And so to 1984, a year full of Orwell, but ironically not very Orwellian, all things considered. No, this was a different kind of dystopian. In the UK the year was dominated by the Miners’ Strike – on the one side Thatcher’s government closing down coal mines, on the other the National Union of Miners. Cue mounted police charging picket lines, running battles, and societal scars that still remain.
Later on that year, the IRA bombed a hotel where the Conservative government were meeting for their annual conference, with many high profile figures narrowly escaping death – it was a volatile time.
Reagan was re-elected in a landslide, while in the USSR there was a game of musical chairs at the top. Chernenko replacing Andropov (who had replaced Brezhnev), only to be replaced by Gorbachev a year later; they had a habit of dying suddenly. Meanwhile Indira Ghandi was assassinated leading to reprisals against the Sikh population in India.
Steve Jobs releases the Macintosh computer, there are lots of space shuttle launches and spacewalks (from the USA and USSR), and towards the end of the year the plight of starving Ethiopians leads Bob Geldof to release Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas.
Which brings us back to the music, which is why we’re really here.
It’s kind of ironic that one of Van Halen’s best known songs, Jump, is based on a synthesiser riff when the prior album was based entirely around Eddie Van Halen’s distinctive fretboard-hammering guitar skills. You could, I think, repeat the riff of Jump with grungy guitar chords and the song would work the same, although there is something so irresistibly Eighties about the whole sound.
But then this is pretty much what the next track on the album, Panama, does, immediately returning to the riff-driven kind of Eighties rock sound as previously heard on ZZ Top’s Eliminator. And we’re back into familiar complex soloing territory again with Top Jimmy, a classic rock-and-roll based tribute to the band Top Jimmy And The Rhythm Pigs (no, me neither, but they were contemporaries of X, The Gun Club, and Circle Jerks as seen on this list).
Talking of ZZ Top, this album continues their their theme of “cars ‘n’ girls” (as also established by AC/DC), especially with Hot For Teacher (which isn’t as explicit as Venom’s Teacher’s Pet, but is much the same kind of fantasy). It’s a great outing for the Brothers Van Halen though, Alex delivering frenetic drums with Eddie embellishing with very Eddie guitar licks. Although this was to be David Lee Roth’s last album with the band, he certainly doesn’t hold back. The video for this features a yellow deuce coupe that feels like both a reference to ZZ Top’s red Eliminator, and American Graffiti.
In the great rock pantheon, to me this particular style doesn't hold a candle to the stuff of the Seventies, nor to later forms once the Eighties reliance on synthesisers fades away, but it does have a certain cheesy charm.
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