, kept thinkin' I could never live without you by my side") she soon pulls down the shutters and from then on brooks no suggestion that some sweet talking is going to change her mind.

"Go on now, go. Walk out the door. Just turn around now. Cause you're not welcome anymore." - each phrase ends with a definite full stop amplified by the purely functional, no frills backing that provides Gaynor with the musical backbone to bounce her lyrical one off. The fact that it's gender/sexuality neutral to gives the message of strength and independence a universal appeal for the downtrodden everywhere to take the earth rather than wait to inherit it. By the end, we don't know if Gloria has survived, or whether her outburst is just bravado and that she's really getting out the razors and running a hot bath, but it doesn't matter. The song is adaptable enough for anybody to fashion their own finale, all Gloria is doing is giving you a shove in the right direction.

''I Will Survive' has become familiar almost to the point that it parodies itself. Certainly it's inherent message has been diluted by too many turns on the irony karaoke, but taken in isolation with a fresh pair of ears then it provides a welcome relief from some simpering 'lover come back' soul or the exaggerated joy of lesser genre tracks - there's joy here, but it's joy in strength, personal fulfilment and the sheer pleasure of saying 'fuck you' and meaning it.

1979 Bee Gees: Tragedy

It's a fair question I suppose - how do you follow up a runaway, multi million success like the 'Saturday Night Fever' soundtrack? To take the example of the other act tasked with following up a widely popular album in 1979 - all the world wanted from Fleetwood Mac was 'Rumours Part 2', but in 'Tusk', Lindsey Buckingham gave them an album that was hell-bent on providing anything but.

With 'Tragedy' (and in the 'Spirits Having Flown' album), the Bee Gees weren't about to throw the baby out with the bath water and it ploughs the same furrow they ploughed at the discos in 1978, only moreso. A hell of a lot moreso in fact. The playful lightness of touch on the 'Saturday Night Fever' songs is gone, replaced with a dense carpet bomb of sound that paints the break-up of a relationship as scene from the book of Revelation. "Here at night in a lost and lonely part of town, held in time in a wad of tears I slowly drown" - it's a heavy duty palette of angst spread thick by those falsetto vocals that no longer swoop around the melody like birds in flight but squeal like animals in pain. "It's hard to bear, with no-one to love you you're going nowhere" - there's a desperation there, but it's more the desperation of the Gibbs trying to convince their audience that the scale of this 'tragedy' is worthy of the Wagnerian bombast.

But in fact it isn't. It's too much and too self indulgent. I like 'Tragedy', like it a lot even, but I can't honestly say it's a truly enjoyable listening. I can do overwrought angst as much as the next man, but whenever I'm in the mood for a bit of self indulgent misery there are other artists on whose door I'll knock long before I arrive at the Bee Gees. For a pop cum disco track it's too long, too dense and too serious; there's nothing ironic or playful going on here, and while there's undoubtedly a fine song in there amongst the debris, the real irony is that it took the no nonsense pop assault of Steps to sift it out. As performed by the Bee Gee's, it's the sound Nero should have produced on his fiddle as Rome burned around him.

1979 Blondie: Heart Of Glass

But of course, if I'm going to go on about disco bandwagon jumpers then there are no more glaring hoppers on than Blondie. Prior to 1979, as far as the UK was concerned, Blondie were post CBGB/New Wave skinny tie also-rans distinguished chiefly by being fronted by one of the most photogenic women in the history of popular music. Indeed, 'Heart Of Glass' wasn't consciously born as a disco song at all. In it's early incarnation as 'Once I Had A Love' it was a cod-reggae led shuffle in keeping with much of their early output and responsibility for it's disco re-wiring can be laid solely at the foot of producer Mike Chapman, a veteran of the UK's seventies Glam Rock scene and every bit a bandwagon jumper as the band.

'Heart Of Glass' stands alone in Blondie's output. Though the whole of the parent 'Parallel Lines' album had Chapman cleaning up Blondie's fifties trash sound into something more mainstream orientated, nothing else on there sounds as blatantly slick and danceable as 'Heart Of Glass' (the band took to referring to it as 'the disco song); it's where Chapman really went to town and it's as much 'his' song as that of Debbie Harry and Chris Stein who ostensibly 'wrote' it. Driven on a slinky low key guitar riff and high hat rhythm, 'Heart Of Glass' is one of the sparest sounding songs Blondie ever put their name to with their usual dense pop clutter of guitars, hole plugging keyboard stabs and Clem Burke's rolling flat kit drum fills exorcised in favour of a more organic 'I Feel Love' pulse.

