From Blitz Club to Britpop: Charting the best books putting 1980s music in the spotlight

TEDDY JAMIESON

SOMETIMES, it can feel like we are living in an eternal 1980s. Turn the TV on and there’s Maggie and Princess Di in The Crown. Turn the radio on or walk around a supermarket and you get a blast of Madonna or Prince or Kim Wilde (or at this time of year it’s probably Wham!’s Last Christmas).

It’s the same in bookshops. Go in

(if you can) and you’ll find the music shelves covered in books about the decade we don’t seem able to give up. This year alone you could read books by Soft Cell’s Dave Ball (Electronic Boy, Omnibus Press, £20, a wonderfully louche and honest memoir), Chris Frantz of Talking Heads (Remain in Love, White Rabbit, £20; possible alternative title “The Trouble with David Byrne”), Shirlie and Martin Kemp (Shirlie and Martin Kemp: It’s a Love Story, Mirror Books, £20; a Spandau Ballet/Wham! two-forone) and even Judas Priest’s Rob Halford (Confess, Headline, £20).

Were the 1980s really that special, though? Dylan Jones, editor-in-chief at GQ magazne, spends more than 600 pages in his new book

Sweet Dreams (Faber, £20) arguing that, indeed, they were.

It’s possible you might consider that rather excessive given that, as the subtitle explains, Jones is telling “the story of the New Romantics”. But, in truth, the book uses the denizens of the Blitz Club as a foundation to build up a cultural history of the time, one that takes in Bowie and Roxy Music, punk, the rise of synthpop, postmodernism, politics, sexuality and fashion.

Jones’s theory is that the bands who emerged from the London scene at the start of the 1980s forged the template for pop (and pop culture) that framed the rest of the decade and beyond. At times, it does feel like the book is pushing its ideas beyond what the evidence might sustain and there’s certainly only the ghost of the notion that the other cities in the UK – whether Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester or Sheffield – were just as important as London in that decade’s musical history.

Still, the book’s mix of first-person testimony from many of the pop stars and those around them involved (from Boy George and Adam Ant to magazine editors, stylists and DJs), interspersed with Jones’s own enjoyably opinionated contextualisation, makes for an engaging, page-turning delight. Altogether, it is a powerful argument for the importance of pop music.

Bananarama turn up in Jones’s book from time to time but founding members Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward offer their own take on their own story in Really Saying Something (Hutchinson, £20). It works best as an account of a lifelong friendship. Woodward is open about her depression and both speak (sparingly) about the sexism they encountered in their early days. But they have clearly decided to keep most of their secrets to themselves. As a result, this is a frothy account of parties and friendships.

Gary Numan also makes an appearance in Sweet Dreams, but he’s very much one of the book’s outsider figures. It’s an idea his own memoir (R)Evolution (Constable, £20) rather endorses. He has Asperger’s and this is a nakedly honest account of his life. Numan was a key figure in popularising electronic music at the end of the 1970s, but the years of ridicule that followed

(thanks to hair transplants and his sometimes-ill-fated flying exploits) did much to undermine his reputation and, it seems, his self-belief.

As a result, much of this book is as much about one man’s insecurities and battles with depression as it is about his music. He talks candidly about his financial troubles during the 1980s and 1990s (regularly buying planes and boats probably didn’t help), and the IVF treatments his wife Gemma took on in the hope of becoming pregnant

(ultimately successfully, thankfully). That he can find the humour in their attempts to conceive and even in the screaming terror of his 1981 round-the-world flight is what makes this book worth your time.

For Numan, it was planes and boats. For New Order drummer Stephen Morris, it was tanks. According to Fast Forward, Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist Volume II, the tanks were the thing he turned to when he gave up drugs. It quickly became the most interesting thing about him, he suggests. “I went from being a boring nerd to a boring nerd with a tank.”

Morris is, indeed, nerdy (there is an awful lot of words and pictures about synths here), but he’s funny with it. Fast Forward is a mordantly

L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S

Nicholas Lens and Nick Cave

Deutsche Grammophon

As a child I was brought up within a church. As a young adult, I worked within a monastery. As a grown-up, I have left a lot of this behind.

From the first bar of Litany of Divine Absence it felt as if I had stepped back in time. Written during the first coronavirus lockdown, Nick Cave has collaborated with Belgian composer Nicholas Lens on new opera L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S..

Not what you would expect from a self-described opera, L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S is modern chamber music in its purest form. The simple lyrics from Cave add emphasis to the emotion that swells from Lens’ compositions. A meditative ostinato in its simplest form, L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S is both relaxing and thought-provoking. Asking questions about where we come from, what our purpose is, how we can grow and where we will go at the end.

L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S is a powerful work that inspires serenity from its very core.