Ten Teenage Albums

Four years ago there was a Facebook meme where people talked about the 10 albums from their teenage years that had most influenced them. I wrote most of this at the time, but then didn't post it, mainly to avoid pissing off the guy mentioned in album number 8, who does follow me on Facebook. Today I came across it while going through some old stuff on the flash drive that I store most of my life on, and thought... ah, might as well put it on the blog, as I don't post much there these days, and he doesn't read my Twitter feed/blog.

And so, very belatedly, here are the albums that defined me from age 13-19. Keeping myself to only 10 has been difficult, of course, so it's only fair to mention a couple that didn't quite make the cut, like The Golden Age of Wireless by Thomas Dolby, The Queen is Dead by The Smiths, and The Whole Story by Kate Bush. Anyway, here they are, in pretty much the chronological order in which I discovered/bought them. I apologise that they're not hipper, but what can I say? It was the 80s. It was not a hip decade.


1. Ultravox - Vienna (1981)
This was the first album I ever bought, at the age of 14. In those days you had to go to Sundown Records in Walsall, which meant a bus ride and a cramped shop full of muso afficianados looking down their hippie noses at you. I remember hearing the title track in early 1981, and deciding that it was like nothing I had ever heard before. I think my mate Ian had bought a copy before me and taped it onto an old TDK C-90 cassette (with Visage on the other side) for me, and I had decided that I had to have this record. Listening back to it now, those first notes of Astradyne still send shivers down my spine. I bought pretty much else they ever did, and even delved back into their punk phase, when John Foxx was fronting them, and they produced classics like Quiet Men and Hiroshima Mon Amour. I can't really listen to their later stuff now, especially Quartet onwards, but this album I still have a soft spot for, and its gloomy follow-up, Rage In Eden. Sometimes I listen to New Europeans and remember that optimism of the 80s (a counterpoint to our fears about nuclear war), and the idea that Europe had generated, via the likes of Kraftwerk, its own shared culture and ethos, separate from the USSR and Reagan-era USA. In spite of Brexit, I still feel European as much as I feel British, and that Connie Plank, Kraftwerk-influenced Krautrock that filtered into the New Romantic movement in the UK was definitely part of why that is.

2. Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark - Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (1980)
And talking of Kraftwerk, on to the band that were probably the closest British equivalent, OMD. I didn't know much about OMD, and think I pretty much only bought this and their second album Organisation on the strength of liking Enola Gay on Top of the Pops, and at first the albums were a disappointment and took me a longer time to get into. There was some very strange stuff like Red Frame, White Light - a song about a phone box - and the dissonance of Dancing, but there was also the more mainstream poppy stuff like Electricity and Messages. But in the end I think what really sold it to me were the longer tracks, the elegaic Pretending to See The Future and especially the ethereal, lilting The Messerschmitt Twins, which I still love. Of all of the crappy New Romantic stuff I listened to in the early 80s, OMD (and to a lesser extent Thomas Dolby) is the only stuff I can still listen to today.

3. The Police - Outlandos d'Amour (1978)
This was the first Police record I bought, and I'm not sure why I dipped into their back catalogue rather than going for Ghost in the Machine or whatever their contemporary album was at the time. Probably it was because it had Roxanne and So Lonely on it, which I recognised and remembered liking. So Lonely had actually been my first encounter with The Police, on TV - a brief clip on the BBC's Nationwide of all things, and played there only because it sounded like they were singing Sue Lawley. But I'm glad I did. I think for a lot of bands there's a freshness to their first album that gradually gets knocked/produced out of them in later, more polished works. I can remember playing this over and over again in my bedroom at home, headphones on, singing badly along to Truth Hits Everybody. I bloody loved it, and still do. Sting is one of those people we are apparently supposed to hate these days, but I did and do like his music, though I'd agree he was much better with Copeland and Summers.

