I guess it's because we grew up in that most derided of decades, the 1980s.
The 1980's have rather annoyingly been thoroughly misrepresented in both the current media, and the history books. Buy any CD claiming to be 'The Ultimate 80s Album' and you'll suffer the tired old performances of Wham, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Nik Kershaw, The Thompson Twins, Howard Jones, Culture Club etc, and any TV retrospective will churn out the usual tirade of Thatcherism, Yuppies, big hair, shoulder pads, Armani suits, filofaxes, and the general sense of 'me me me', all the time portraying good men like Arthur Scargill, Tony Benn and Neil Kinnock as beaten down caricatures of the 'old Left'.
We here at the ~Streetlamp~ say BOLLOCKS TO ALL THAT!!!
The 80s for us weren't the awfulness mentioned above; they were The Smiths, Crass, New Order, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Sarah Records, Creation Records, Rough Trade, the NME, joining the Miners Strike, campaigning for the CND and the women of Greehnam Common, generally doing everything to take a stand against Thatcher and all that she represented. Of course slimy, smug Right Wing apologists will argue that if it hadn't been for Thatcher then Leftist musicians, artists and writers would have had nothing to rail against....but we'd still have preferred NOT to have suffered her at all.
Being Scottish, we had even more reason to hate her than most; not only did she rupture the mining industry up here, she also closed the steel yards, and then tried the Poll Tax out on us like we were some single-cell guinea pig.
We HATED her!!!
And the only other people who despised the old witch as much as we Scots were the Scousers (that's people from Liverpool to our overseas readers!). And it's a fine release by good Scouser Pete Wylie that I am here to Blog about tonight.
Pete Wylie was of course the brains and talent behind the myriad Wah! projects that ran through the 80s, but my favourite release of his was under the strange moniker of Big Hard Excellent Fish. Their one and only release was 'The Imperfect List'; under Wylie's supervision, performance artist (and Wylie's girlfriend of the time) Josie Jones reads out a list of all things vile, mostly related to Thatcher and the 80s, over an ambient soundscape created by Robin Guthrie of The Cocteau Twins.
Here is the list in full as read:
Adolf Hitler
Mike Gatting
Terry & June
Fucking Bastard Thatcher
Insincere social climber of mixed origin
Overdose
Scouse impersonators
Macho dickhead
Bonnie Langford
Poll Tax
Neighbours
Lost keys
Phoney friend
The Royal Family
Stock Aitken & Waterman
Heartbreaking lying friend
Smiling Judas
Myra Hindley
Acid rain
Stinking rich female in furs
Disloyal lover
Wife & child beater
Drunken abuser
Racist
Bully
The Sun newspaper
AIDS inventor
Leon Brittan
All nonces
Massive massive oil slick
Loneliness
Cancer
Hard cold fish
Hunger
Greed
Imperfect list
Gut wrenching disappointment
Evil gossiping fashion bastard
Tasteless A&R wanker
Nurse Ratchett
The Tory invention of the non-working class
Cold Turkey
Mister Jesse Helms
Hillsborough
Weird British judges
Depression
Apartheid
J Edgar Hoover
John Lennon's murder
Hiroshima
Anyone's murder
Vietnam
The breakdown of the NHS
The Bomb
Heysel Stadium
Police harassment
The death of the rain forest
The troubles
Rednecks
The Klan
Rape
Imprisoned innocents
The all-American way
Red sock in the white washin'
Nancy's term
Tiananmen Square
Ronnie's term
Sexual harassment
Jimmy Tarbuck
Mile long check-out queue
Sick baby
Nelson Mandela's imprisonment
Miscarriage
Where were you?
The single was released in 1990 and was one of the first records to attack the 1980s as a whole, as though it were a product of Thatcherism itself. Despite it's ambient beauty, the track is still fairly savage and the hatred of the Right runs all the the way through it.
Unsurprisingly, the single wasn't a hit and wasn't played on many Radio stations either, whether for political or censorial reasons, who knows?
I feel though that it's time the 1980s were reclaimed by those of us whose view of the decade was forged by political activism and Left Wing art and culture; let's debase all these horrid notions of a synthetic, money burning, selfish, culturally vapid decade, and let's remember that among all the detritus, there was a generation who didn't just sit back and take it.....and we still wont!!
Unless we act now, this current decade will end up tainted and tarnished and in an even worse condition than Thatcher left us with back then!
You know what to do!
~Gordon~
You can download the track here
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