Get In Touch
info@stevepafford.com,
Publishing Inquiries
info@stevepafford.com
Back

Perfect 10: War songs of the ’80s that aren’t by Culture Club

I have to admit, we look back at the 1980s quite a bit, don’t we? Nostalgia for that batwing decade and its pop culture has both seemed to move in curious cycles and yet be ever-present since before the takeover ’90s had even finished. 

It’s an interesting paradox: In the same way as our parents’ generation harp on about how great the “swinging” sixties were, my peers and I are usually happy to remember our formative decade with an innocent fondness: a vibrant multicoloured pop shop, its neon hues and winkle-picker shoes dominated by the so-called Second British Invasion of the American charts.

The early ’80s, in particular, was when pop music sounded like the future, but also an era that was shot through with apocalyptic darkness, and a paranoid uncertainty about the future. Coups, revolutions, disasters are all bargain basements to some of the more capitalist campers of the day.

In response to the massive buildup of weapons and troops by the Soviet Union, the USA dramatically escalated its military machine. Hollywood b-movie president Ronald Reagan famously branded the USSR an “evil empire.” World War III seemed a very real possibility, and the spectre of full scale conflict between the two superpowers weighed heavily on the hearts and minds of everyone from Moscow to, well, Milton Keynes, for instance. 

Indeed, I can remember Mrs McFarlane, our feisty form tutor at Sir Frank Markham, admonishing the class with a pained but impassioned, “Doesn’t it worry you lot that there might be a nuclear war in the next five years?” That she said this in 1984 – a year in which we were spoilt for choice with war songs shortlisted for this article – tells you something of the percolating hysteria that prevailed at the time.

Popular culture of the time reflected this constant anxiety, in films such as WarGames and The Day After, and in numerous songs by a plethora of artists. Though the ”tune” we most certainly wont be holding up as a beacon of political pop hope is Culture Club’s The War Song.

Not content with inflicting Karma Chameleon on the world in ’83, just a year later they went even further into the realm of ear-worm sadism by releasing an insipid, inane nursery rhyme so teeth-grindingly awful that they recorded it in not only English but additional international imbecillus in Spanish, French, German and even Japanese. Are you cringing comfortably?

Forty years ago this very week, on the UK chart dated  7 – 13 October 1984, The War Song was stuck behind Stevie Wonder’s equally immovable I Just Called To Say I Love You, equally a career low point for the Motown multi-instrumentalist to boot. It would be Culture Club’s seventh and final top-five hit of the decade.

Talk about saying sayōnara to your “credibility” though. Boy George’s career never really recovered after that, and before long food and drug addiction, and radiators and rent boys would figure largely in his life. 

Interestingly, my sister bought both of Ver Club’s criminal records, but I often wondered why she succumbed to the latter. So I could laugh at it, I suppose. 

Stella was never fully invested in her favourite musical acts in the same slightly OCD methodical way her older brother was. In her defence, the bands she was moderately into – not only Culture Club but ostensibly their biggest rivals Wham! and Duran Duran – were considered “girls’ music”, whatever that means. 

To qualify that, one of my female classmates, Sharon Dodds, decided to ask the supply teacher with the short blonde bob who was taking our English class if she liked The War Song. Needless to say, Shaz didn’t get the response she wanted, with “Miss” pulling a face that was somewhere between chewing a hornet’s nest and drinking a bucket of bleach.

“What, ‘War is stupid and people are stupid’? I don’t think so…”

And so, without further ado, here are a year-based perfect ten-ish of eighties’ war songs that not only fail to feature O’Dowd & co, but don’t even include the “W” word in their titles. War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Oh, sorry, wrong decade. 

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark — Enola Gay (1980) 

What an intro. What a mission statement. Enola Gay kicked off OMD’s sophomore set Organisation with a somewhat unintentional prologue — from a literal reference to the atomic bomb onwards, the rest of the album was dominated by the sort of austere atmospherics associated with Cold War Europe.

