Naples, 1989: Roberto Baggio comes of age

“I’m not Maradona — he’s something else entirely.” Roberto Baggio may have been wise to distance himself from the best player in the world, but there was a time when comparisons with Napoli’s captain were inevitable, especially if you wore the number ten shirt. For three seasons Baggio had ostensibly fulfilled that role for Fiorentina following the retirement of club captain Giancarlo Antognoni. But they were frustrating years conditioned by painful recovery from the career-threatening damage to his right knee suffered while playing for Vicenza in May 1985 and again for his new club in September 1986. I’ll spare you a gory retelling of the hundreds of stitches, and dramatic weight loss, and the tears that he would never play again.

By 1988 Baggio had regained fitness and had begun to leave an impression on a league already packed with attacking talent. He scored 15 goals during the 1988-89 campaign and two more by week four of the 1989-90 season. Next up was a visit to Naples. Napoli remained unbeaten in Serie A under new mister Albertino Bigon, yet Maradona had so far yet to kick a ball. He’d fallen out with club president Corrado Ferlaino, and in protest had granted himself an extended vacation after that summer’s Copa América. Wearing a heavy beard and the number 16 shirt, Maradona made his belated return to the side as a substitute in a goalless UEFA Cup tie at Sporting, just three days before the Fiorentina match. The following Sunday he again started from the bench, alongside a young Gianfranco Zola. Fiorentina’s coach, Sven-Göran Eriksson, had also gone to Lisbon, Benfica specifically. His replacement, Bruno Giorgi, was the same man that had launched Baggio’s career at Vicenza and taken the club from Serie C1 to Italy’s top flight.

Such mini subplots may have sold some newspapers in the days leading up to the match, but this was 1989: “social media” meant chatting at the bar over a macchiato and the morning papers, while Serie A had yet to reorganise its weekend schedule to favour the casual armchair spectator. Referees still dressed in black, and all matches kicked off simultaneously on a Sunday afternoon. On 17th September 1989, as Napoli and Fiorentina took the field at the Stadio San Paolo, Inter and Juventus were lining up to face each other some 400 miles away at San Siro. Not all eyes were on Naples, and any hype generated before kick-off was tempered by the collective understanding that regardless of the sacred rituals and frenzied passions that calcio no doubt cultivates, sometimes a football match is just a football match.

And what a match it was. Perhaps still groggy from their trip to Portugal, Napoli started poorly and by half-time were two-nil down. Maradona came on for Massimo Mauro after the interval, and within ninety seconds of the restart had already missed a penalty. Stefano Pioli deflected the ball into his own net, then Careca equalised. Three minutes remained when a Maradona cross was met by Giancarlo Corradini’s head: 3-2. The result put Napoli on top of the Serie A table, which is where they finished the season in April. Though the unlikely comeback launched Napoli’s march towards a second scudetto, the game is still recalled for one reason only: Roberto Baggio, who scored both of Fiorentina’s goals. The second was a routine penalty, but the first saw the young forward travel three-quarters of the length of the pitch with the ball (in Italy they call this kind of run a “coast-to-coast”). It was the sort of individual effort with which Baggio would become forever associated, and to which magazine articles are devoted some thirty-five years later. Only one other active player in Serie A could have scored such a goal, but on this occasion he could only watch in admiration from the Napoli bench.

The move began in the twenty-second minute inside Fiorentina’s own penalty area, where a swift exchange between Napoli’s twin attacking threats, Careca and Carnevale, was anticipated by the balding Battistini who, in the libero tradition, wore his shirt untucked. He immediately played the ball out to the pragmatic Dunga, a player whose very existence defied every Brazilian footballer stereotype. The stocky mediano turned and found Baggio, still deep in his own half. Eleven seconds later Fiorentina were in front. What happened in between Baggio receiving the ball and depositing it in the back of the Napoli net is hard to describe, and even harder to explain. Over 50,000 people witnessed the goal with their own eyes, but such accounts can be unreliable; for this kind of forensic study one must turn to the video evidence. The television images are equally hazy and deeply saturated, but their vibrant colours and elongating shadows instantly convey a warm afternoon in September. As Baggio starts to move up field, his socks already shoved down towards his ankles, not even the halfway line — let alone the opposition’s goal — has yet come into view. Surely even he must have been only vaguely aware of his destination, which at that point was represented by a distant rectangle in his peripheral vision. No player in that position thinks, I’m going to score. Or maybe they do. Baggio once described a similar goal against Milan as “the kind I used to score in the hallway at home, only this time the hallway was San Siro.”

Baggio trots unencumbered into Napoli’s half and then quickly outpaces Alemão, who soon gives up the chase. The camera switches to a tighter angle as defenders arrive to halt Baggio’s one-man attack, appearing one by one like hapless bad guys in a kung-fu movie. First up is Alessandro Renica, whose challenge Baggio evades easily, cutting inside and hopping over a trailing left leg with the apparent nonchalance of a Kenyan steeplechaser. Next, Corradini comes hurtling into view with a desperate, sliding lunge, but both Baggio and the ball are already long gone. Recognising that something special is developing, the television director cuts back to a wider shot as Baggio enters the box. Only Napoli’s goalkeeper, the improbably named Giuliano Giuliani, stands in his way. If Baggio had been any other player, he might have laid the ball square to present unmarked Argentine forward Oscar Dertycia with a simple tap-in. But he wasn’t, and so he doesn’t. Instead he feints to shoot with his right foot before rolling the ball past Giuliani with the sole of his same boot. Facing an open goal, a left-foot finish looks like the natural option, but Baggio pulls off a final twist, shifting his weight to slot home with his right. By the time Napoli’s Luca Fusi follows the ball over the line, the goalscorer is already jogging towards the corner flag to celebrate.

Two-and-a-half years earlier Baggio had scored his very first Serie A for la viola goal at the other end of the same stadium. That goal — the type of free-kick that would also become a trademark — earned Fiorentina a point and ensured the club’s survival on the penultimate day of the 1986-87 season. For Baggio, it also represented a release, and a belated rite of passage. He’d missed the entirety of the 1985-86 season and the bulk of 1986-87 following two surgeries in as many years to restore the wreckage of his ligaments and cartilage. Yet few home fans will likely have remembered Baggio’s first goal, as it coincided with the occasion of Napoli’s historic first scudetto. In 1989 the reaction was very different. This time the San Paolo crowd rose as one to applaud not just Baggio’s skill, vision and impudence, but also his perseverance — attributes to which the partenopei had grown accustomed thanks to their own number ten, for whom the stadium would one day be named.

The next evening Baggio and Carnevale appeared together in matching Azzurri training wear from Italy’s Coverciano training headquarters on Il Processo del lunedì, Rai Tre’s long-running Monday night football show. Hosted by Aldo Biscardi, a journalist with a background in law, the weekly live transmission helped popularise the slow-motion machine known as moviola, an innovation that could extend heated debates concerning dubious offside decisions into the early hours. For this episode, given his exploits the previous afternoon, Baggio himself was asked to comment on the footage while his “gol da leggenda” was played back at a reduced speed.

“We’ve enlarged the pictures as much as possible so we can also see Baggio’s facial expressions,” begins Paolo Valenti by way of an introduction, aiming a telescopic pointer at a giant screen like a university lecturer. “This is Renica,” he notes, as though identifying a continent for the benefit of a class of struggling geography students. “I’d like kids who want to play football to see this,” he continues, describing the goal in didactic terms more suited to a masterful set-piece of cinema before breaking down the action into a checklist of pure technical accomplishments. “Ball control, change of direction, acceleration, deceleration, an obstacle jump and then the finishing touch,” Valenti concludes. “It’s a textbook of style.”

Valenti never disclosed his footballing allegiance, but after his unexpected death in 1990 it was revealed that he was a Fiorentina supporter. Baggio’s own live commentary is predictably mundane by comparison: he sounds more like a man offering directions to the nearest farmacia. There are long pauses as he waits for the moviola to catch up — the playback speed has been slowed down to the extent that it takes a full seventy seconds for the goal to be replayed. When the ball finally nestles in the corner of Napoli’s goalmouth Valenti cries, “Olé!” The audience breaks into a spontaneous applause. No other words are necessary.

Two nights later Azeglio Vicini’s Italy played a friendly with Bulgaria in Cesena, where Baggio (wearing the number seven shirt) scored another doppietta. One goal was another coolly dispatched penalty. The other — a typically pacy run around the keeper and a cool finish into an unguarded net — proved that his performance at Napoli the previous weekend wasn’t a one-off. In less than a week, Baggio had confirmed the interest of Juventus and consecrated his status as the host nation’s most exciting young talent ahead of Italia ’90. The 1989-90 season is generally considered Baggio’s best in a Fiorentina shirt. There was much more to come in his career, but by the end of the decade Baggio was no longer compared to Maradona or anyone else. From that point forward other players would be compared to him, though few ever really could.

 

This article was originally published in issue 31 of Mundial magazine.

The moon’s reflection glistened on the inky bay as the midnight blue Lancia sat at a lonely red light. The night was quiet, the air thick with the scent of bougainvillea. A buzzing Vespa punctured the silence and pulled alongside, its teenage rider inching forward on his toes to get a closer look at the car’s UK plates. At this point my father noticed the pistol strapped to the boy’s waist, and with his right hand immediately rolled up the driver’s side window. This was my parents’ inauspicious introduction to Naples, on a sweltering and sultry night forty-five years ago. It was their last summer without children, but they recalled details from the trip so frequently over the years that it sometimes feels as though I was there. In a way I was: my mother was four months pregnant at the time.

