Ghost Town - The Specials (Ghost Town, 1981)

So, like I said, 1981 things weren't looking too good in the UK, and it all boiled over in April with major rioting in Brixton, which kicked off an explosive summer of street battles. By the time Mark and I arrived to spend our summer holidays with our grandparents, the nightly news was full of flying bricks and burning cars as rioting raged up and down the country. Handsworth, Toxteth, Southall, Moss Side were a long way from the idyllic country life of Waltham St. Lawrence, but my grandparents talked of nothing else. The rioting hit its peak in early July. Sypathetically, 'Ghost Town' hit number #1 on the UK singles chart on July 7th and stayed there for three weeks.

Keep in mind that this was the era before MuchMusic and MTV. Music video was in its infancy, and, if you lived in England, everything stopped on Thursday night for Top of the Pops, the weekly chart show where with a countdown, live performances and awkward dancing. I remember seeing The Specials on TOTP that July. I was 14 years old, and I really wasn't sure what the hell was going on in England that summer, but I was absolutely convinced that 'Ghost Town' was going to give me a better idea than sitting in the country listening to my grandparents perspective on Britain's decay. I'm pretty sure this is the performance we saw. There's a bleak little video too.

Top of the Pops was cancelled by the BBC last year. They say it was because they couldn't compete with 24-hour music channels. I like to think it was because they went back and had a look at the archives and realized they hadn't done anything relevant since July 1981 and gave up out of self-disgust.

One in Ten - UB40 (Present Arms, 1981)

UB-40 are often dismissed as 'reggae-light' and, certainly by the time they were known in North America for 'Rat in the Kitchen' and Neil Diamond's 'Red Red Wine', the cap probably fit. However, Present Arms stands up as a solid document of the mood of discontent and social upheaval in Lady Thatcher's (more on her later) England. There are better songs on the album, but 'One in Ten' has stayed with me the longest. The teenaged me probably identified with the 1:10 living on the margins, isolated and mis-understood... a relatively benign bit of melodrama that leaves the rapidly middle-aging cringing with embarassment.

UB-40 also reminds me of me friend Michael Storch, mostly because he bares (bore) a pretty convincing resemblance to the band's lead singer Ali Campbell.

Youth of Eglington - Black Uhuru (Red, 1981)

When we started to dig a little deeper, we learned that there was more to reggae than Bob Marley. Black Uhuru was a discovery of my friend Michael Storch. Officially my longest serving pal, I've known Michael since Grade 3. He was always a little odd, but charmingly so. Somewhere along the way Michael discovered that you could borrow an unlimited number of records from the Southgate Public Library at any one time. Every two weeks he would return home with a massive stack of vinyl, more often than not chosen by the cover art. Things he liked would be copied to cassette (he still has a substantial collection of cassettes built through this approach) and played in his father's white (?) Toyota as we cruised around looking for places to drink coffee. I'm pretty sure this is how Black Uhuru entered our universe. Michael lives in Montreal and remains obsessed by Patrik Fitzgerald, one of the oddest of his odd discoveries.

Positive Vibration - Bob Marley & The Wailers (Rastaman Vibration, 1976)

Let's put aside The Pogues and the punks for a moment and talk about reggae and ska, shall we? Bob Marley: the alpha and omega of any discussion of reggae... not that we knew any better in 1982 when this was the soundtrack of the summer (and fall, and winter, and spring) of Grade 10. I first heard this record at my friend Dave Pankhurst's house. Dave I'd known since my first day of elementary school in Edmonton in 1975. He started Grade 3 with me at Westbrook Elementary in Aspen Gardens. I asked him if I could borrow his 'rubber'. He had no idea what I was talking about. We were estranged for a while during junior high, then re-united in high school. Dave's parents were always away, which made his house the logical place to hang around during spares (when we weren't otherwise studiously engaged in learning). His house had two things that set it apart from those of all my other friends: 1) a swimming pool; 2) the most elaborate stereo system you have ever seen including the biggest set of speakers known to mankind. We put both of these unique features to exhaustive use, much to the chagrin of Dave's neighbours.

I should also add that Dave is one of the very few people I know whose claim to be descended from somebody famous actually stands up to scrutiny. His great great (?) grandmother was Emily Pankhurst, a militant suffragette who fought for the right of women to vote.

Streams of Whiskey - The Pogues (Red Roses for Me, 1984)

This was my Xmas present from Mark in 1984 (?) - on cassette, of course, so that I could play it on my Walkman... actually it wasn't a real SONY Walkman, I only had some cheap rip off. It sounds improbable, but the Walkman was every bit as revolutionary in 1984 as the iPod is today. Everybody had one, and the newspapers were full of articles talking about an epidemic of premature hearing loss resulting from a generation of teens blasting their music too loud. Erin might differ, but I don't appear to have suffered a significant decay in my hearing resulting from too much Pogues - despite my best efforts. Pogues singer Shane MacGowan is both one of rock's greatest poets and biggest drunks. A quick perusal of the photo galleries of his website reveal just how deeply he's been ravaged by the bottle. MacGowan commits slow suicide. Meanwhile his 'Fairytale of New York' becomes further entrenched as one of the few meaningful recent contributions to the Christmas song book; one of the most popular songs of the season. It's a double achievement worthy of Dylan Thomas.

911 Is A Joke - Public Enemy (Fear of A Black Planet, 1990)

I don't know what I was doing when hip hop 'happened', but 15+ years after the release of Fear of A Black Planet, I'm a little embarassed to say I really wasn't paying attention. I was totally distracted by others things (many of which appear on vol. II of this compilation). However, you couldn't really have a pulse in 1990 and not be aware of Public Enemy. In retrospect they represent a special moment culturally, when there was something genuinely dangerous and subversive going on in 'mainstream' hip hop - before everybody got hysterical about gangstas and bling - before it was all about money and misogyny. Hip Hop and punk rock ran on parallel tracks in the 1980's and neither style has really survived the inevitable dumbing down at the hands of major labels, commercial radio and MTV / Much Music. Hip Hop in the 1980's represents something of a music regret for me. I wish I'd spent as much time listening to Chuck D as I did moping about to a soundtrack by Morrissey (vol. II, track 3).

MTV Get Off The Air - Dead Kennedys (Frankenchrist, 1985)

So, we've had British punk, New York punk, and Edmonton punk. This is California punk, characterized by being fast, nasty, and oh, so sarcastic! Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra was/is the king of the sarcastic punk sneer. I saw the DK's at Sports World Roller Rink in October, 1984. A mere four years earlier, Sports World was the place we went to every Saturday morning (a walk to the #54 bus, change to the #69 at Southgate Mall) for Roller Disco. Amazing how things change between the ages of 13 and 17. It's hard to properly explain how odd it was to be standing on the roller rink watching Chi Pig (S.N.F.U. opened) and then Jello Biafra do their thing. Media reports of the time don't really do it justice. My most enduring memory of the show is seeing the mosh pit parting like the Red Sea as a - somewhat portly - local punk Kelly Simpson (lead singer of Cadillac of Worms) took his turn to stage dive. Poor Kelly bounced ever so slightly off the plastic floor then slowly took himself off to a quiet corner to lick his not inconsiderable wounds.