Unsurprisingly, Enola Gay is one of several on this timely P10 that sound deceptively infectious and poppy while conveying some brutally dark subject matter, which makes the contrast coruscatingly severe. Every part of this song, especially the main synth line that anchors it, is a danceable earworm, but all of that is a propulsive delivery mechanism for a meditation on nuclear war via historical context. 

Enola Gay is named for the US aircraft that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima (the recurring lyric “It’s 8:15” marks the moment time literally stood still), which brought a somewhat heinous end to World War II. The song is filled with allusions like the line “Is mother proud of little boy today?” referencing both the atomic device Little Boy and that the pilot had named his plane after his mom. 35 years later and the track would be the first of nine Top 11 singles for OMD in the UK.

Also in 1980: Like Enola Gay, XTC’s Living Through Another Cuba Like looks to past atomic era events to illuminate their current moment, in particular the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when “Russia and America are at each other’s throats.” No change there then. 

Kate Bush’s take was a more impressionistic and imaginative one, using a fittingly nightmarish pair of 45s in the shape of a) Army Dreamers and b) Breathing (both from her third LP, Never For Ever, and in singles terms, sandwiched between the bigger Babooshka) to convey the horrors of war from a family POV, ie the grief of a mother who’d lost her soldier son in battle, and the idea of a nuclear conflict from a perspective of a foetus in a mother’s womb. 

La Bush also crops up on Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers, inspired by the Charles de Gaulle originated French TV show Jeux sans frontières (It’s A Knockout in Blighty), where European teams competed in infantile and often grotesque competitions. PG’s lyrics imply various metaphors to illustrate the often reckless behaviour of world leaders and comparing international diplomacy to children’s games. It’s a classic. 

The Police – Invisible Sun (1981) 

One of the more sombre singles in the Police catalogue, Invisible Sun’s lyrics were written in Ireland and stem from Sting’s pondering how people in war-torn or impoverished countries find the will to carry on.

Over a foreboding looping synthesizer beat, the haunting subject matter was also deeply personal for drummer (and son of a founding father of the CIA) Stewart Copeland. Lebanon, depressingly like today, was being heavily bombed at the time of recording:

“For me, the song was about Beirut, where I’d grown up, which at that point was going up in flames. My hometown was being vilified by the media as a terrorist stronghold, and it was being blasted by bombs and napalm. Twenty thousand Lebanese were killed that year. And the Lebanese must have been feeling some heat from the invisible sun, because they were keeping their peckers up.”

Despite the powerfully moody story, Invisible Sun carries a cautiously optimistic message. Though the BBC felt pressured by the Thatcher government to ban its promotional video, which featured a montage of clips taken from the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The hoo-ha harmed the single’s chart performance: whereas the previous two Police albums could boast their respective lead 45s going to No. 1, this potent trailer for fourth LP Ghosts In The Machine was prevented from hitting the top spot by none other than Prince Charming by Adam And The Ants, the second single I ever bought. 

Also in 1981: The title track to ABBA’s icy magnum opus The Visitors is ostensibly a Scandinavian protest song about the nearby Soviet’s mistreatment of Cold War dissidents. Though its meaning was kept enigmatic at the time, the song is told from the perspective of a person on the inside, hearing people coming for her. It could be vague — the repetition of “Crackin’ up” could simply make the intensification seem like a run-of-the-mill psychological spiral — but its tension and narrative make it another example of how ’80s artists were capturing the atmosphere of the era even when they were focusing on more granular topics amid this nuclear fall-out saturation. It’s a crash course for the waivers.

Prince – 1999 (1982)

I’m not dreaming when I write this, because opening tracks don’t get much better than this. 1999 encompasses every bit of the Minneapolis marvel’s musical genius. From soaring post-disco synth riff to funky bass-line to pop-banger chorus it’s got everything. Yep, this Cold War classic kicks off Prince’s apocalypse-anticipating fifth album that, perhaps paradoxically, was built to last in every city and every nation for decades and even centuries to come. Not your average bubblegum hit then.

In a rare TV interview, the Purple One confirmed to CNN’s Larry King in, appropriately, 1999 that the titular song was inspired by those in the eighties who were dreading and half expecting the end of the world. 