They had driven down from England with another couple, the brother of one half of whom was engaged to a young woman from Naples named Concetta. She and her fiancé were back in England, but her family were still more than happy to host their future brother-in-law and his wife, plus their friends in the form of my mum and dad, lending truth to the stereotype of southern Italian hospitality.

My parents stayed at Concetta’s grandma’s apartment which was opposite that of her own parents, in a four-storey building near the water. It was surrounded by near-identical buildings divided by gardens abundant with plum tomato plants, the fruit from which went straight into the daily sugo. Every couple of days a man selling vegetables from a cart made the rounds, and would replenish a basket lowered from the balcony by Concetta’s mother, Giovanna.

Food occupied a considerable portion of the Naples experience. Every day Giovanna prepared epic dinners that ran late into the night. My dad used to remember how just as it seemed the meal was ending, several more courses would arrive from the kitchen. Though the food kept coming, Giovanna didn’t eat any of it. Instead she just watched from the doorway, a cigarette in one hand, while intermittently poking her cheek with the knuckle of the other as if to say, “Buono, vero?”

On one such evening Concetta’s younger brother arrived home from a “notte brava” wearing a peaked cap which had, until recently, belonged to the uniform of some unlucky officer from the carabinieri. He then proceeded to sport it around the house at a jaunty angle.

On another evening Giovanna was granted a night off, and instead they all ate at a waterfront pizzeria. The best in town, apparently, not that four young English people would have known the difference in 1978 (or even today). In the early hours they repaired to the home of another relative — Uncle Rosario — where more local specialties awaited. To this day my mum can still recall the dual challenge of struggling to finish arancini while also trying to stay awake.

When they weren’t seated at a large marble table my parents and their friends were being shown around the city by their exemplary hosts. They were also taken on a boat trip to the nearby island of Capri. On their last day they drove to the foot of Mount Vesuvius, from where you could take an old wooden train towards the Gran Cono at the summit. As the train ascended, my mum stood holding a metal pole while gazing out the window at the Gulf of Naples gradually coming into view. Suddenly, she felt a strange sensation in her stomach, almost like butterflies. But it wasn’t vertigo that was causing this new feeling, nor the breathtaking panorama. It was me.

Having been subjected to the overwhelming sounds and smells (if not yet sights) of Naples over several days, evidently I couldn’t take it anymore, and using my tiny body did my best to make my presence felt. The incident became a running joke in my house growing up: that I loved Italy so much I knew it before I was even born. Of course that isn’t true — I highly doubt these were conscious decisions on my part — but in some subconscious way I’d perhaps recognised my spiritual home.

* * *

When I eventually (and reluctantly) emerged five months later it was on a snowy night in Nottingham. I’ve often maintained I was born in the wrong place, half-joking. The half that isn’t joking soon decided to do something about it, and from the age of about twelve I began imagining one day living in Italy. It was a fantasy that later became a plan, in great part thanks to several trips I’d already made there. On those early holidays we drove everywhere and stayed in Siena, Rome and Venice, but my parents never returned to Naples, despite my frequent suggestions. As a young football fan discovering the allure of calcio, Naples seemed a natural destination since it’s where both Maradona and Careca played at the time. I still remember cheap knock-offs of the team’s blue shirts (emblazoned with the ‘Mars’ sponsor) hanging from bancarelle outside the Uffizi. More importantly, I found Naples appealing because it represented what were already, for me, three of the key attractions of city life, all depressingly absent from small town Leicestershire: heat, beauty and danger. In my impressionable head at least, Naples exuded these in abundance. Instead, during idle moments elsewhere in Italy I amused myself by reading aloud from an already outdated and dog-eared copy of a Michelin guide that my parents kept in the door of their Renault. This particular edition had been published in 1971, but could have been written a century earlier: “The Neapolitans are small and dark, with almost Grecian profiles.”

In 1989 my dad (who was a high school art teacher) started running an exchange with a liceo in Borgo San Lorenzo, a small town in the Mugello, a picturesque valley a few miles north of Florence. Through the success of the programme he made friends with several Italian colleagues, one of whom was an English professoressa named Bibi. That was only a nickname. Her given name was Fortunata. But everyone called her Bibi so we did too. Not even five feet tall, she was probably almost sixty when I first met her, but already seemed older (I remember being surprised that her mother, who lived in the adjacent apartment, was still alive). Bibi had been born in the same town but had moved to Naples as a small child, later studying languages at the university. She lived in Genoa, Milan and England in the sixties before returning to Borgo in 1973. By the time we encountered her she owned her entire building, whose unforgettable address was Via Leonardo da Vinci. The cold marble floors and gilded chandeliers of Bibi’s ground floor apartment would, in time, become as familiar to me as the electric fireplace in my own grandmother’s bungalow.

We stayed with Bibi every summer until I was nineteen. My brother and I slept in the living room on a leather “Anfibio” sofa bed (designed by Alessandro Becchi in 1972). During my degree I spent a year studying in Pavia, and after graduating from university moved back to Italy. By this point Bibi’s mother had died, and she kindly offered to host me while I looked for an apartment and a job in Florence. Having recently retired, Bibi had taken in a small but hyperactive black cat whom she’d christened Cholmondeley, after a character in some old novel. Bibi now rarely left the house unless absolutely necessary, and her reclusive nature only seemed to enhance her legend around town, as if she were a forgotten star from the golden age of cinema.

For several years Bibi had employed a woman named Tina to keep the apartment clean and cook her meals, duties that soon expanded to include laundry, grocery shopping, and any other errand that might arise (and they often did). Tina was in her thirties, and married without children. She was also from Naples, and just like Bibi, also went by a nickname. Her actual name was Immacolata, a somewhat burdensome moniker for anyone born in the past century. (Before Tina, Bibi’s housekeeper was a tall, elegant woman from Somalia called Lula — who knows if that was her real name.)

Tina arrived at the apartment every morning around ten, usually with several bags from the supermarket in tow, which she’d begin unloading in the kitchen before lighting a cigarette. Lunch was served at one o’clock and dinner at eight, a precise schedule designed to coincide with both editions of the telegiornale on Canale 5, whose dramatic intro theme served as a cue for Tina to drain the pasta. Bibi’s hearing had begun to wane, to the extent that the volume of the television could prohibit meaningful conversation. On the evenings I returned for dinner after an aperitivo with friends, I remember being able to hear la tivù blaring TG5 from down the street.

Bibi ate very little. What she did eat she’d wash down from a fiasco of Vernaccia, which she’d dilute from a jug of water, probably since she’d already enjoyed her pre-dinner staple: a tumbler of Punt e Mes without ice. Perhaps to compensate Tina heaped vast servings of pasta into my bowl, sometimes twice in one day. Her culinary repertoire didn’t veer far from the neapolitan classics, which was absolutely fine by me. In the spring she’d make pastiera, the famous Easter cake, which I considered her specialty. Tina had Sundays off, and so would often leave a large dish of pasta al forno for Bibi and me in the fridge, complete with heating instructions. If not, I cooked for the two of us myself.

Behind the dining table was a large dresser. Amid the antique silver dishes and floral vases sat an incongruous straw donkey, around whose neck hung a blue pennant with a large letter ‘N’ on it. Bibi still followed Napoli from afar, and every Sunday evening used to ask me their result: “Cos’ha fatto il Napoli?” Unfortunately the once champions of Italy were languishing in Serie B at the time, and without the internet I often had to wait until I’d picked up La Gazzetta the next morning before I could break the often disappointing news.

Bibi and Tina made quite the pair, constantly teasing and bickering like an old married couple, while each complaining about the other to me in private. You would never have known they’d grown up in the same city. Bibi spoke the closest thing to a true Italian with an academic precision, regularly stepping in to correct me when I misgendered a noun or fluffed a passato remoto conjugation. She devoured books in English (my mum regularly sent her the latest fiction) and liked to ask me to explain peculiar idioms she’d stumbled upon. We used to watch a nightly game show called Passaparola and light-hearted drama series such as Il Maresciallo Rocca or Elisa di Rivombrosa. On the other hand, Tina’s broad accent was sometimes difficult for me to understand, and her speech was peppered with dialectal phrases in napoletano. In the afternoons we’d often watch MTV together while Bibi napped.

I only planned to be at Bibi’s for a couple of weeks. I ended up staying five months. After I moved to Florence I’d return for lunch about once a month, and I could tell Bibi missed having me there. That this unlikely friendship would be born from a cultural exchange programme was appropriate. Italy was like a beautiful shop window against whose glass my nose had been pressed for years. Bibi’s generosity had flung open the doors, after which there was no turning back.

* * *

I stayed in Florence for four years, but aside from the occasional day trip or a couple of weekends out of town I never had extra money to travel. By the time I saw Naples for the first time I was living in New York. My wife and I drove there on the A3 autostrada from the Amalfi Coast, where we were staying in a bed and breakfast in Ravello. I didn’t drive at the time, so my wife was the one to navigate the city’s notorious traffic, though it was during daylight hours and thankfully we didn’t cross any armed delinquents on two wheels.

