Here we are in 1982. This year, at least from a British perspective, was dominated by the Falklands War where the failing Junta in Argentina tried a bit of adventurism but ended up helping the deeply unpopular Margeret Thatcher to garner a large amount of public respect in the UK, all at the meagre cost of hundreds of sailors on both sides. Am I cynical about it? Why yes, I am. Beyond that perspective, trouble continues in the Middle East (business as usual, in other words).
The IRA upped its bombing campaign with some particularly vicious nail bomb attacks on packed public spaces, although there was more public outrage over injured horses than people. Meanwhile, there seems to have been a higher than average number of aviation accidents this year, for some reason.
Beyond the doom and gloom, Spielberg releases ET, the space shuttle Columbia lands after an 8-day mission, the first CDs are produced, and the International Whaling Commission agrees to end commercial whaling by 1986 (although lots of “research” continued to be done).
And so to the music.
I’m not sure even how to describe the sound of Haircut One Hundred (who ought, perhaps, to be given as Haircut 100?). Wikipedia classes it under New Wave, but surely that’s stretching the definition to mean “anything released between 1979 and 1983 that I don’t know how else to classify”. Although it’s not an “official” terminology, I’d call this kind of thing something like “blue-eyed funk”. If you can have blue-eyed soul, why not funk?
Because that’s what underlies a lot of this early-Eighties pop sound – a funky bassline or, in the case of Favourite Shirt (Boys Meets Girl), the kind of funky guitar, horn inflections and pseudo-rap that became an Eighties staple (see also Wham, Belle Stars).
Percussionist Marc Fox provides some Latin beats on Lemon Firebrigade, while Love Plus One has a slight ska feel underneath the Eighties pop. Although my sense of Eighties pop is still that it’s desperately uncool (and just look at those lovely sweaters on the album cover), there are some pretty good tracks on here, and there’s no arguing with Nick Heyward’s singing ability.
The hit single Fantastic Day typifies the bright and breezy nature of this kind of music. Possibly it’s because this style came into vogue at the same time that Yuppie culture really started to take off, and so it feels in some way to stand for the vacuous (and materialistic) nature of that culture, in contrast to the grim post-punk / goth music and the (Northern) working class sentiments. Not that all the synth-pop groups necessarily endorse Thatcherism (Heaven 17 for example actively lampoon it), but somehow they feel part of that side of the growing wealth gap, culturally.
Perhaps because Heyward’s vocals are just slightly too smooth, or that the saxophone elements sound a bit cheesy, or that the music blends in a lot of elements like Steely Dan did to sound both complex yet simple at the same time, I’m not sure, but it didn't land with me then, and it doesn't now.
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