A few weeks ago, for reasons I needn't go into here, I was moved to think of 1981. I got my diary for the first six months of that year, (when I was 15) out of the bottom drawer and went through it, sharing some of the more ludicrous and touching moments with friends online.
I find you can only do this for so long at a stretch and then you have to put your diary back in the drawer again and carry on living in the here and now. 'The past is a foreign country' and so on. Strange that just as I've done so, an album should come to my attention by a duo from Oakland, California called The 1981 which has taken me back again. Spinning. Helpless..
I find their album 1981 a nice place to be. The band is well named. Move On, the record in question, reminds me of The Television Personalities, bands on Fiction Records, Cherry Red, Factory or Flying Nun. It has a black and white cover with a picture of a young woman in shadow, wearing a dress and leaning against a wall. An indistinct, dream like image, like memories or postcards from those times. The record too. Something you actually lived through and experienced but which are so distant now, so far back in time, that you can't quite be completely sure.
So come back to an earlier, simpler time. When it really seemed possible that Young Marble Giants or Eyeless in Gaza might conquer any opposition sent onto the field to take them on. When even U2 didn't seem like such a dreadful idea. This record has an innocence and naivete that is utterly winning.
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