We strolled down Via Toledo, through Galleria Umberto I, stopped for a coffee at Gambrinus, wandered Piazza del Plebiscito, admired the graffiti and hanging laundry lines off Via Lungo del Gelso, stumbled over mounds of refuse on Via Chiaia, and ate lunch at Pizzeria Brandi. Walking down Via Cesario Console towards the bay we saw Vesuvius looming in the distance, so we stopped at Via Nazario Sauro to take a photo across the water. I’d expected to feel something, some sort of ethereal but undeniable connection to a city that had grown mythical in my mind over time, precisely by virtue of never having been there. But I felt nothing in particular, and quickly realised I had no special connection to Naples, besides one inconsequential anecdote that happened before I was even born. I was now older than my mother had been when she felt me kick (or roll over) for the first time. After thirty-two years I was just another tourist.

Like many famous non-capital port cities — Liverpool, Hamburg, Barcelona, New York — Naples sits apart from the rest of the country. It is a country unto itself, and its unique “otherness” is undoubtedly part of its fascination, especially to foreigners. Naples may always remain a subject of ridicule and abuse among many northern Italians, but outside Italy, its image has perhaps never been healthier. Today Naples exists for me through the music of Pino Daniele, the films of Giuseppe Sorrentino, or the novels of Elena Ferrante. From the comfort of my own home I’ve watched Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli side gallop to the cusp of the club’s third scudetto, and whether it’s a candlelit shrine to Diego Maradona or a cat dozing alongside a leather-skinned fisherman, social media projects the best of Naples. It’s an excess of content in more vivid detail than I could have hoped to consume thirty years ago, and though I’m writing this from a distance of some 4,000 miles, Naples somehow feels closer than ever. But while the mystique it once held for me has been finally stripped bare, it remains forever out of reach. It’s not exactly a return to the womb, but you might say I’m back where I started.

This article originally appeared on The Culture Division.

Italy’s new badge and football’s design direction

The new year may only be a few days old, but Italy’s football federation, the Federazione Italia Giuoco Calcio (FIGC), has already revealed its new logo. In fact, it’s launched two: the federation’s new logo appeared back in October, but the latest reveal is of significant greater interest since it will be worn by the Italian national team on its shirts. “We’re ready for the future,” claimed FIGC president Gabriele Gravina at the brand launch, perhaps not speaking for everyone.

This is not the first time the Azzurri have altered their badge. When Italy won consecutive World Cups in 1934 and 1938, they wore the arms of Savoy on their blue shirts. Following the birth of the Italian Republic in a 1946 referendum, a simple shield design was adopted, incorporating the colors of the Italian flag (without a coat of arms) beneath the word “ITALIA.” This design remained essentially unchanged for over thirty years, but the new logo is the fifth complete overhaul since 1984, more than any other major national team in the same period.

Italy’s previous logo was only launched in 2017, towards the end of the doomed qualification campaign for the 2018 World Cup. According to then FIGC president Carlo Tavecchio, it had apparently been in the works for three years. So it’s especially surprising that it would be ditched after just five years, considering that the job itself must have been assigned even sooner than that (assuming the work wasn’t knocked out during the World Cup).

The project itself was entrusted to Independent Ideas, a creative agency owned by Gianni Agnelli’s grandson, Lapo Elkann. With offices in Turin and Milan, the company’s clients include some of the biggest international Italian brands, such as Fiat, Ferrari and Gucci, though their work is more typically campaign-driven. One can only assume that Elkann’s connections in football had something to do with securing the job, but to the FIGC’s credit at least it wasn’t outsourced abroad (unlike the recent rebrand of Inter).
 

The new logo was revealed on January 3rd: strong reactions were as immediate as they were predictable. The democratic nature of social media deems that seemingly any person with eyes and an iPhone can be a graphic design critic. Some online observers have likened Italy’s new badge to the kind you’d find on a cheap knock-off jersey at your local market. While I’m inclined to agree, I shall first attempt an objective review.

Let’s start with the shape itself, which, like Italy’s last two crests, is ostensibly a continuation of Italy’s traditional shield. But where previous designs’ two sides met to form an elegant point, the new shape has a continuous sagging curve, like a semi-circle that’s been tacked on the bottom of a rectangle. The effect is a bulbous logo that appears too tall.

This issue is further compounded by the gently arched top, an odd choice considering that “ITALIA” sits on a straight line. The type appears centered between the logo’s thick borders, but no optical adjustment has been made to account for the extra negative space in the top-right area created by the final letter A, resulting in a logo that feels unbalanced. As for the type itself, the last two Italy logos employed elegant typefaces that subtly recalled aspects of Italian history and design. This new, condensed bold font is neither sophisticated enough to continue these important legacies, nor distinctive enough to justify its selection.

Italy’s colours — the tricolore of its flag and famous azzurro of its national team — are well established, but the new design still manages to misuse them. The type, outline and stars are all rendered in white, further cheapening the overall aesthetic. The familiar gold is reserved for the “FIGC” letters, though their clumsy inclusion frankly looks like an afterthought. Several colourways of the badge have been released, presumably for use on home, away and third shirts, as well as other graphic purposes. By simply inverting the blue and white but not the tricolore, the away version ends up with a central white panel of a different width due to an invisible separation.

Everything about the new badge, especially the outer border, feels too chunky, which only accentuates the issues already mentioned. None of the details seem considered, resulting in a logo that is poorly executed, and utterly devoid of the style and elegance associated with the country in question or the illustrious traditions of its national team. This restyling strips “La Nazionale” of any authority or historical grandeur, in a moment when it could certainly use them as inspiration to rebuild.
 

Whatever your thoughts on the new logo, this project is definitely representative of a modern desire for football teams to embark on thorough reappraisals of their brand identities, an undertaking more typically associated with large corporations. Moreover, it’s also the latest example of a micro-trend in Italy for teams to make radical visual departure from their classic look. In recent years Juventus, Inter and Fiorentina have gone through major rebrands. In each case, the new logo was poorly received (by football followers and graphic designers alike), but the clubs persisted nevertheless.

Football fans have a deeper connection to their team than they do to, say, their chosen brand of dishwasher tablets or preferred food delivery app. It should go without saying that a football team’s identity should be updated with caution and respect. But the long-term supporter is perhaps no longer the target demographic. As clubs look to expand their reach in emerging markets, existing, local fans matter less and less, and how the logo will look on a team’s shirt is today, sadly, of secondary concern.

In 2023, a football club or national team requires a thorough brand identity for myriad digital communication purposes. But this also means that a football team’s crest must function in new marketing contexts and therefore satisfy more people, some of whose interests may lie outside football. Anyone who’s worked in the corporate world knows that when a committee is granted input on a creative process the results are invariably safe, bland, and ultimately ineffective. To perhaps illustrate this point, the new logo has been launched together with a banal slogan, “Created by emotions,” as well as an accompanying “sound identity” — specifically a few seconds of a vaguely operatic chorus mixed over generic club beats. The precise purpose of this hopefully short-lived innovation has yet to be revealed.

Amid the fervour surrounding the new badge’s launch, it’s telling that few have actually questioned the necessity of this project in the first place. Italy may be going through a period of transition on the pitch, but the FIGC’s decision to undergo yet another redesign has the feel of an iconic brand changing its look in a desperate attempt to reverse a temporary dip in sales. Of course, Italy’s failure to qualify for the last two World Cups represents an undeniable dual low-point for the Azzurri. But between those sporting disasters, Mancini’s side also managed to become European Champions, playing the best football of the tournament.

The Italian national team may have its problems right now, but the badge on their shirt has never been one of them.

 
 

A version of this article originally appeared on The Culture Division.

The return of Fiorentina’s retro logo was welcomed on social media. In Florence, not so much…

Summer is the best time to be a football fan, precisely because there is no football. Instead there’s the prospect of football, the expectation of the season to come. In other words, hope. Yet the football fan is also a romantic sort, whose identity is inexorably wrapped up in the history of the club and defined by its past (for better or worse). So this summer, when the launch of Fiorentina’s new kit for the 2021-22 season provoked consternation among much of the club’s notoriously passionate following, I was amused, but not surprised.

The new shirt takes direct inspiration from those worn by Fiorentina in the mid-eighties, featuring a white horizontal band across the chest and some subtle red trim. It’s the first time the club has made an overt reference to one of its previous kits, and in most eyes the new shirts (there are four of them) are a stylish improvement on last season’s somewhat generic offering. As soon as images of the new kit began circulating around the world, social media became a frenzy as collectors snapped up the shirts without hesitation.

But Viola fans weren’t such an easy sell. The main source of their disapproval was not so much the shirt itself, but the return of the Fiorentina badge from the same period — known these days as “il logo Pontello” for the club president who introduced it — after an absence of thirty years. Perhaps anticipating a strong reaction, kit provider Kappa apparently conducted a survey among Florentines before committing to the old logo. Evidently too few people objected in order to veto the project, but it’s still a surprising move given how unpopular the logo was the first time around, and what it has come to represent for fans in the ensuing years.

