23. MYLENE FARMER – “Libertine” (1985)
Events overtook me – they overtook everyone – and two weeks ago, when I posted this song to Bluesky, seems a very long time indeed. I’ll try to reconstruct this ancient era.
When I think about 80s French pop I think of M. Le Moigne, my French teacher for a year or so after I’d taken my O-Level, got a B, and was stuck doing French for a couple of terms longer because they couldn’t find anything else to take its spot on the syllabus. Le Moigne was a soixante-huitard who used to set us documents from the era, sit us down to watch classic French cinema like Le Trou and Le Salaire de la Peur, and got us struggling through Candide. He was one of the best teachers I ever had. He could easily be diverted onto tales of the barricades, he (inevitably) smoked endless gauloises, and he would also sometimes play us his favourite French rock music, which I’m sorry to say we mocked.
Mylene Farmer wasn’t one of the artists he liked, but the intense theatricality of “Libertine” – best experienced in an 11-minute video which would have cost the guy his job if he’d showed it to us – takes me back to that summer and my crash course in Francophone culture. It is French beyond the schoolboy dreams of Frenchness, involving 18th century duels, naked women in a bath, the howling of wolves, and a very symbolic horse. It’s also a wonderful piece of synthpop, with the characteristic flimsiness of French 80s production working particularly well with Farmer’s very breathy voice.
22. KATE BUSH – “Hounds Of Love” (1986)
In one way very similar in vibe to “Libertine” – you can imagine Mylene Farmer’s collaborator/director champing at the bit to get at this one – in another… well, just listen to those drums smash in after “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” and know you’re in the presence of someone who is not fannying around, productionwise. Everyone who’s written this up for the challenge has talked about the terrifying, amazing feeling of falling in love, me included, and yes that is what the song is about. But it’s also my favourite Kate Bush song because of its deep connection to landscape and nature – the trees, the lake, the fox. It’s the most English of songs, bringing the rolling countryside of Southern England, where I’ve lived all my life, unavoidably to my mind.
21. FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD – “Two Tribes” (1984)
This was the pick originally scheduled for November 5th, I dropped it back a bit and I’m glad I did. The thing about nuclear war and the 80s is that it was mostly truly terrifying but it was in some tiny reptilian part of the brain also darkly exciting – not in the shitty survivalist Twilight 2000 sense of imagining you personally might end up as a post-apocalyptic warlord but in the “inner Doctor Strangelove” sense of the sheer scale of everything you had ever known ending all at once. Frankie Goes To Hollywood understood this when they recast armageddon as something you could dance to, synthesised basslines and high-NRG keyboards pushing into the red as Holly Johnson drops a series of extraordinary one-liner slogans.
These days I am rather less keen on that death-urge, though we’re reminded day in, day out how strongly it still exists.
20. GETO BOYS – “Mind Playin’ Tricks On Me” (1991)
One of rap’s darkest, most dread-laden songs – not the horrorcore gothic grand guignol of someone like Gravediggaz, but true, clammy paranoia. I read about it before I heard it, in a Greil Marcus book, talking about how the mysterious “lawman” (which I always heard as “ol’ man”) in Bushwick Bill’s song is an avatar of Stagger Lee and Satan. Not much doubt about the latter – Bill’s verse is a grade-A ghost story told in a minute, with an ending that flips the situation into something even less comfortable than a meeting with the devil, who you can after all bargain with. As the years have gone by I’ve learned to love the other verses to the song as much – more subtle but just as chilling narratives of minds on the edge of a breakdown.
19. TAFFY – “I Love My Radio” (1986)
One thing I noticed doing the sorting and filtering for this challenge was how often I was turning to the most upfront, trashy tunes of my youth, like Taffy, which if you’re being flattering you could say is Italo disco (she’s from Deptford but the song came out on an Italian label and was a hit there first). But you could just as easily describe it as holiday pop, the soundtrack to pissed-up nights in Meditteranean nightclubs, brought home as a souvenir. As I pointed out at one point on Popular that’s also the story of acid house and Balearic Beat; it’s just a question of the lens you look at this stuff through.
There’s a few reasons I’m drawn to songs like this at the moment, good and bad. On the good side I like its unpretentious immediacy – “I Love My Radio” is not trying to be anything other than a dancepop banger, a job it executes perfectly. On the bad side I suspect the prominence of this is a kind of decadent impulse – we’re considering a stretch of years I lived through, have thought about and returned to many times, and most recently polled a lot of on Twitter – no doubt I’m drawn to tackier pleasures to escape the burden of critical overthought.