I should apologize for inflicting my music on you. However, I will take the adult way out and blame Tim Gow and his Funny Cold Wars project, specifically his references to 1979 era Top of the Pops.
The music of one's youth is supposed to bring you back to the good times, but I'm never sure the good old times were ever so good. This spring while in the UK I had a number of people ask why I had not moved back to the UK at some point. My stock answer is the most likely time to do so would have been my early 20s, but the UK didn't look like a place anyone would want to go at that time. I got to know Britain during regular (annual or semiannual) visits with my dad between ages 16 and 24. This was between 1978 and 1986 probably the one of the worst periods to view the UK. My first visit came during Christmas of the Winter of Discontent and from them I got the full gamut of IRA terror campaigns, the Miner's Strike the Falkland's War and Thatcherism in its full glory. To an impressionable liberal minded Canuck, Trudeau's Canada looked a hell of a lot better than Thatcher's Britain.
Anyway for me the music of my youth reminds me of what a scary time the Cold War was both politically and economically. And if I were to pick a single thing to represent the Cold War it would be the Berlin Wall (wikipedia it you youngsters). And the song that comes to mind is of course David Bowie's Heroes. To my generation it's song about young lovers trapped on the wrong side of a wall by nasty global politics. To a younger generation it's a love song from a bad Godzilla movie! Or it's part of an actually pretty good medley sung by Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman in "Moulin Rouge".
I first heard this on the 1977 Bing Crosby Christmas Special, the odd pop culture mash up that gave us the much loved "Little Drummer Boy" duet. Incidently the video of the equally desiccated octogenarian crooner and the heroin addicted glam rocker was judged severely creepy by my daughter on first encounter as a preteen.
There are of course more versions of Heroes than can be easily counted, so I give you three You Tube videos to choose from.
1. The official video from 1977 (so predating MTV)
3. The performance on Der Bingle's Christmas Special, which is actually pretty darn creepy!
Interesting. I can think of various Viet Nam related songs but I struggle to think of Cold War ones from the 70s. The 1st that popped to mind was Nena's 99 Red Balloons but that was '83 and German.
ReplyDeleteProbably a matter of timing (i.e. when one is 16-24). Also the Vietnam era had a pretty large imprint on the North American psyche.
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PD
Interesting. In 1979, at 16, I went to the UK with my sister - Reading, Liverpool and Chester. Liverpool was a depressing wasteland of rusting cranes, London less so but not much. The whole country seemed a little threadbare and worn. I was even "racially profiled" leaving Heathrow for being a young male with an Irish name - ironically our stock was strictly Orange Loyalist. My cousin Anne introduced me to the early Stranglers - No More Heroes being the pivotal period song from the Live (Xcert) album. I would follow that up with Kate Bush's "Oh England, My Lionheart"
ReplyDeleteFor cold war songs I would also go back to Kate with "Army Dreamers" and "Breathing". As a Canadian reservist in the early 80'S, our section theme song was Joan Jett's "I love Rock and Roll" (put an other mag in the C2 baby ... put another belt in the GPMG)
Falklands - Split Enz "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" of course. ;)
I next went back in 2012 with my wife and daughters - A very different and better feel.
Pat
DeleteYeah the UK in '79 looked bad, except for the music which was great. Much better feel and look now. Split Enz is a great idea…
Cheers
PD
Not to mention that by 1972 it was more about hockey than nukes.
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