Like Magic in the Streets

 Having grown up, for my formative years, in the Eighties in the UK, I've always felt that it was generally misrepresented as a decade in films and TV programmes for the most part, particularly in terms of describing what coming of age felt like then. Going to university seemed to be mostly presented in a shallow, facile light. All about being a New Romantic or trying to get onto the University Challenge team. It wasn't like that for me. The Eighties was a furiously political one in the UK as Thatcherism seized control of peoples mind and lives in an appalling way and communities were torn apart.

The music I first really loved was 'independent' guitar driven, literary stuff. R.E.M, The Smiths, The Go Betweens, Aztec Camera, The Triffids, Echo & The Bunnymen, Lloyd Cole & The Commotions, Prefab Sprout. Much of it seemed on the surface to be decorative rather than deeply engaged but this was deceptive. The music that these bands made was actually made for these times and a reaction and response to what was going on politically and culturally in the mainstream.

Tim Blanchard's Like Magic in the Streets is the first music related book that I've read that truly captures what it felt like and feels like looking back on those years for those of us who were utterly opposed to what was going on and made our musical allegiances according to that opposition, choosing bands and records that seemed to express and help us understand those emotions and impulses for us.

Blanchard chooses Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, The Go Betweens, The Smith and The Blue Nile and an early, important album from each as the basis for his discussion of these times. He could easily have chosen any of the artists I've listed above or several others. He understands and clearly loves the music deeply but  his argument is a much broader one, essentially focused on Romanticism, with a capital, rather than a lower case 'R', and how these bands expressed key features of this 19th Century movement of ideas, poetry, fiction and cultural change in terms of the records and decisions that they made and how they presented themselves.

This is a wonderfully realised book and I'm very grateful to Tim for writing it. He rightly bases his narrative on the writing of the music papers at the time (which were such a fundamental and valuable education to the likes of me), places these records within their historical and cultural context and reclaims those years from unconvicing, airbrushed representations (where the winners wrote the history of the times), recognising the incredible strength and resolve of the people who made this wonderful music. It's a must read for anyone who grew up in these times loved this music then and still do.