“I knew that there were going to be rough times for the Earth because this system is based in entropy, and it’s pretty much headed in a certain direction. So I just wanted to write something that gave hope, and what I find is people listen to it. And no matter where we are in the world, I always get the same type of response from them.”

The key lyric is obviously “Everybody’s got a bomb/We could all die any day/But before I’ll let that happen/I’ll dance my life away.” Indeed, Prince might be worried about the apocalypse, but, in the meantime, baby, he’s got a lion in his pocket that’s ready to roar. 

So max up the volume and party like it’s, yup, 1999. 

Also in 1982: Mournful and moving, Shipbuilding is one of Elvis Costello’s most touching compositions and was written about the Falkland War, which pitted Margaret Thatcher against the Argentine dictator General Galtieri.

The lyrics are something of a slow lament, juxtaposing the jobs that war brings to small manufacturing towns, with the death of the area’s youth in the war itself. Legendary jazz man Chet Baker makes an appearance on the Costello recording in 1983 but for my mind the original Robert Wyatt vocal is the most affecting, and was one of David Bowie’s favourite 45s. Sussex Britpoppers Suede would later cover the song for a War Child benefit disc in 1995. 

Nena — 99 Luftballons (1983)

Here it is: When it comes to nuclear war songs, Nena’s 99 Luftballons is one of the most naively iconic, one that sums up the whole era perfectly. Though the original German and subsequent English version (as 99 Red Balloons, a UK No. 1 in 1984) differ lyrically, the basic gist is: someone sets off some balloons, they get mistaken for something hostile, and eventually World War III breaks out.

As the music switches between three different synth-based grooves, the narrative was fairly common throughout Cold War storytelling: something stupid and accidental — you know, like a tweet/post on Elon Musk’s X, in today’s parlance — setting off the end of everything. But as a song and a story, it lives on as one of the best and most succinct examples of eighties international anxiety in pop.

Also in 1983: The mid ’80 was hardly the most fertile and inspired era for Paul McCartney, and yet I’ve always had a secret love for Pipes Of Peace. Yes, it’s a sentimental and slushy message promoting human and Earthly unity, but it does appeal to the corny, pop-focused Macca fan inside all of us. The video set in the trenches of France during Christmas 1914 is a birrova classic and it all helped to give Macca his second and final chart-topper over the festive season of 1983-84. 

Frankie Goes To Hollywood — Two Tribes (1984) 

What a strange and brief phenomenon Frankie Goes To Hollywood were. With the possible exception of George Michael and Wham!, 1984 belonged to the lads from Liverpool even though they fit no contemporaneous trends, unusually for a British band.

Burning brightly but briefly, Frankie couldn’t be described as anything besides their own genre-busting creation, albeit hugely assisted by Trevor Horn’s epic production. Touting an unlikely image of Scouse scally meets leather gay clone, they dominated the charts all year with a trio of No. 1s, Relax, The Power Of Love, and sandwiched between them, the epic nine week chart-topper Two Tribes. FGTH’s sophomore single is a fascinating study into pre-internet hype contagion, and they weren’t pulling any punches. 

The ubiquitous video for Two Tribes opens with archival footage of Richard Nixon proclaiming “Above everything else, the American people want leaders who will keep the peace.” It isn’t any subtler who the two tribes are from there, as the visuals focus on a boxing match between lookalikes of Presidents Reagan (USA) and Chernenko (USSR). 

With its dramatic, bass-driven orchestral crash-bang-wallop, the song reflects the futility of it all (“When two tribes go to war/ A point is all you can score”) and the feeling of the whole world being caught between American and Russia’s personal pissing match. 

It also highlights another common thread amongst ’80s nuclear anxiety songs, especially those by European acts: the idea that here the rest of the world was powerless sandwiched between two superpowers teetering closer to a confrontation that could yield a one-way ticket to global destruction

Alphaville — Forever Young (1984) 

Following their breakthrough Big In Japan, Alphaville’s beautiful ballad is another Cold War classic that has stood the test of time, enduring in a way that, conversely, lessens the existential element of the lyrics.