After several seasons of depressing football (and results that weren’t much better), I can’t blame Fiorentina for diverting attention from the team while using the marketing of its kit to symbolize a much-needed fresh start. In terms of football kit trends, the decision to dust off an old design is not remarkable. With at least three new kits to devise every season, it’s inevitable that manufacturers should look to clubs’ colourful and storied past for inspiration, and enough time has passed that the eighties are now ripe for a reassessment. Roma reinstated their beloved “lupetto” badge on their away kit in 2016, and continue to use it as a secondary logo. Similarly, in 2018 Milan restored a stylised devil not seen since 1984, and last season Verona resurrected the badge worn when the club won its historic scudetto in 1985. Lazio have gone even further in recent years, sporting brand new kits that are faithful remakes of designs worn in the eighties. Such retro references have been mostly welcomed by fans and football shirt aficionados alike, so why is Fiorentina’s case so controversial?
 

For some kind of an answer we have to cast our minds back forty-one years, to the summer of 1980. The new decade coincided with new ownership of the club in the form of local businessman Flavio Pontello, who handed the role of club president to his son, Ranieri. The Pontello family had made their fortune in construction, and now hoped to achieve similar success in football, by building a Fiorentina team that could compete with the superpowers of Serie A. Things did not go to plan early on: Fiorentina found themselves second from bottom at the halfway point of the 1980-81 season. The team recovered to finish a respectable fifth, but like most men of ambition Pontello wanted more. He envisioned a Fiorentina that could challenge for top honours, but rather than reinforce the squad with big name players like Platini or Zico, he decided there was another factor that could help the club make that leap: the team’s kit.

And so in the summer of 1981 the club unveiled a brand new strip that took everyone by surprise. Fiorentina had worn white shorts for most of their history, but the updated uniform was all-purple, with the unprecedented addition of red trim on the collar, cuffs, and socks. In keeping with sportswear developments the kit itself was made of a shiny, silky material, though perhaps the quirkiest feature was the white circle inside which red numbers were printed on the back of the shirt. But the biggest innovation was on the front, which was dominated by an oversized new logo. Out went Fiorentina’s traditional kite-shaped badge, in its place a stylised hybrid of a giglio (the flower symbol of both city and club) and a letter F. It might be argued that the new logo’s unavoidability — boldly emblazoned across the entire body to the extent that the club’s first ever sponsor, J.D. Farrow’s, practically went unnoticed — did not help endear it to the public. Certainly Fiorentina’s loyal fans weren’t convinced, likening the design to a medieval halberd. Even fashion designer and Florentine nobleman Emilio Pucci weighed in, calling the new logo “a failure.”

The new branding may have been unpopular, but Fiorentina were not the only Italian club to refresh its look in this period. Prior to the late seventies such matters were of minor significance: kits changed infrequently and most team shirts didn’t feature club badges or visible sponsors. It was graphic designer Piero Gratton’s groundbreaking work for Roma — including the famous “lupetto” logo launched in 1978 — that initiated a new approach to marketing in Serie A. Soon other top clubs followed by unveiling similarly minimalist branding that owed more to corporate marketing directions than any football tradition.

Public opinion aside, the new kit did not harm Fiorentina’s performance on the pitch. Despite losing their captain, Giancarlo Antognoni, for several months following a dramatic collision with Genoa’s goalkeeper, the team were tied on points with Juventus with one match each to play. But on the final Sunday of the campaign Fiorentina could only manage a goalless draw at Cagliari, after Graziani’s goal was controversially ruled out for a foul by Bertoni on the goalkeeper. Meanwhile a questionable penalty (converted by Liam Brady) was enough to earn Juventus a victory at Catanzaro, and their twentieth scudetto. The result was Fiorentina’s best Serie A placement in thirteen years, but the achievement went uncelebrated, and the circumstances of the season’s climax proved a watershed moment in the club’s rivalry with the Turin giants.

Fiorentina stuck with the same kit for the following season, before the design was modified in the summer of 1983. Now produced by Ennerre, the new shirt was made of a knitted acrylic known as “lanetta” (literally, “light wool”) and incorporated a broad horizontal white band (as referenced this season) that extended onto the sleeves. Below this sat the circular badge, reduced in size slightly though still larger than was typical, embroidered in an unusual position around the stomach.

That strip also lasted for a cycle of two seasons, but still success eluded Fiorentina. At this point the club’s kits began to tone down the eccentric design flourishes that had come to define the Pontello era thus far. The 1985-86 shirt removed all traces of red trim and the white band from the sleeves, while the logo now appeared at a standard size on the left chest. Then in 1986 the white stripe disappeared entirely, and Fiorentina went back to sporting a kit resembling something closer to its traditions, despite adopting the inexplicable habit of wearing white socks at home for the next few seasons.

In 1989-90 Fiorentina arrived only twelfth in Serie A (their worst finish since 1978) but enjoyed an impressive run in Europe, reaching the final of the Uefa Cup. Their opponents were old foes Juventus, making it the first of that decade’s three all-Italian finals. The first leg in Turin ended 3-1 to the home side. Fiorentina had played all their home European games in Perugia due to renovations taking place in Florence for the upcoming World Cup. But for the final they were forced by Uefa to switch to a neutral ground after crowd disturbances during the semi-final. The venue chosen was the Stadio Partenio in Avellino, where, as throughout swathes of Italy’s south, Juventus could lay claim to a traditionally strong fanbase. The match ended goalless.

It was Roberto Baggio’s last game for Fiorentina. The disappointment of losing the Uefa Cup final was compounded by the sale of the club’s young star to Juventus for a then-record £8 million. The transfer was confirmed two days after the second leg, prompting irate fans to take to the streets of Florence in protest. Two days of rioting resulted in injuries and property damage to the club’s headquarters, and even disrupted the Italy squad’s World Cup preparations at Coverciano (the national team hastily decamped to another facility outside Rome).

For the Pontello family there was no way back, and in 1990 they ceded ownership of the club to film producer Mario Cecchi Gori. In the summer of 1991 Fiorentina signed a young Argentine forward named Gabriel Batistuta, whose first season in Florence was also the first to use an updated version of the traditional kite-shaped logo. Indeed, by the start of the new decade the graphic logos of the eighties had begun to fall out of favour. Many Italian clubs reverted to modern updates of their traditional crests, which were now undergoing something of a reappraisal, as clubs began to lean into their own history and authenticity as important marketing angles.

But life as a Fiorentina fan in the nineties was hardly smooth sailing: the club was unexpectedly relegated in 1993 but bounced back quickly, and by the end of the decade was competing in the Champions League. But the financial irregularities of Cecchi Gori’s son Vittorio ultimately led to Fiorentina’s bankruptcy — and dissolution — in 2002. Under the ownership of the Della Valle brothers the club re-established itself in Serie C1, before eventually buying back the Fiorentina name and kite-shaped badge, which has remained on the shirt ever since. Until this season.
 

I first visited Florence in 1988 and for a long time had a giant poster on my wall of the 1990-91 squad — the last season the Pontello-era logo was used. I never questioned it, but for years it has been seen by Florentines to represent a decade of disappointment and bitter frustrations, starting with the “stolen” 1982 scudetto and culminating in the one-two blow of a Uefa Cup final defeat and the departure of Baggio in 1990. Some have accused Fiorentina owner Rocco Commisso of lacking a basic understanding of the club’s history. Two days after the new kit’s release, tifosi from the Curva Fiesole (home to Fiorentina’s most fervent support) unveiled an enormous banner near the stadium that denounced the return of the logo and demanded show more respect towards the club’s fans. Of course such attitudes are prevalent only among supporters of a certain age — most fans under forty will have little first-hand recollection of the Pontello era.

But was that era even that bad? Undoubtedly, Fiorentina’s squads in the eighties boasted some rare talents and in any other league (or with better luck) might have achieved more, but as already documented, the thirty years since have been nothing short of an emotional rollercoaster for the city and anyone who follows the club, punctuated by memorable highs and stressful new lows.

Another important motive for the less-than-beloved logo’s return is its need to function in a rapidly changing world. Both Juventus and Inter have devised all-new brands in recent seasons, supposedly designed to serve them better on digital platforms and in global emerging markets. Had Fiorentina taken the same approach, I imagine the results would have been similarly poorly received. The kite-shaped logo is an awkward fit for social media; at least the circular Pontello logo is more visible when reduced to 32 square pixels. But given the speed with which new ideas are discarded I can’t see it lasting for another full decade.

Once the 2021-22 Serie A season got going the initial fuss surrounding the logo subsided, in part thanks to Fiorentina’s promising start under new coach Vincenzo Italiano. More recently, the issue has been relegated to the backburner in the wake of Dušan Vlahović’s protracted contract negotiation saga. If the Serbian striker leaves the club (as looks likely) and the team’s good form dries up the logo might once again become a talking point. Instead I’m hoping Fiorentina can keep their good run going, and in the process perhaps even create positive associations surrounding its (new) old logo. It’s easy for fans to dwell on what went before. But the next match is always an opportunity for history, and minds, to be changed.

 

A version of this article originally appeared in KitMag.

Retrospective reassessments of some favourite albums from my record collection (in strictly chronological order).
 

