Ian Botham, Valerie Singleton and OMD: the summer of '81
The nostalgia industry is thriving, and it's no bad thing
In the summer of 1981 I was finishing my penultimate year at school. No AS-Levels for us, thank god. Indeed, I remember it as the year in which I did less work than any other. It was also the year I felt that life was really beginning.
Having reached my adult height of 6’4” at 14, I had for some time been responsible for getting the beers in at the various pubs we frequented on account of their flexible attitude to underage drinking. The Park in Exmouth, for example, where one lunch time, the genuinely scary Miss Spencer (Deputy Head) burst in, berated the landlord with threats to report him to the police (he kept his licence so perhaps she was all bark after all) and noisily frog-marched us all back to school. Or The George and Dragon in Topsham, where we made the pool room our own for months on end. But as we headed past our 17th birthdays, things became easier as nearly everyone began to look as if they were old enough to be in a pub without their parents.
That summer would go down in sporting history for the exploits of a certain Ian (now Lord) Botham. We were playing the annual Staff vs Pupils cricket match on the day Botham, recently relieved of the captaincy, miraculously contrived to save England from an(other) ignominious Ashes defeat, with a scintillating innings of 149 not out in the third test at Headingley. Such heroics were rare until Botham came along. We were happy to have our hero back, it mattered little that Australia would have no trouble knocking off the 130 runs required to put them two-nil up with three to play in the six match series.
The following afternoon, I was fully engaged in Mr Hill’s computer science class when Derek Walker, who’d sensibly chosen history instead, appeared outside our classroom window. Derek was among those for whom getting served alcohol was still a bit of a challenge, and while our classroom was on the ground floor, it had high windows and was at the top of a grass bank, so Derek had to leap into the air, arms flailing, to attract the attention of those of us inside. Not that this was something he made a habit of.
Needless to say he also attracted the attention of Mr Hill, who immediately opened the window to interrogate him. Almost beside himself, Derek talked straight past Mr Hill to inform us that Bob Willis, steaming in like a man possessed, had reduced Australia to 68 for 6. Always a good sport, Mr Hill instructed Derek only to leap up at the window and scream if and when further wickets fell. Needless to say he rather lost the class as, over the next 45 minutes, Derek attained ever greater heights as Willis demolished the Australian lower order and delivered England one of the most remarkable victories in the history of test cricket.
For several of us, including Derek, next up was a single period of economics. Thankfully, the estimable Mr Watson (of whom you will hear more on these pages as time goes on), was also a cricket fan, and by the happiest of coincidences, that single period was the one we spent each week in the TV room watching a recording (early days of VHS) of the previous Sunday’s Money Programme.
We always enjoyed the Money Programme, not least because it was presented by Valerie Singleton, with whom we’d grown up in her previous job on Blue Peter. Poor Mr Watson was driven spare by our endless John Noakes impressions.
It only took a couple minutes to persuade Mr Watson to give Val a miss and put the cricket on instead: we spent the full hour watching Peter West, Ted Dexter, Jim Laker and Richie Benaud talk us through the fall of each wicket again and again between interviews with the heroes of the hour: Willis himself, Botham of course, and the recalled captain, Mike Brearley without whose inspired leadership neither would have been able to do what they did over those two remarkable days at Headingley.
It must have been a few months later, the cricket season long finished, when we gathered once more to watch the latest edition of the Money Programme, an episode given over to a long interview with Leon Brittan, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Mr Watson (a founder member of the SDP) had primed us by explaining that while Brittan knew something about economics (rare in a Treasury minister then, unheard of now) he was nonetheless the dullest TV performer among cabinet ministers. Watching Brittan interviewed, Mr Watson opined, was like watching Chris Tavaré bat for England.
Now Tavaré, an attractive stroke maker at county level, had been brought into the side a year earlier when England were being decimated by the mighty West Indians. Faced by the fastest bowling attack ever assembled he decided, quite sensibly, that the only way to avoid getting out was to play as defensively as possible: leaving most balls, and employing a solid forward defensive when he had no choice. Mr Watson described Leon Brittan as the ‘Tavaré of the government’ and proceeded, from his position beside the TV screen, to demonstrate his own solid forward defensive stroke, each time Brittan coolly batted back one of Ms. Singleton’s testing questions.
Botham famously said that for the next twenty years, every cricket fan he met told him they had been at Headingley that day to witness his great innings. As you will have gathered from the above, I was not. Botham also used to dismiss talk of that knock being his best. For him, the 118 he scored four weeks later at Old Trafford, in the process helping England to an unassailable 3-1 lead in the series was his best.
We were in the Lake District on holiday when the Old Trafford test match came around in mid-August. By the end of the second day, England had a healthy lead, having made 231 in their first innings before restricting Australia to 130. By the close on Friday evening, they had extended that lead to 201 for the loss of just one wicket. The weather forecast for Manchester wasn’t great, but better than it was around Windermere, so that evening my dad suggested we drive south the following morning to see if Botham had one more ace up his sleeve. (He’d single-handedly bowled Australia out at Edgbaston since his heroics at Headingley).