Yet when you think of those emotional ’80s stereotypes, the nostalgia and the throwback to adolescence and innocence, you think of songs like Forever Young, even if it ends its first verse with “Hoping for the best/ But expecting the worst/ Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?” 

It’s worth noting that Alphaville, like Nena, are a German act; once more, artists writing from the perspective of the symbolic centre of the Cold War, with aggressors on each side, ready to flick the switch. 

It’s a masterpiece from this milieu, its wistful lyrics mingling further allusions to the threatening planet surrounding them with thoughts on aging. Perhaps more than any other song here, it encapsulates the feeling of living a life day to day, with theoretically normal hopes and dreams, under the heavy shadow of East versus West paranoia. 

Also in 1984:

The only entry that I actually bought at the time of its release, Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears In My Eyes criss-crossed in the singles charts of May 1984 with another also-ran, the Human League‘s The Lebanon, while flimsy fare from Duran and Wham! were taking turns in hogging the top spot.

The Sheffield set’s somewhat noisy but worthy 45 “wanted to speak up for the little people” and say something meaningful about the situation in Lebanon, though they were cruelly lambasted for the literal simplicity of the line “And where there used to be some shops is where the snipers sometimes hide.” Nevertheless, when they go on to ask, presciently, “And who will have won when the soldiers have gone from the Lebanon?” it’s quite clear that, in the words of Shirley Bassey, it’s all just a little bit of history repeating. 

With its fervent, urgent delivery, “Eyes” was Midge Ure and co’s final top tenner, and another of those tunes that told a heartfelt tale against the scene of everyone having a matter of mere minutes left before the wind blows. The video depicted Ure as a man realising a power-plant meltdown was imminent and rushing home to spend his final moments with his family. A chilling predictor of what would happen in Ukraine two years later. 

Tears For Fears — Everybody Wants To Rule The World (1985) 

It’s easy to dismiss the good-old-bad-old eighties as an era of musical cheese, light on substance and heavy on shoulder pads. But the decade spawned many of music’s most emotional, teary moments, the more affecting for the fact that the delivery vehicle is unashamedly pop. Arguably, it works best when a slightly upbeat anthem are juxtaposed with starker lyrical messages, like this TFF 45.

The Bath boys’ infectious evergreen Everybody Wants To Rule The World  — sung by Curt Smith, written by Roland Orzabal, and produced by former Ants drummer Chris “Merrick” Hughes  — is one such groove with gravitas, an existential meditation of sorts in a chugging uncommon shuffle beat-driven 12/8 time, opening with that immortal line, “Welcome to your life — there’s no turning back.” 

Originally titled Everybody Wants To Go To War, it’s more of a serious statement than many realised at the time, as Smith recalls: 

“It’s about everybody wanting power, about warfare and the misery it causes. We were really discussing the Cold War. But it was the US and Russia then, and now the concern is more the US and Korea. I find that fascinating.” 

Either way, Everybody was lapped up by both the public (US No. 1, UK No. 2i) and the critics (it won its year’s Brit Award for Best Single; in a typical fit of immodesty, Orzabal opined it also deserved to win the Ivor Novello International Hit of the Year award, over the inexplicable victor, Paul Hardcastle, because 19 is only a “dialogue collage” and not an actual song. He had a point. 

Also in 1985: The Stranglers’s North Winds Blowing is one of JJ Burnel’s quiet classics, referencing such issues as AIDS, the Palestinian crisis, and the aftermath of WW2. Sting’s Russians is much way direct than the earlier Invisible Sun and is a chilling reminder of the Cold War’s standoff. 

Rather than a paranoid or furious screed, it’s a fractured prayer delivered over a dramatic synth-based motif purloined from Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev. With a boyishly hopeful vocal, the now solo star namedrop both Reagan and Khrushchev but the tone is one of struggling hope that both sides realise some kind of common humanity before it’s too late continuously wrapping around to the line “I hope the Russians love their children too.” 