Frank Sinatra / In The Wee Small Hours

Capitol, 1955
Frank Sinatra’s ninth album, In The Wee Small Hours, isn’t quite the oldest record in my collection — I actually have ten other LPs from 1955, and seven others dating back even further (I think the oldest is the soundtrack to the 1950 Kirk Douglas movie, Young Man With A Horn). But in terms of industry history this might be the most significant, as it was the first “pop” album to be released on a 12” disc. That format had previously been reserved for classical recordings — considered by the labels to be more important and prestigious — but the success of this album helped render the 10” record obsolete. The new format’s microgrooves allowed for a longer running time, which in turn lent itself to a more conceptual approach. Rather than a grab-bag collection of songs or a package of previously-released singles, In The Wee Small Hours was compiled with a unifying theme in mind, making it perhaps the first ever concept album. That concept was clear from the artwork. Lonely and forlorn, Frank the jilted lover is resigned to wandering the streets after hours. This luckless romantic persona may seem cliched today, but at the time it was a departure for America’s most beloved entertainer. Aside from the brand new title track, the other fifteen songs were all standards, tastefully and sparely arranged by Nelson Riddle, making it one of the great late night listens. The album is said to have been inspired by the collapse of Sinatra’s tumultuous marriage to Ava Gardner, a union that deteriorated due to both parties’ frequent infidelities. Gardner also underwent two abortions while married to Sinatra, due to MGM’s strict penalty clauses preventing their stars from becoming pregnant. It was MGM that announced the couple’s separation in 1953, a few months after the release of From Here To Eternity, in which Sinatra had landed a role — revitalizing his career — thanks only to Gardner’s clout with the producers. She filed for a divorce in 1954, which was finalized in 1957. But the two remained friends, and in Gardner’s autobiography, published shortly after her death in 1990, she stated that Sinatra was the love of her life.
 

John Coltrane / My Favorite Things

Atlantic, 1961
While not technically a Christmas album (side two includes “Summertime”), this is a record I play often around the holidays. Released in 1961, the LP takes its name from the title track, a modal rendition of the song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. At the time of recording the musical was just a year old, and though the lyrics make no mention of Christmas, the song quickly became something of a holiday standard. Coltrane’s version is a showcase for his new band and a preview of the innovative musical paths he would take in the sixties. McCoy Tyner’s piano prances over a simmering rhythm section comprised of Steve Davis on bass and Elvin Jones on drums, while Coltrane leads on a soprano sax whose sound is at once familiar and eerie. The key of E minor lends the material mystery and nuance — there are moments when the music takes on an almost byzantine quality. Even the song’s traditionally upbeat ending is left ambiguous and unresolved. Coltrane had only begun to play soprano the previous spring, after receiving the instrument as a gift from Miles Davis while on tour in Europe. After leaving Davis’ quintet, Coltrane formed his own quartet with whom he spent the summer playing Village sets and developing the sound that would be debuted on this album. Sessions took place over three days in October 1960 at Atlantic Studios at 1841 Broadway, and included Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” plus fresh treatments of the popular Gershwin tunes “Summertime” and “But Not For Me.” But it’s the title track that has compelled me to return to this LP year after year, ever since I first heard it as a teenager. Clocking in at nearly fourteen minutes, “My Favorite Things” is a brooding, hypnotic masterpiece, and without doubt one of my favourite jazz recordings. There’s a line in the Elvis Costello song “This Is Hell” that goes, “My Favorite Things are playing again and again/But it’s by Julie Andrews and not by John Coltrane.” I always think of that whenever I give this record a spin. If you have this album (or failing that, a Spotify account) make sure to put it on this Christmas. I guarantee you won’t feel so bad.
 

Bob Dylan / The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

Columbia, 1963
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released just three days after the young artist had turned 22. Only 14 months had passed since the release of Dylan’s eponymous debut, but the distance between the two LPs is better measured in light years. Unlike its predecessor, Freewheelin’ was a record of all-original material, and established Dylan not only as the most exciting songwriter on the New York folk scene, but also a performer of a skill and intensity that belied his young age and boyish appearance. Drawing from current events for inspiration — as well as his romance with a young activist named Suze Rotolo — his subjects were both political and personal, his lyrics both scathing and absurdist. This recognition led to Dylan being lumbered with the unenviable label of “spokesman of a generation,” a tag he was keen to repudiate. His 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Vol. 1, recalls a headline from this period: “Spokesman Denies He’s A Spokesman.” Rotolo (and her very left-wing family) has often been credited with influencing Dylan’s more topical output. The couple had met at a folk concert at Riverside Church and had been living together (much to her family’s disapproval) in an apartment on West 4th Street for six months when (at her mother’s suggestion) Suze left to study art at the University of Perugia. She postponed her return several times, and this extended separation left Dylan pining: he wrote “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” upon learning she was considering staying in Italy indefinitely. Rotolo finally did return to New York in January 1963, and a few weeks later Columbia photographer Don Hunstein snapped her and Dylan arm in arm as they trudged through a snow-covered Jones Street, as part of a wider shoot around Greenwich Village. The image was used for the cover of Dylan’s upcoming LP which, along with Abbey Road, is probably the most replicated album photo of all time. Dylan and Rotolo broke up in 1964. For decades she refused to discuss their relationship, which continued to overshadow her own work as a visual artist, until 2008 when she published her own memoir called A Freewheelin’ Time. She died in 2011 aged 67.
 

Wayne Shorter / Night Dreamer

Blue Note, 1964
I recently conducted an inventory of my record collection and was slightly surprised to discover I have more LPs from 1964 than any other year (27). This is one of them. Released in November 1964, Night Dreamer was Wayne Shorter’s third album as a leader but his first for Blue Note. “This date came at a time as I was entering a new stage as a writer,” he said at the time. “And also, I knew that for my first album for Blue Note, I had to say something substantial!” The difference is notable not just musically, but visually: compare the front cover of this record with his previous one, Wayning Moments, on the Vee Jay label. The sleeve design was the unmistakable work of graphic artist Reid Miles, a Chicago native who was plucked from Esquire magazine in 1955 when Blue Note began producing 12” LPs. Miles soon developed a simple but unique style that made clever use of color, typography, and photography. Ironically, given that his bold artwork became a visual shorthand for the hard bop era, Miles didn’t particularly care for jazz, and relied solely on descriptions of the music from producer Alfred Lion. Most Blue Note sleeves in this period incorporated a cover photograph by label co-founder Francis Wolff. Typically, these were taken during recording sessions at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Unusually, Night Dreamer uses an outtake from a nighttime location shoot with Shorter on 66th and Broadway. Like much of Manhattan, that area of the west side has changed a lot since 1964, but the huge sign on top of the Empire Hotel (the glow from which is visible in the background) is still there sixty years later. Around the time of this record’s release Shorter joined Miles Davis’ “Second Great Quintet,” but continued to turn out brilliant albums for Blue Note over the next few years, several of which — Juju, Speak No Evil, The All Seeing Eye — are filed after this one in my living room. In 2013 I was lucky enough to see Shorter perform a special concert to celebrate his 80th birthday, as part of that year’s jazz festival in Montreal. It remains the singularly most intense live music experience of my life.
 

Herbie Hancock / Empyrean Isles

Blue Note, 1964
Empyrean Isles was Herbie Hancock’s fourth release on the Blue Note label, but in abandoning some of the latin-soul explorations of his first albums for straightforward hard-bop, the 24-year-old established himself as one of the most inventive young musicians of his time, whose work from that point forward consistently challenged the conventions of jazz. At the time of this recording, three quarters of this young line-up had already been working in Miles Davis’ quintet; the sole horn player is Freddie Hubbard, who swaps his usual trumpet for a cornet. Drummer Tony Williams was just eighteen when these sessions took place on June 17, 1964. Hancock’s four tunes on this record are loosely themed around the myth of the titular islands, floridly described in the back cover liner notes by Nora Kelly. The most famous of these is “Cantaloupe Island” which, like Hancock’s previous fruit-inspired composition, “Watermelon Man,” soon became one of his signature numbers. The track gained a new generation of fans in 1993, when it was sampled by jazzy hip-hoppers Us3 for their hit, “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia).”
 

John Coltrane / A Love Supreme

Impulse, 1965
In 2011, on a cold January afternoon not unlike this one, I picked up this gently-used copy of A Love Supreme, John Coltrane’s 1965 masterpiece, for a mere three dollars at Big City Records, a second-hand LP store on East 12th Street specialising in soul, funk and jazz (don’t bother looking for it now — it closed in 2012). By that point I was already quite familiar with this landmark recording: I’d been gifted the CD one Christmas in the late nineties, and some time after that had read an entire book on the background and making of the album. Not even that book’s author, jazz historian Ashley Kahn, can pinpoint the precise date this record was released; some sources say January ’65, others suggest February of the same year. But after sixty years what difference do a few weeks make? The recording session took place on December 9, 1964 at Van Gelder Studios in New Jersey, where Coltrane led a quartet featuring pianist McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. Though technically there are four tracks, the music is presented as a suite in four parts — “Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” “Psalm” — and to me it always felt more like a single piece, especially on CD. Given the record’s ambition and enduring impact, it’s surprisingly slight, clocking in at just under 33 minutes. This yearning, hypnotic record plundered new spiritual depths and obliterated jazz conventions of the time, taking listeners on a post-bop journey into the avant-garde. There are times when it barely resembles jazz at all — in fact, so meticulously was it composed, that it’s almost closer to a mini classical suite. Coltrane’s solo quest for enlightenment in the face of intense social upheaval continued in this direction until his death aged 40 in 1967. A Love Supreme was embraced by the counter-culture and is often cited as one of the most beloved and influential recordings of the sixties. Carlos Santana covered the first part of the record on his 1973 album Love Devotion Surrender; I saw him perform it on stage in Italy in 2004, which still ranks as one of the most memorable live experiences I’ve ever seen.
 