Yet whereas Summer's orgasmic cooing got the more conservative listeners hot under the collar, the detachment of Harry's 'couldn't give a toss really' "Ooh ooh ooh whoa's" and complete absence of trademark vocal snarls delivery exudes an icy coolness of mocking indifference that always remind me (ever since I saw the film anyway) of the indifferent icy cool, 'couldn't give a toss-ness' of Marlene Dietrich performing 'Falling In Love Again' in Sternberg's 'Der Blaue Engel'. It's clear that her Lola is not capable of true love, but she presents a persona seductive enough to reduce Emil Jannings' 'Professor Rath' to destitution in his fruitless pursuit to win it. "Once I had a love and it was a gas, soon turned out to be a pain in the ass"; it's easy come, easy go for Ms Harry too, but her indifference is just as attractive.

And on that front, whilst it's true that Ms Harry would look good in a face pack and potato sack, the promo videos for previous Blondie singles were still pushing the punky, urchin, not trying too hard look but there's no doubt her scrubbed up, made over visage in the 'Heart Of Glass' video helped seal the deal with a generation of adolescent Professor Jannnings howling at the moon in their bedrooms (I wasn't going to revert to a lazy remembrance of how much I fancied our Debbie back then but I seem to have arrived there anyway - ok, I was one of them. I fancied Debbie Harry big time in 1979. And 1980. And 1981. And 1982........). And who wouldn't be howling with those 'come to me' smiles framed by glistening red lips that spark with friction off those cold 'now piss off' eye rolls - "Love is so confusing, there's no peace of mind" - don't look to Debbie for an easy ride.

By embracing the mainstream they originally purported to be kicking against, 'Heart Of Glass' wound up many long standing fans and purists who were quick to cry 'sell out' (filming that promo video in Studio 54 when previously they were part of CBGB's only wound the same folk up a further notch). And fair enough, 'Heart Of Glass' may well be an unusual Blondie song, but even if it was a sell-out of sorts, the most ardent naysayers couldn't deny that it was a damn fine one. Damn fine.

1979 Ian Dury & The Blockheads: Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick

Another song, another memory. Two memories to be exact, one true and the other false. What's true is that 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick' was the first single I ever went into a shop by myself and handed over my own money to buy. So that makes this a landmark of sorts, the popping of my record buying cherry. The false memory is that I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that this was number one at the tail end of 1979 rather than the start as I was listening to it around Christmastime, but as it was released in November 1978, it means I actually bought it before it was number one, which makes me all the cooler I think.

Why did I buy this? Well I was caught up in the mystery of it all, from that splendidly cryptic Barney Bubbles sleeve (so good I thought you should see both sides) to the evocative travelogue that pours from Dury's mouth. What helped my interest too is the genuine edge of rebellion that buying it engendered. Up until then, mine and my parents taste in music usually ran on the same rail - I only ever really listened to whatever they played and they liked 'Grease' as much as I did (in fact, they took me to see the film when it came out). My father, however, was no fan of Dury's and his headshaking comment of 'I'll bloody hit him in a minute' after watching this on Top Of The Pops generated a frission of friction between us, the first time I realised there could be a difference between what my parents liked and what I did.*

But away from all that, the reasons I liked 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick' in 1979 are basically the same reasons I still like it today. Again, it's the mystery - Dury presents an almost uncrackable code of a lyric in a free flow of onomatopœia rhymes and scattershot imagery that recall Dylan at his best (though I know that last comparison will turn off as many people as it will turn on). As a lyricist, Dury was always at his best when he had characters to work with and a setting to put them in but on 'Rhythm Stick' he doesn't; the song (or rather the song's subject matter) itself is the character - that is, the universal pleasures of music and dancing.

It's a perfect convergence that keeps the song moving ever onward in a fluid wave of rhythm that's ideal dancing fodder for anyone made of rubber, with a chorus that, as if to stress the all embracingness of the tune, on each repetition includes a different line starting in French and answering itself in German. Clever yes, but not too clever clever 'by half', and it's subsumed into a groove fed by Norman Watt Roy's spider walk of a bassline so completely that you barely register it until it's passed. Play that funky music white boys.