The opening cut of New Order’s third album, Low-Life, the charmingly Beatle-esque Love Vigilantes saw Bernard Sumner tap into the tragedy of war in an unexpected way. “It was about a soldier that came back and his wife was sent a telegram to say that he was dead,” he told GQ. “You can take the ending one way or another. He’s either dead and he’s come back as a ghost and he sees her, or he’s not dead and the telegram was a mistake. But his wife’s got it and killed herself.”

Genesis — Land Of Confusion (1986) 

Usually for latter-day Phil Collins and Genesis, Land Of Confusion is more cheesed off than cheese. A characterful and punchy hit from Invisible Touch over the biting winter of 1986-87, it’s yet another sardonic indictment of politicians during the height of the Cold War. 

One of the most famous, recognisable videos of the early MTV era, the Grammy-winning short video depicts the Surrey trio playing, as well as various world leaders, as hideous Splitting Image puppets. 

The story centres on “Hoppalong” Reagan in dream-like state, a geriatric president aimlessly running around in a Superman costume, looking benignly bemused at everything as senility comes calling. He eventually awakes and as he goes to press the “Nurse” button by his bed, accidentally and obliviously hits the “Nuke” button. 

Yeah, that one hits just a little too close to home in 2024. Incidentally, the loquacious LOC was one off the very first commercially released compact disc singles, and the trusty diary records I belatedly bought my copy in August 1987, the same month I took possession of my first CD player. Remind me what vinyl is again?

Also in 1986: Two of the more reflective, meditative offerings here, Status Quo’s In The Army Now and The Stranglers’ Always The Sun revolve largely around world injustice in broader terms: In the Quo 45, a soldier goes into battle not knowing their fate. Essentially a puppet manipulated by his government, the story emphasises that soldiers don’t really defend their homeland, but serve politicians’ interests in unnecessary and often illegal overseas invasions. And even if they makes it back alive, few will care about them or the horrors of their experiences in the combat zone.

The Stranglers song also has a moving philosophical. At one point Hugh Cornwell gets more specific, with another more subtle reference to the cognitively impaired Reagan, asks “Who gets the job of pushing the knob? That sort of responsibility, you draw straws for it if you’re mad enough.” 

Both singles peaked in the same October 1986 week in the UK charts, with Ver Quo standing tall at No. 2 and The Stranglers having to make do with 30, the same position their previous single stalled at. It’s Nice in Nice.

From their incendiary Infected album, The The’s Sweet Bird Of Truth is a biting diatribe regarding America’s ever-present military involvement in Middle East politics. Mainman Matt Johnson said, “The idea of that single was to provide a musical interpretation of the sort of cultural conflict that occurs when the ultimate Western power takes on the sort of Eastern fundamentalism that you’ll find in Arab nations.” With the US air strikes on Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya a reality, the band’s label CBS were unwilling to promote the track, so it was relegated to a low-key limited edition 45 and deleted on the day of release.

“The other day, someone asked me who I liked and I said Sigue Sigue Sputnik. People laugh at that but they’re so entertaining.” 

So said Blondie’s Debbie Harry in Record Mirror that year. Much can be said about this mad band fronted by the down and out deviant Martin Degville, and Love Missile F1-11 is, structurally, not much more than a looping Moroder bass sequence, over which there’s a cacophony of samples, randomly timed guitar squalls and the vagueness of vocals treated with sci-fi effects. 

It “bears only the scantiest relationship to music” opined Trouser Press, but we still think it has one of the most brilliantly provocative opening verses in pop: 

“The US bombs cruising overhead

But there goes my love rocking red

Shoot it up

Oh, shoot it up”

And he does. 

David Bowie — Time Will Crawl (1987)

Of the many roles Dame David of Bowie played in his storied stellar career, one of them was the effective poet laureate of the Cold War in pop music. If you go back to his revered ’70s albums there is, of course, the Berlin trilogy he crafted with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, where, armed with his eternal outsider’s perspective, Bowie subsequently soaked up the culture of a Berlin that still very much bore the scars of WWII and epitomised the austere concrete Cold War in a divided walled Europe. Such is its symbolic impact that some credit the performance of “Heroes” at the 1987 Concert For Berlin as being a factor in a cultural push to “tear down this wall.” 