4. ABC - The Lexicon of Love (1982)
This was one of those albums that everyone in my school year seemed to have (Ultravox's Quartet and U2's live album Under a Blood Red Sky also came close), and I probably only got it because everyone else did. Still, at the time ABC seemed impossibly cool and glamorous, and to a callow teen there was something somehow grown up about their songs about love and romance, probably a function of producer Trevor Horn looking backwards to Hollywood melodrama and the orchestral backing score for inspiration. I haven't really listened to this for many years, and it doesn't do much for me now, but for a couple of years it was part of the backing track to growing up in the 80s.

5. U2 - The Unforgettable Fire (1984)
My oldest friend got into U2, and played this album all the time when I was over at his house, and I absorbed it by osmosis. I had really liked New Year's Day, but hadn't really kept up with U2 through my New Romantic synth-pop phase (see Ultravox, OMD above). But the opening track, A Sort of Homecoming, just swept me up in its big chords and jangly guitar intro, and it seemed an interesting departure. Of course it was the start of Phase II of U2 - their 'American Phase', along with The Joshua Tree and Rattle & Hum, after the 'Irish Phase' of Boy, October and War, and then it was followed by the 'German Phase' of Achtung Baby and Zooropa, before they went on to their Bland International Megastar Phase. I know they're one of those bands these days that you're somehow required to hate, like Coldplay - a similar position that Genesis and Status Quo occupied back in the 80s - but it's worth remembering that even U2 were once quite an exciting Irish rock band, if a bit preachy and obsessed with Martin Luther King by the mid 80s.

6. Electric Light Orchestra - Eldorado (1974)
Paul, who got me into U2, was also responsible for my love of early ELO. My parents had a copy of Out of the Blue, but Paul had excavated their back catalogue, and we listened to all of it, even really weird stuff like The Battle of Marston Moor. He even got a copy of some stuff from The Move, the precursor to ELO. I think the fact that they, like us, were from the West Midlands appealed to him - his father knew someone who had gone to school with Bev Bevan or something. Eldorado was I think the album that really sold me on ELO - it was the perfect example of their trademark combination of rock and classical, and maybe one of my first introductions to the idea of the Concept Album. Eldorado still vies with On The Third Day as my favourite ELO album, and I think it was part of their mid-70s creative peak, before the disastrous swerve into disco that came with Discovery and their Xanadu stuff with Olivia Neutron Bomb. I know everyone likes Mr Blue Sky, but I much prefer the strangeness of Eldorado.

7. Dire Straits - Love Over Gold (1982)
I don't know where the whole Dire Straits thing came from. I remember being in Amsterdam in 198...3? And Industrial Disease seemed to be playing all the time on the radio. I think I also liked the noir-ish Private Investigations and the long slow build of Telegraph Road. Once I got this album, by the time I went to university in 1984 I had bought all of their previous albums - Dire Straits, Communique and Making Movies, and loving all of them, and then being cruelly disappointed when the next year they released the astonishingly bland Brothers in Arms, which became the backing track to every yuppie with a CD player. It was even more disappointing than when Spandau Ballet had gone commercial and released Gold. I still think of this as the last good Dire Straits album, but to be honest, I actually prefer the earlier, rawer stuff like Down to the Waterline these days.

8. Emerson, Lake and Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery (1973)
Oh boy. A fine example of what peer pressure can do. So when I got to Uni, my social circle ended up congregating around the room of this guy. He was a hi-fi afficionado, coffee snob, public school rugger type and alpha male. He was also a keyboard player and devotee of Keith Emerson. I listened to far more Prog than I had ever imagined existed (and also The Beatles, which was an education I'd been sorely lacking up to that point). Much of it stuck - especially Pink Floyd, who I hadn't really listened much to before. And I also discovered that freshly ground coffee was nothing like the instant crap I had drunk up to that point - I really have that to thank him for. But he played a *lot* of ELP, and it seemed to be the thing to listen to. I look at my record box now and thanks to him there are Tarkus, Works 1 and 2, and Trilogy, but mainly I remember this one. I think the H R Giger cover really did it, with the mechanical pistons that fold out to reveal an enigmatic woman's face. Also I especially loved Karn Evil 9, a long concept track about a homicidal artificial intelligence. I find the bombastic excesses of ELP too much these days, but then this album does show that they could also pull off something like Benny the Bouncer and take the piss out of themselves too.