What this means is that 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick' is perhaps unique in Dury's output in that an understanding of English is not required to appreciate what he's trying to say. And that's because, with an already crack backing band in 'the Blockheads', Dury's vocal becomes just another instrument in the mix with the lyrics playing out as further notes varied in tone and stress - just compare the shift in emphasis on "In the wilds of Borneo, and the vineyards of Bordeaux" for evidence of Dury's loving embouchure of the syllables almost in the manner of a jazz scat singer until he breaks into almost Peter Brötzmann free form squawking ("HIT ME!!!") on the outro.

In short, a wonderful single and a wonderful number one.

* Not that I turned into an angry young man overnight - I can remember hiding the single at home in case someone noted that the B side was called 'There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards'. And you needn't look any further for a classic example of Dury's mastery of English when he had a solid subject to bounce off:

"Einstein can't be classed as witless.
He claimed atoms were the littlest.
When you did a bit of split-em-ness,
Frighten everybody shitless."

1979 Village People: YMCA

Now here's another bundle of memories, chief of which is remembering some older boys asking me if I was gay in 1979 and my innocent reply of 'yes I'm feeling happy' causing no end of hilarity amongst them. You see, I had no idea what 'gay' meant or that it was regarded as an insult in my neck of the woods. At age ten I only had the vaguest idea of what heterosexual sex was so anything else was well off my radar. By the time the year was out though, the 'joke' didn't work anymore; everybody knew what 'gay' meant in the sexual sense and I think that little enlightenment can be put down to the success of the Village People, one of the first acts to openly acknowledge the gay community by dressing in outlandishly stereotypical gay fantasy persona and performing music that only hid its message behind the flimsiest of metaphorical curtains.

As far as signature tunes go, they don't come much more signatory than 'YMCA'. Essentially an upfront message of pride that encourages the waverers to embrace their sexuality ("young man, what do you wanna be"?) it's nevertheless a conservatively insular recording in that it recommends the 'young men' (women are not welcome it seems) to go where similar minded people can be found - the YMCA *- rather than pushing for universal tolerance for homosexuality. But as lyric writer Victor Willis (the 'cop' in the line-up) was heterosexual and only tapping into the gay market with 'YMCA', maybe he thought that was more than he'd be able to get away with.

Upbeat and in your face it might be, but I find it difficult to listen to 'YMCA' in these terms as through benefit of hindsight I know that in a few short years the light of carefree optimism would be dulled with the emergence of intolerant right wing governments on both side of the Atlantic and the arrival of AIDS. To that extent, listening to 'YMCA' is like looking at photographs of you and a mate on a night out when you knew he was killed by a drunk driver on the way home.

'YMCA' can still be taken on face value as fancy dress disco with pantomime mimes to spell out the letters with all subtext removed and that's fine. In fact, I've known gay people who bitterly resent the Village People as insulting panderers of faux macho/comic stereotypes to the straight world and are far happier to see 'YMCA' as nothing more than a grown up version of a child's school dancing game. On that level (and in truth it's the only level I'm 'qualified' to comment on) the song still holds up remarkable well for what is basically a tune disco by rote.

A chunky, horn led affair, 'YMCA' is carried along mainly by the vocal and a repeated 'Young man' exclamation until you're essentially dancing to the words rather than the beat. And despite the intended 'young man' audience and shorn of any sexual politics, 'YMCA' still carries a universal appeal in its simplicity and sheer good cheer that can still pack any dancefloor (pretentious white suits are not required here) as soon as the opening brass riff starts up - it's fun to stay at the (deep breath) WIIII - EMMM - SEEEE - AYYYY, but it's bloody good fun to dance to it too.

* According to Wikipedia, the YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) was a popular cruising and hook-up spot, particularly for young gay men. I can only take this at face value, but I do remember my delight at finding out shortly after this hit number one that my hometown had its own YMCA. My delight turned to disappointment when I went along there out of curiosity - it looked a rather drab, run down affair with gangs of teens drinking cheap cider outside, none of whom were dressed as cowboys or Indian chiefs. Oh the innocence.....