The Thin White One was still writing about songs of mass destruction in the eighties too. In the autumn of 1986 he shared soundtrack duties for the animated nuclear fallout film When The Wind Blows with Hugh Cornwell Roger Waters and Genesis. 

Then in April 1987, Bowie’s 17th album Never Let Me Down included the apocalyptic Time Will Crawl as its undoubted highlight, inspired by the Chernobyl atomic disaster that had occurred exactly a year prior, to the very week. 

Originally titled How We War, the lyrics were classic opaque impressionistic Bowie, railing against the political climate, while warning, harbinger-like, of the impending slow destruction of the planet by pollution and industry, as it, in the author’s own words, “deals with the idea that someone in one’s own community could be the one responsible for blowing up the world.” 

Morrissey – Everyday Is Like Sunday (1988)

“Come, Armageddon, come!” Steven Morrissey sings at the end of the first verse in Everyday Is Like Sunday, the stately second single from his solo debut Viva Hate and still one of the high watermarks of his chequered career. 

Of course, the mardy Mancunian can be so melodramatic you’d be forgiven for misinterpreting the lyric as Morrissey simply being Morrissey. As it turns out, the lyrics were partly inspired by Nevil Schute’s On The Beach. A masterful piece of end-times existentialism, the 1957 novel tells the story of a group of Aussies eking out their final days awaiting their deaths at the hands of radiation floating down from a nuclear war that’s already decimated the rest of the planet. 

Of course, it’s a fitting inspiration for the eternally morose Mozzer, painfully evident in the lyrics:

“Hide on the promenade, etch a postcard

‘How I dearly wish I was not here’

In the seaside town

That they forgot to bomb

Come, come, come, nuclear bomb”

Moz had form, of course, deploying the off-handed line “It’s the bomb that’ll bring us together” in The Smiths’ ’86 classic Ask. It’s just an example of how the prospect of nuclear war was so constant, so part of everyday life, that it could function almost like a conversational hinge like sharing a cup of tea, greased or otherwise.

R.E.M. — Orange Crush (1989)

Before R.E.M. were big, there was the pressing rush of Orange Crush. The ominous lead single off the Georgian’s sixth album, 1988’s deceptively colourblind Green, is as sexy as the summer heat, which may explain why it took until June of ’89 to chart in Britain, giving the band their first bona fide Top 30 hit. An upbeat sounding song about a morbid topic. Welcome to the age of irony.

A play on words par excellence, Orange Crush is, of course, a soft drink, but, in this case, it refers to Agent Orange, a toxic substance used indiscriminately by the US in the Vietnam War. 

A dangerous chemical contaminant designed to strip leaves from trees and improve visibility, American forces used some 80 million litres of the stuff on Vietnam’s forested areas, affecting some 3-4 million Vietnamese, killing approximately 400.000 and causing half a million children to be born with severe defects. Surviving veterans back at home also showed an increased risk of cancer and nerve disorders. 

The father of impossibly chiselled singer Michael Stipe served in the helicopter corps in Vietnam, and the band’s reference to “agents (of the free)” and “spine” is also far from coincidental. Spina bifida is a birth defect affecting the spines of foetuses and infants. Agent Orange is a very likely culprit, causing a whole host of neurological conditions.

The music is sinewy, bewitching, entrancing; the lyrics, once deciphered, sound halfway improvised. It’s a magnetic single, one that sounds like the invention of indie rock. Stipe broods over his microphone. Next to him, Peter Buck and Mike Mills are the delightfully dorky, garage rats playing at being rock stars. 

As college misfits turned stadium rockers, R.E.M. would become massively more successful, but they’d rarely sound as hypnotising. 

The overseas conscience is here? 

Steve Pafford

Liked it? Take a second to support Steve Pafford on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!
Steve
Steve

Cookie Policy