We set off early, arriving at Old Trafford about 10:30, bought our tickets at the gate (the Saturday of an Ashes test match!) and took our seats. The morning session was tough going. Chris Tavaré holding firm against Dennis Lillee and Terry Alderman who were making the most of overcast conditions. Then came the trademark collapse: England losing Geoff Boycott, David Gower, Mike Gatting and Mike Brearley for just 25 runs. Tavaré, Leon Brittan-like in his composure, looked on helplessly from the other end.
Then it happened: Botham walked to the wicket, sans helmet, and took guard. It took him 53 balls to score 28 runs before Australia took the new ball and Lillee raced in. The shot with which Botham brought up his 50, a fierce slash backward of point, bounced just inside the boundary rope, before flying over our heads and into the back of the stand. I still haven’t seen a cricket ball travel that fast. By the time he’d finished, Botham had set a new record for sixes in an innings for England against Australia, and had scored 118 runs in two hours, including 22 off one Lillee over.
England’s total of 404 was enough to see them home, though fine centuries from Graham Yallop and Allan Border did make a fight of it over the last two days.
I offer this perhaps overly nostalgic meander down memory lane by way of introducing the real subject of this piece: the immense success of the nostalgia industry.
That same summer of 1981, two young musicians from Liverpool were in the process of changing the world of popular music just as their more famous predecessors had done two decades earlier. Not that they knew it at the time.
In 1978, from the ashes of the various bands they had been involved in, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys had formed Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, committed to synthesiser-driven pop inspired by the German band Kratfwerk. My sixth-form years coincided with four of OMD’s top ten hits, and while they were never massively successful, their sound became ubiquitous, and they are cited as influencing numerous outfits who did make it big, including: Depeche Mode, The Human League, Frankie goes to Hollywood, The Pet Shop Boys and Duran Duran.
Between the Headingley and Old Trafford tests, OMD released Souvenir, the first single from their finest album, Architecture and Morality, which would follow three months later. It’s an album that perfectly showcases the enormous musical innovation of the early 1980s by a cohort of bands often lumped together as ‘post-punk’ but each cultivating a unique and original sound.
The six weeks between Souvenir’s release on 3rd August and its peak at No. 3 six weeks later, saw top ten hits from: Spandau Ballet, The Specials, Duran Duran, The Human League, Soft Cell, Gary Numan and Adam and the Ants; with U2, Visage, The Teardrop Explodes and Siouxsie and the Banshees all ‘bubbling under’.
These bands might not be your cup of tea, but their simultaneous success illustrates what a fertile period this was for innovative new music, and also the extent to which OMD, who were pretty much first out of the gate, shaped the music of the period.
A couple of weeks ago, enjoying a resurgence in popularity as surprising as it is deserved, OMD played to a packed audience at London’s O2 Arena. As McCluskey said, after 45 years of trying, it was the largest crowd they’d ever attracted in the capital. He and Humphreys (along with Martin Cooper and Stuart Kershaw) were clearly having the time of their lives.
It was a great gig: McCluskey’s fabulous voice sliding effortlessly from rich baritone to pitch-perfect counter-tenor. And with both sound and vision enhanced by the technological advances of four decades, I’d have happily paid to watch the backdrop projections at the cinema, as long as the music was piped through.
Of course, OMD are not the only band from that period currently enjoying a resurgence in their popularity. At the O2 they were more than ably supported by Howard Jones, another 60-something whose voice has only improved with age. Many of these ‘renaissance’ acts packed it in years ago, assuming their careers to be over before speculatively reforming, hoping there were enough people willing to pay good money to travel back forty years, at least for an evening.
And of course there are: many of us who grew up listening to these bands now have a bit of money to spend, and few things give us greater pleasure then shelling out to re-kindle our relationships with bands like OMD, many of which are at least as good now as they were back in the day, thanks to the discipline and attention to detail that comes with maturity.
Clearly this late-career success has a great deal to do with nostalgia, but is that necessarily a bad thing? It’s not about harking back, misty-eyed, to some imagined golden age. Forty years ago, I had the world at my feet, helped as I was by a free education to 22 years old and the prospect of earning enough to buy my first home while still in my twenties. In going to see OMD I wasn’t expessing a preference for the world of my youth over today’s world. I was celebrating the power of music to provide a temporary means of escape from a world which then, as now, had a great deal wrong with it. Despite the horrors still unfolding in the middle-east, back in 1981, the end of civilization was probably a great deal closer than it is today. Which is why, of course, McCluskey wrote Enola Gay, giving OMD their first top-ten hit in 1980.
As 12,000 ecstatic fifty somethings bounced around the O2 arena to Electricity (who knew it never got higher than 99 in the charts?) a look came over McCluskey’s face not dissimilar to that worn by Gerard Langley during The Blue Aeroplanes gig at the Electric Ballroom last year. It seemed to combine two sentiments: Blimey, I never thought this would happen again, and Christ, it was all worth it after all.
For those of us without the talent, skill or courage to eschew a conventional career in pursuit of our dreams, a world in which those who did can top up their pensions, while providing the rest of us with such sublime entertainment, in the name of nostalgia or otherwise, still has a great deal going for it.