9. This Mortal Coil - It'll End In Tears (1984)
If any album encapsulates my first year at Uni then it's this one. Like The Unforgettable Fire and Brain Salad Surgery I absorbed it by osmosis, this time through the flimsy wall of my dorm room in Vanbrugh College, York University. I was billeted next door to a Scots music student from Glasgow. He played all kinds of things, no doubt to do with his course - Gregorian chant, lots of fucking awful accordion music - but his recreational stuff was Scots indie bands like the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance, bands I'd only vaguely heard of when occasionally listening to John Peel. This album in particular he played on hard rotation, and I was really taken with the incredibly pure sound of Elizabeth Fraser's voice on Another Day and the incomparably beautiful Song to the Siren (actually as I discovered much later a Tim Buckley cover), and I ended up buying this and Filigree and Shadow as a result.

10. Rush - 2112 (1976)
The closeout of my teenage years would probably be typified by this album. By now the prog types had finished their courses and left university, and I was hanging out with a slightly different group, and while much of the music we listened to was still prog, now it was Canadian outfit Rush that I started listening to and liking. Liking rather too much to be honest, and they stuck with me for the next ten years or so, though once I turned 30 their allure started to fade away. But back then I loved it. The first side of 2112 is a prog concept piece about a dystopian future society where conformity is enforced by the computers of the priests of the Temples of Syrinx, and non-sanctioned entertainment is banned, until one young man discovers an old guitar and learns to play it, and ends up leading a revolution. This is a plot later stolen by Ben Elton for his shitty Queen jukebox musical We Will Rock You. It's pompous, it's ridiculous, it's great. The rest of the album is a blander grab bag including a song about drugs (Passage to Bangkok) and another about The Twilight Zone. Still, there it is, at 19 I loved this stuff.

The Strange Death of Liberal Interventionism

In 1935, George Dangerfield published his (in)famous book: The Strange Death of Liberal England. The book concerned itself with the apparently abrupt demise of the Liberal party; prior to the First World War one of the two main governing parties of the UK, yet after it in a terminal decline and surpassed by the new emerging Labour party. Dangerfield placed the blame on the fights that the Liberal party had picked with its Conservative opponents; over Irish home rule and the 1911 Parliament Act (in effect the status of the House of Lords), while simultaneously being outflanked on the left by suffragism and the trade union movement. His thesis has been picked apart over the years, but whatever the merits of the book, he was putting his finger on something profound, a seismic shift in British constitutional affairs. Yesterday saw something just as profound; the strange death of Liberal Interventionism, with the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, amid an orgy of finger pointing. 

Liberal Interventionism was based around the idea that liberal democracies should try to make the world a better place by stepping in to defend citizens of other lands from domestic tyranny and the consequences of failed states. It's sometimes argued that as a concept it went back to US president Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points that emerged from the carnage of the First World War, alongside his call to "make the world safe for democracy", but it would be just as easy to draw a line straight back to the Liberal party itself - Gladstone's calls for humanitarian intervention in Bulgaria following atrocities in the war of 1875-8 struggled for mastery in Victorian England against Disraeli and Salisbury's realpolitik and fears of Russian expansionism. Earlier than that, British military (mainly naval) might was used to end the slave trade (albeit after many decades of having profited handsomely from it).

While the United States could hardly have been said to enter the Second World War due to Liberal Interventionism, its attempt to engage in 'nation building' in the shattered ruins of Germany and Japan after the war, and its creation of the United Nations - a second attempt after the failure of Wilson's League of Nations - to try and form a rules-bound framework for international affairs heavily biased towards the US and its (mostly) democratic allies certainly were. But the second half of the 20th century was obscured by the battle against communism, and a series of decidedly Illiberal Interventions in countries like Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and support for equally unsavoury regimes in Argentina and Paraguay, which were much more about traditional great power politics.