Bob Dylan / Bringing It All Back Home

Columbia, 1965
The cover image for Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan’s fifth album, was shot by Daniel Kramer at the home of Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, near Woodstock. Dylan perches on the end of a chaise longue holding his cat (whose name was Rolling Stone) while languorous model Sally Grossman (Albert’s wife) stretches out behind him. Along with his new look — more wealthy upstate bohemian than beat troubadour — the style of Dylan’s lyrics was also shifting. Though the wit and wordplay remained, his imagery was becoming increasingly surreal, personal and complex. Side one of the record was also notable in that it featured a full band. This major turning point in the artist’s life has often been described as an abandonment of his folk origins, but Dylan was never really a folk singer. He was embraced and championed by the folk community because they saw in him what they wanted to see, but for Dylan, that Village scene was merely a step in his rapid evolution. Regardless of his sound, in appearance and attitude Dylan was always a pop singer and a pop star in the truest sense, as evidenced by D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary film from this period, Dont Look Back. Side two was mainly acoustic, but this wasn’t enough to appease a minority of dissenters. This situation culminated four months later at the Newport Folk Festival, where factions of the crowd revolted against Dylan’s electric performance. Ironically, the song that sparked reaction from the crowd was “Maggie’s Farm,” a blatant gripe against those seeking to curb his creative vision. This overblown incident entered rock folklore, and was dramatized in the recent Timothée Chalament movie, but for a more nuanced understanding of events, I’d recommend the 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home.
 

The Beatles / Let It Be

Apple, 1970
This afternoon I finally got around to finishing Get Back, Peter Jackson’s epic three-part Beatles documentary. The series meticulously chronicles sessions for the band’s next album (eventually released in 1970 as Let It Be) and aborted TV special, before culminating in the surprise performance on the rooftop of Apple Studios on 30th January 1969 (I always remember the date because it was ten years to the day before I was born). Edited from 60 hours of film footage and over 150 hours of audio material originally intended for Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s film (also entitled Let It Be), Jackson’s project was conceived as a standalone feature with a theatrical release, but Covid delays and pandemic viewing trends prompted Disney to re-purpose it into a binge-worthy streaming event. Now, nobody loves a rockumentary more than me, and the prospect of indulging in hours of unseen Fab Four footage filled me with glee. Yet even this Beatle obsessive found the experience of watching the series less than riveting at times, mainly because of the bloated format. The suggestion of urgency through on-screen captions and calendar graphics seems like an afterthought designed to mask the lack of a narrative structure. During a debate in the third episode Lindsay-Hogg comes to the discovery that he’s spent three weeks shooting footage but still has no story, a problem neither he nor Jackson quite managed to overcome. Naturally, there are moments both priceless and hilarious, but rarely are these genuinely revealing and they mostly fail to convey the individual band members in any new light. But the documentary is utterly absorbing as a window into a hyper-specific place and time, capturing the detailed dynamics of the group and their nebulous inner circle, while hinting at the band’s impending and unavoidable dissolution. Anyway, the series compelled me to revisit Let It Be, an oft-maligned album and maybe the Beatles LP I’m least fond of. The record confirms what the documentary shows, which is that Paul was really the only creative Beatle still fully on board by this point (the most realised compositions are all McCartney’s). But at least it clocks in at a brisk thirty-five minutes…
 

George Harrison / All Things Must Pass

Apple, 1970
George Harrison’s epic solo debut arrived just seven months after the Beatles’ split, and only six after the release of the band’s final LP, Let It Be. Harrison, always “the quiet one,“ had emerged as an able songwriter, but remained a victim of band inequality: typically he only saw one of his compositions on each side of a Beatles release. After the break-up he found himself sitting on dozens of unreleased songs, some of which dated back to 1966 and had already been overlooked by Lennon and McCartney. There was enough material for several albums, but for commercial reasons the recordings were contained onto an eighteen-track, double LP, which also included a bonus disc of somewhat indulgent studio outtakes entitled “Apple Jam.” The whole thing came packaged in a large box, the kind typically used for operas, which wasn’t wholly inappropriate: many have described the record as sounding “Wagnerian” in its scope and bluster. Much of this sonic grandeur was the influence of Phil Spector, who initially acted as producer on the sessions before removing himself from the project due to “health reasons” (Harrison once said Spector needed “eighteen cherry brandies” before he could start work). Spector’s trademark “Wall of Sound” technique is evidenced throughout the album’s four sides even though Harrison completed production duties himself — he later admitted he got carried away with excessive multi-track layering and heavy reverb overdubs. In that sense the album is perhaps a harbinger for some of the bloated, grandiose albums that would come to define a lot of rock music in the seventies. Stunning for its musical variety and emotional range, the record is both a celebration of Harrison’s creative individuality and an emphatic liberation from the highly rewarding yet spiritually stifling phenomenon that was Beatlemania. Even the cover art, featuring four broken gnomes, was designed to indicate the end of that particular and unrepeatable era. I think this album is best enjoyed in its entirety on an autumn afternoon with a cup of tea.
 

Carole King / Tapestry

Ode, 1971
While making coffee this morning I put on Carole King’s second solo album, Tapestry, for the first time in years. Aside from the quality of her songs I always liked King’s voice, straight and unadorned. Her earnest sound — and relatable look — pioneered a quintessentially New York brand of feminist ethnic soul which could not have emerged from any other city (see also Laura Nyro). By the late sixties King had left for California (the first track describes a romantic infatuation in terms of an earthquake) but this album still exudes an East Coast urgency. It’s pitched somewhere between the Brill Building and Laurel Canyon, weaving the sophisticated piano-led pop hooks of one with the personal introspection and intimacy of the other. Tapestry was recorded in the same studio and at the same time as Mud Slide Slim by James Taylor — inevitably the two albums share much of the same personnel and even a song. In one of my previous design studio jobs one of our clients was named Carol King (without the E) and so every time we visited her office the “You’ve Got A Friend” jokes would fly. Two other songs on Tapestry had already been hits for the Shirelles and Aretha Franklin, but with the exception of “Smackwater Jack” (which probably sounded dated even in 1971), every track has a sort of timeless purity, as all great pop songs tend to do. It’s also my favourite album with a cat on the cover, though to be honest I can’t think of many others.
 

The Rolling Stones / Sticky Fingers

Rolling Stones Records, 1971
Sticky Fingers was the Rolling Stones’ first studio album of the seventies, the first since Altamont, the first without founding member Brian Jones, and the first to showcase the talents of new lead guitarist Mick Taylor. But perhaps most significantly, it was also the first release on the band’s new label, Rolling Stones Records. Like the Beatles, the Stones had fallen victim to Allen Klein’s financial (mis)management and dubious contracts, and were thus compelled to form their own company to control their recordings and publishing rights. Mick Jagger (always the most image-savvy Stone) commissioned John Pasche, a British junior art director working at the New York advertising agency of Benton & Bowles, to create a logo for the eponymous brand. The idea for the now ubiquitous “tongue and lips” design came about after Jagger spotted an image of the Hindu goddess Kali inside a corner shop. For the album artwork, Pasche’s logo was modified by Craig Braun and included on the inner sleeve and centre labels of the LP. The cover concept was devised by Andy Warhol, whose Coronet signature can be seen on the pair of white briefs visible behind the working zipper. The identity of the crotch on the cover has never been confirmed, but it is assumed to be either a lover of Warhol’s or else a member of his Factory circle. Later releases of the album dispensed entirely with the zipper gimmick, which proved costly to manufacture and also tended to damage the vinyl itself during transit. I have an American version; my parents’ British copy has a different type treatment on the cover. Due to the censorship of the Franco era, in Spain the cover was replaced by a more literal (and disturbing) image of a pair of fingers emerging from a tin of treacle. The iconic logo has now appeared on every Rolling Stones release for half a century, not to mention countless items of merchandise. Pasche received £50 for his design upon completion, and a further £200 in 1972, before selling his copyright to the Stones for a much higher sum in 1984. His original artwork now belongs to the Victoria & Albert Museum.
 

