All is Quiet on New Year's Day

 

I taught myself how to ride a bike when I was 16 in 1982. First, painfully in awkward small circles in the family  back garden in Teddington. Then across the road in Bushy Park behind the National Physical Laboratory. I cycled in to six form college but frankly I never felt safe in a saddle. My father had omitted to teach me and my younger sister when we were young. I probably haven't been on a bike for more than 35 years and have never learned to drive, generally because of a lack of basic faith in my eye, muscle co-ordination,

I did have a few years of slightly uncertain cycling though. '82 to '85. Like I said I cycled to college some mornings, trying to hide my essential lack of confidence. I remember scraping a wheel against the side of someone's car one day just outside the college and the look of intense irritation on the face of the female driver. You should have seen it. A fellow student of Richmond Tertiary College. She looked so pissed off,

I was cycling to college most days in January 1983.1983 and '84 were good years in my life. I was building my confidence. Constructing myself. Onwards. Into 17 and 18. I'd discarded the set of awkward NHS Costello specs I'd worn at Secondary School in favour of steel rimmed Lennon ones and become presentable rather than awkward. I was reading Camus, Sartre, Fitzgerald and Greene, alongside a peculiar stubborn fixation with Agatha Christie I recall. 

I'd discovered R.E.M. when they first started visiting British shores. A major revelation. A road to Damascus moment. Aztec Camera were already there. Smiths, Go Betweens, Lloyd Cole & the Commotions to come shortly. I knew what I liked and increasingly why I liked it. I hunted down the requisite books, films and philospophical and political attitudes to flesh out my personality and character. University beckoned. I didn't know it. But I was probably as happy as I've ever been.

I had a Saturday job in Tesco Home & Wear department on Teddington High Street. It was deathly frankly. Wheeling a palette around stock rooms, folding cardboard boxes and hauling them to the crusher. Looking at the Sekonda watch I was so proud of every couple of mnutes. But I eaned twenty quid each Saturday. Most of it went on records.

In January 1983 I have a mental image of myself. Lennon specs. Floppymop hairdo. I kidded myself that I was a spit for Don't Look Back  Dylan. Collarless red and white striped grandad shirt. My bike and my portable radio with which I could check out the single chart rundowns when they were announced on Radio 1, if I recall on Tuesday lunchtimes.

That January there was a singles invasion by good bands for a change. Bunnymen, U2 and Wah! The Cutter, New Year's Day and The Story of the Blues. Splendid songs all which made their way into the Top Twenty, kept rising and lingered in the Top Ten for a few memorable and spendid weeks. They all got daytime radioplay and were granted memorable Top of the Pops appearances. It was a statement. Pop music didn't have to be obvious. It could project genuine depth and inspire. There was more to life than Kajagoogoo and Nik Kershaw.

I liked U2 at the time and liked New Year's Day. I bought their third album War on the back of it. They'd been around for a while and put out a couple of credible albums in Boy and October. I'd liked a few tunes. Gloria. 

War however I never warmed to much. It was clearly a bid for the stadiums and the word I'd associate with it was bellicose. Bono, it soon became clear was in Morrissey's yet to be uttered words, 'a flatulent pain in the arse.' He was fond of waving flags, clambering up scaffolding and frankly wittering on. And on and on. Talking loud and saying nothing. I soon realised he was not for me. I was in Mac's camp. With Billy Mackenzie, Julian Cope and Jim Kerr. Before Jim decided he'd rather be in Bono's camp instead too and uprooted his tent late one night and was next seen throwing ludicrous shapes that spoke to dunderheads at the back of enormodomes in the Midwest.

If I listen to New Years Day now, I think it's a nice tune but the rhetoric is empty. The Cutter by comparison is still one of the most important songs of my lifetime. An indication that genuine and resonant art can break through and make a splash in the mainstream. In the words of the song, 'not just another drop in the ocean.'  I still think it completely inspired. A rousing, anthemic tune that doesn't settle for the obvious and has lyrics to match. U2 waved flags. The Bunnymen preferred Camus. I followed their example.

U2 cleaned up over the next few years. I chose Mac ibstead, Lloyd, Forster and McLennan, Stipe, Morrissey, Paddy and David McComb, Artists who had read and understood the books that Bono pretended he'd read but probably hadn't. Best of all these people actually followed these books lead, producing art of their own which more than deserved comparison with what had inspired them. I've lost my vinyl copy of War for reasons that aren't clear. I won't be replacing it.