It was only with the fall of communism and an end to anti-communist interventions (some of them disastrous, like Vietnam) that Liberal Interventionism really got its second wind. President Clinton in the United States and Tony Blair in the UK presided over a series of international Liberal Interventions, beginning in Somalia in 1992-5, Cambodia (1992-3) and Bosnia (1992-6), and then progressing through Haiti (1994), Kosovo (1999) and Sierra Leone (2000). While success was mixed at best in Somalia, the spectacle of US troops dragged through the streets after the Battle of Mogadishu leading Clinton to approve a hasty exit, the apparent success of each subsequent intervention paved the way for the next. It even led the American right, usually by inclination isolationist, to come up with its own variant on Liberal Interventionism, via the Project for the New American Century, which dreamed of a muscular neocolonialism, toppling pro-western dominos across the globe to secure what was still unironically referred to as a New World Order, a new Pax Americana.

If 2000 marked the apotheosis of Liberal Interventionism, then 2001 would begin its downfall. The Bush administration's (over-)reaction to the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington was repression at home and military adventurism abroad. Afghanistan was apparently won quickly, using the Northern Alliance as ground troops backed up by B-52 strikes. Emboldened, neoconservatives in the Bush government organised a sequel two years later in Iraq, and dreamed of rolling the tide onwards, perhaps to Tehran and beyond. But Iraq proved to be a bridge too far. The power vacuum left by the removal of the Ba'ath regime allowed first Iranian-backed militias to take the south, and then the terrifying fundamentalist state of ISIL to emerge in the north and west, spilling over into Syria and destabilising that state. The 2010-11 Arab Spring that seemed at first to be the neocon dream finally emerging was nipped in the bud in places like Egypt, and after a final Liberal Intervention in Libya went sour and degenerated into armed warlords battling for major cities, the West backed away from Syria and left it to the Russians and Turks.

The US is still deployed in Iraq, and after much blood, money and many setbacks has belatedly managed to scrape together some semblance of a functioning state, albeit with the Kurdish north in a de facto independence. But Afghanistan has been the conflict that has exposed most cruelly the limits to 'nation building'. The Taliban, aided and abeted by Pakistan and occasionally others, has emerged stronger than ever from 20 years of insurgency, while the US withdrawal, negotiated by president Trump but followed through by Biden, has exposed the house of cards that 20 years of corruption, warlordism and mismanagement had built. The collapse of the central government was so fast because Afghanistan never had a central government, just a collection of regional tribal warlords who paid lip service to the government in Kabul for as long as US dollars were flowing. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of imperial ambitions for the British and Russians in the past, and has proved the same for the United States today. Not that it will necessarily be plain sailing for the Taliban either; they are enmeshed in Pashtun society, but Pashtuns only represent 45% of the country, and there will be resistance from Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north, just as there was in 2001, and Iranian-backed Tamurs in the west.

Still, I think Afghanistan marks the end of Liberal Interventionism, certainly for now. There has been no attempt to corral even 'coalitions of the willing' into Yemen, Tigray or South Sudan, let alone Syria. France has a presence in Mali to fight Al Qaeda afiliates, but president Macron is scaling that back and there is no pretence at 'nation building' any more. The world has become more complex, with the re-emergence of global powers, mainly China, but Russia has punched above its weight via leveraging the internet and deniable guerilla operations, and India is also beginning to flex its muscles on the international stage. 

If the Strange Death of the British Liberal Party was as a result of picking fights it lost while being outflanked by new forces rising in the country, then perhaps the Strange Death of Liberal Interventionism is a similar story; picking fights in Iraq and Afghanistan that could not be won, while China and other major powers change the dynamics of geopolitics. I once told a disbelieving friend that future history books would date the decline of the post-WWII western hegemony to the financial crisis of 2008-9. I still believe that to an extent, though I admit I had underestimated the effect of China's demographic time bomb - resulting from the One Child policy - on dramatically slowing its seemingly inexorable rise. I wonder now if they might instead point to the inglorious retreat from Afghanistan as the final nail in its coffin.