Marvin Gaye / What’s Going On

Motown, 1971
Perhaps more than any other, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On is the record that altered soul music’s course, and one that even half a century later still resonates on every level. At first listen, the album is a reaction to the all too familiar struggles affecting Black America, but it was also fueled by Gaye’s personal depression, brought on by the collapse of his marriage, cocaine addiction, and the death of his singing partner, Tammi Terrell. Gaye had scored seven top forty hits with Terrell before she was diagnosed with a brain tumor; she died in 1970 aged just twenty-four. Though Gaye was a commercial certainty, for the hit-making factory that was the Tamla label the record represented a risky departure, as the smoothest singer in their stable now embarked on what was essentially a protest album. Gaye’s mood of disillusionment is apparent immediately on the record’s iconic cover. Gone is the smiling, clean-cut young man to whom millions had become acquainted. Instead a bearded Gaye appears by a deserted set of swings, weary and lost in thought, seemingly indifferent to the rain that drenches him. Side one begins with snippets of street chatter before the opening saxophone bounces in like a mellow breeze, belying the despairing lyrics of the title track. The record continues in this vein, with each song flowing into the next to create a slightly eerie, almost dreamlike suite whose singular collective tone helped define the sound of progressive soul in the early 1970s. What’s Going On may represent the first major personal statement by a Black solo pop artist, and subsequent albums by Gaye’s contemporaries — Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield — began to lean in similarly socially-conscious directions. Despite Motown founder Berry Gordy’s initial concerns, the record peaked at number six, charting again after Gaye’s death in 1984. In 2020 Rolling Stone magazine placed What’s Going On at number one in its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Though such accolades are purely futile and entirely subjective, such recognition is testament to the music’s quality and also a timely reminder, were it needed, that the record’s message is no less urgent or relevant today.
 

Joni Mitchell / Blue

Reprise, 1971
Blue was the first Joni Mitchell album I ever heard, but such was its status as a defining artifact of the seventies (not to mention its iconic cover art) I was aware of it before I’d ever put it on. Though more rhythmic and varied than her previous records — Joni accompanies herself on most tracks with guitar, piano or Appalachian dulcimer — Blue is still relatively spare compared to the lush jazz-rock arrangements of her mid-seventies albums. I always like to listen to it very loudly late at night, especially in summer. Blue was the record with which Joni’s star shifted from Canadian folk songstress and would-be painter to international rock and roll icon, confirming her to be a musician, vocalist, songwriter and lyricist of singular style and talent. Poetic and almost painfully personal, the album made Mitchell the archetype of the confessional singer-songwriter that became inexorably associated with Southern California in the first half of the decade. The record is almost a concept album in that it traces an arc in the artist’s life in which Joni goes through two break-ups: her relationships with Graham Nash and James Taylor are said to have inspired half the songs on Blue (JT even shows up on guitar, though not on the tracks about him). Trading in Laurel Canyon domesticity she then takes us on several entertaining and evocative jaunts around Europe, a travelogue that’s both carefree and bittersweet, as Joni faces the necessary prospect of overcoming her own pessimistic worldview. Indeed, Blue introduced what would become a continuing theme in Mitchell’s work: travel, both real and metaphorical, as an essential tool for one’s own development and enlightenment. Side one’s opening line, “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling…” immediately explains her emotional state, but could also be an apt description for her entire career. Joni has spent a lifetime forging her own path in an industry that more readily celebrates mediocre men than brilliant women, and she has always seemed more than content to go it alone. Then again, who could keep up with her?
 

John Lennon / Imagine

Apple, 1971
Unlike most records I’ve written about here, Imagine isn’t one I’m especially fond of. To me it is quite weighed down by a series of plodding mid-tempo numbers over which Lennon’s bitter rants do little but highlight his sour state of mind in the early seventies. Not that he didn’t have plenty reason to be angry: “Gimme Some Truth” is as lyrically relevant today as it ever was. But the infamous “How Do You Sleep?”, a five-and-a-half-minute diatribe against Paul McCartney, only reveals the gracelessness with which Lennon handled his lingering animosity towards his former songwriting partner after the pair’s acrimonious split. The song is only really interesting at this point for its hyper-specific lyrical content in the context of rock non-controversies. Other tracks seem ahead of their time. “I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier” is a loose, hypnotic jam that sounds more like 1991 than 1971. But “Crippled Inside” and “It’s So Hard” feel like folky (or jokey) genre exercises, while “Oh Yoko!” is an early example of Lennon’s gratuitous habit of laying down odes to his domestic bliss on wax. Lennon comes off better when he’s at his most vulnerable. The two ballads, “Jealous Guy” and “How?”, each showcase his talent for combining gorgeous melodies with raw moments of honest introspection. The same technique is of course used to greatest effect on the title cut. Inspired by Yoko Ono’s poem “Grapefruit” (a passage of which is reproduced on the record’s back cover), Lennon later theorized that the only reason the anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-capitalistic anthem was so universally accepted was because it was “sugarcoated.” After all, it’s practically a socialist manifesto. The irony, of course, is that like other protest songs with a straightforward lyric, “Imagine” has been embraced most frequently and fervently by precisely the people towards whom its criticism is directed — politicians, corporations, churches, even celebrities — in other words, those with little imagination at all.
 

The Rolling Stones / Exile On Main St.

Rolling Stones Records, 1972
Exile on Main St. was the Rolling Stones’ tenth studio album, and is still considered by many to be their best work. High praise considering the bulk of the half-written tracks were captured by the band’s mobile recording truck during a loose series of nightly “sessions” in the damp and sprawling basement at Villa Nellcôte, a Belle Époque mansion on the Côte d’Azur that Keith Richards was renting having absconded (along with the rest of the Stones) to France to avoid paying British taxes (hence the album’s title). Built by an English banker in the 1890s, the property was said to have served as a Gestapo headquarters during the war — the arrival of the world’s most notorious rock and roll outlaws (and a revolving coterie of guests) only added insult to infamy. Overdubs were added later in Los Angeles, but most of the record’s sixteen original songs draw inspiration from the Stones’ hedonistic life on the road and substance-fueled escapades on the French Riviera. That said, Mick Jagger’s languid drawl is often buried so deep in the final mix that the vocals can feel fragmented or even unintelligible. One track, “Casino Boogie,” was actually composed by cutting up random phrases and assembling them into verses, a technique borrowed from William Burroughs. Another, “Sweet Black Angel,” about Angela Davis, is one of the few overtly political songs in the band’s entire catalogue. Musically speaking, no Stones release before or since is so heavily saturated by Mick and Keith’s adventures in (and fixation with) America’s deep south. The album is a murky, simmering stew of early rock and roll, blues, country, gospel and soul, but these songs aren’t mere genre exercises: there is a lived-in, hard-fought truth to them, that combined with a lyrical weariness makes for a record of rare (and raw) depth and honesty. Several numbers have since become part of the Stones’ live repertoire, but despite being a double LP the album didn’t produce the usual handful of hit singles. Though as my parents often recalled, “Tumbling Dice” received repeated punches on the jukebox at their wedding in August 1972.
 

Santana / Caravanserai

Columbia, 1972
Santana’s fourth album, Caravanserai, was released in October 1972. That same night the band performed at Spokane Coliseum, having just embarked on an epic world tour that would span five continents and last an entire year (the recording from the show in Fukuoka was released in Europe as the live triple LP, Lotus). In November 1973, my parents saw Santana at the start of their next tour at the Rainbow in London, a show I heard a lot about growing up (in 2004 I saw Santana with my parents in a piazza in Pistoia). Anyway, this was the album on which Santana broke free of the artistic restraints imposed by the narrow confines of commercially viable pop music. The result was a predominantly instrumental LP reflecting Carlos Santana’s blossoming interest in the spiritual jazz pioneered by Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders. Upon hearing the finished record, CBS executive Clive Davis accused Santana of committing “career suicide.” Indeed, Caravanserai produced no hit singles and only reached number 8 on the Billboard chart. But it’s my favourite Santana album up to that point precisely because it abandons any attempt to conform to radio or record company expectations. To me, some of Santana’s early hits feel firmly rooted in their era, while their English lyrics forced them towards “American rock band” territory, undermining their musical ambitions and spiritual worldliness. In every sense, Santana was always a band without borders, whose compositions and live performances transcended background or language. It’s no surprise that in 1986 the BBC chose nine-minute closer “Every Step Of The Way” for their closing World Cup montage (it’s on YouTube), acknowledging Santana’s Mexican roots while encapsulating the sun-drenched drama of that international event. I can’t talk about this album without mentioning “Song Of The Wind,” a genuine highlight and one of my mum’s all-time favourite tracks. Just as some of the band’s more conventional rock numbers haven’t aged well, this six-minute instrumental — while showcasing Santana’s effortlessly emotive guitar playing — is evidence that he could produce a work of timeless beauty simply by doing what came naturally.
 

Steely Dan / Can’t Buy A Thrill

ABC, 1972
Can’t Buy A Thrill, Steely Dan’s debut album, was released in November 1972. I don’t know the exact date and it seems the internet doesn’t either. To recap: Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had met at Bard College in 1967, and were working in Los Angeles as staff songwriters for ABC/Dunhill Records when they were encouraged to form a band by producer Gary Katz. He suggested guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and drummer Jim Hodder, and in 1970 they placed an ad in the Village Voice: “Looking for keyboardist and bassist. Must have jazz chops! Assholes need not apply.” Long Island native and guitarist Denny Dias responded and moved out west, before short-lived vocalist David Palmer (he only sang lead on two tracks) was added to compensate for Fagen’s initial stage fright. Though it introduced trademarks of Becker and Fagen’s partnership — unconventional chord structures, cryptic lyrical concerns and a wry, sardonic wit (as evidenced by the original liner notes credited to Tristan Fabriani, a Becker/Fagen alias) — “CBAT” (to use its social media shorthand) is probably my least favourite album by my favourite band. Having said that, this catchy LP was a hit in 1972 and includes three of the five Steely Dan tracks that can still frequently be heard at your local CVS. After two more albums Becker and Fagen grew tired of the road and fired the rest of the group in 1974. Future recordings used the cream of L.A.’s session musicians (Steely Dan didn’t tour again until 1993). This practice however had already started on their first record, which features English jazz percussionist Victor Feldman and New York guitarist Elliott Randall, whose solo on “Reelin’ In The Years” remains a highlight of the Dan’s oeuvre. Fast forward half a century and David Palmer now works as a landscape photographer in South Carolina, while Denny Dias helms an eponymous band based in Boston. Jeff Baxter enjoyed success with the Doobie Brothers, though these days he’s best known for his work as a missile defense consultant. Jim Hodder drowned in his swimming pool in 1990.
 

Bruce Springsteen / Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

Columbia, 1973
When Bruce Springsteen’s debut album was released in January 1973, only seven months had passed since Springsteen’s audition for John Hammond at Columbia Records on East 52nd Street (a set of acoustic demos that emerged on the Tracks boxset in 1998). Hammond — who had also discovered Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan — knew unique talent when he heard it, and wasted no time in signing the 22-year-old to a record deal. The album was cut that summer at 914 Sound Studios, a low-budget facility in Blauvelt, NY. But when the acetate was submitted that August, Columbia president Clive Davis said he didn’t hear a hit single. So Springsteen quickly wrote two extra songs, the first of which was “Blinded By The Light.” The track showcased the young songwriter’s penchant for frantic verbosity bordering on the absurd, inviting the inevitable “New Dylan” comparisons that persisted in the early part of Springsteen’s career. The single failed to chart, but Manfred Mann’s version reached number one in August 1976 — still the only Springsteen-penned song to top the Billboard Hot 100. The second late addition was “Spirit In The Night,” a soulful number that became a staple of the Springsteen’s early live shows. The line-up on this album included Garry Tallent on bass and Clarence Clemons on saxophone, drummer Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez and pianist David Sancious, whose mother lived on E Street in Belmar, NJ. The band used her garage as a rehearsal space and eventually took their name from the address. Though it introduced a prolific and daring artist, as well as some of the lyrical motifs central to his early work — teenage romance, Catholic imagery, the circus, street life, gang violence, and of course, the automobile — this is perhaps my least favourite Springsteen LP. But I have always loved “Growin’ Up,” which would have ideally opened side one. I remember my dad put it on the third compilation tape he made for me not long after I got my first Walkman around 1985. In 2018 I saw Springsteen perform it solo at the Walter Kerr Theatre as part of his Broadway show, to which I wore a T-shirt with art director John Berg’s iconic album artwork.
 

Little Feat / Dixie Chicken

Warner Bros., 1973
Little Feat’s third album, Dixie Chicken, was their second to feature a front cover by Neon Park, whose somewhat surreal illustration style became the band’s visual signature (this one was inspired by a 1954 Revlon ad starring Carmen Dell’Orefice). As a child I remember seeing Little Feat’s LPs at home and being amused by the artwork, which more than hinted at the eccentric humour in the music. This slightly zany sensibility seemed to be a common thread among similarly-inclined West Coast acts in the early seventies, such as Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks, Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, and even Ry Cooder. Though their sound was hard to define, on this record Little Feat landed on what would become their trademark melting pot of swampy, Southern-fried funk and New Orleans rhythm and blues (the album even includes a version of Allen Toussaint’s “On Your Way Down”). Former Mothers of Invention guitarist and vocalist Lowell George had emerged as the band’s major songwriting talent, and the next two Little Feat records — Feats Don’t Fail Me Now (1974) and The Last Record Album (1975) followed in a similar vein. The 1978 live double album Waiting For Columbus was the band’s best-selling release, but by the end of the decade directions within the group had begun to diverge. In 1979 George issued a solo album entitled Thanks, I’ll Eat It Here, a title that may have been a reference to his rapid weight gain, the result of an overindulgent lifestyle characterized by binge eating, alcoholism and speed balls. In June of that year, while on tour in support of the record, George collapsed and died of a heart attack in his room at the Twin Bridges Marriott hotel in Arlington, VA. He was 34. Little Feat’s seventh LP, Down On The Farm, was released soon afterwards, then between 1988 and 2012 the remaining members of the band put out nine more albums. The 1980 Jackson Browne song, “Of Missing Persons” (the title of which is a reference to the opening line of the Little Feat song “Long Distance Love”), was written for George’s surviving five-year-old daughter, Inara, who today is one half of the indie pop duo, The Bird and the Bee.
 

Tom Waits / Closing Time

Asylum, 1973
Without even hearing the record, the title and cover photograph alone of Tom Waits’ debut album, Closing Time, were enough to introduce the young artist as a sort of late-night beatnik balladeer. Though Waits would persist with this identity for the rest of the decade, sometimes to the point of self-parody, it was initially developed during solo sets supporting Frank Zappa on tour and at The Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was here that Waits’ performances caught the attention of David Geffen, who signed him to his new Asylum label. Despite the album’s nocturnal atmosphere, recording sessions took place during daylight hours since there were no evening slots available at Hollywood’s Sunset Sound Recorders. Most tracks feature acoustic guitar, upright piano and stand-up bass, though disagreements in the studio between Waits and producer Jerry Yester (formerly of The Lovin’ Spoonful) still ensued over the direction of the record: Waits wanted to make a jazz album but Yester insisted on a more folk-oriented sound. Waits’ lyrics were perhaps never more unabashedly romantic than on this record, but the production sometimes renders them perhaps more earnest compared to later releases (The Eagles even covered “Ol’ ’55” on their next LP). This is undoubtedly a record of extreme warmth and beauty that instantly evokes its place and period, even for those of us who weren’t there. The slight echo on “Lonely” expertly suggests the emptiness of a rehearsal space above a bar at 4PM (or 4AM), while “Midnight Lullaby” is probably the only song in history to mention “the British Isles” and “West Virginia” in the same line, something I’ve always enjoyed given that my wife hails from Morgantown, WV. The gorgeous after-hours arrangement of the instrumental title track that closes the album is the closest thing Waits ever made to a wordless manifesto. Waits got Bones Howe to produce his next seven releases (Yester was jailed in 2019 on child pornography charges). By the early eighties Waits’ voice had become more gravel-soaked and his work more experimental, but the line between person and persona has always remained a bit hazy.
 

Paul Simon / There Goes Rhymin’ Simon

Columbia, 1973
There Goes Rhymin’ Simon was technically Paul Simon’s third solo album if you count The Paul Simon Songbook (a 1965 UK-only release), though only his second since he and Art Garfunkel had parted ways. His eponymous LP from the previous year had shown he could make more varied and personal music without his partner, but this album established Simon not just as a great pop songwriter, but also a great record maker. It’s perhaps the warmest, most accessible album in Simon’s entire discography. Though no stranger to gospel, blues and jazz, after the success of Bridge Over Troubled Water Simon began to immerse himself in the sound of the American south. Half the LP was recorded at Alabama’s Muscle Shoals studio, whose in-house rhythm section provided much of its charm. The Dixie Hummingbirds appear on two tracks, while the falsetto on “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” is by the Reverend Claude Jeter. Additional backing vocals were provided by the Roche sisters, whom Simon had met in 1971 while teaching a songwriting class at NYU. But like all of Paul Simon’s work it’s his clever songs and unexpected juxtapositions that elevate this album to another level. Though the opening track, “Kodachrome,” caused a headache when Kodak insisted a trademark symbol appear wherever its title appeared in print. For the same reason the song wasn’t released as a single in the UK since laws regarding brand names prevented it being played on BBC radio. My favourite track is probably “Something So Right,” which I’ve always loved for its deceptively simple lyrics and chord structure, but especially the odd middle eight in 3/4 time. Based on a 17th century Lutheran hymn, “American Tune” is a song my dad used to play a lot (he even recorded it). Written immediately following Nixon’s 1972 reelection, it’s perhaps the only note of despair on the entire LP, anticipating the cooler, more defeated tone of Simon’s next album, and cementing his persona as the Upper West Side’s preeminent neurotic intellectual. Appropriately enough each track was visually illustrated on the gatefold cover by another artist inexorably tied to music and Manhattan: Milton Glaser.
 

George Harrison / Living In The Material World

Apple, 1973
Living In The Material World was George Harrison’s fifth studio album and the long-awaited studio follow-up to 1970’s triple LP opus, All Things Must Pass (Harrison had released a live album documenting the Concert For Bangladesh in 1971, but back then three years was a long time in music). The new record eschewed his previous album’s sonic bombast for a more understated production, perhaps a reflection of Harrison’s interest in Hindu spirituality, which by 1973 had reached new heights of devotion. Though his devotion to other things — namely cocaine and cars — meant he was also prone at times to veering from his chosen path, sometimes literally. Harrison and then-wife Pattie Boyd were lucky to survive when he crashed his Mercedes-Benz into a roundabout while doing ninety on the M4 in February 1972. Aside from his spiritual musings, the album also revealed Harrison’s contempt for consumer culture and an increasingly corporate music industry (especially in the wake of having organized benefit concerts), as well as the expected dose of residual post-Beatles bitterness. The recording featured the usual crew of Harrison associates — Nicky Hopkins, Klaus Voorman, Jim Keltner, Ringo Starr — though notably, no Eric Clapton. This was likely due to his infatuation with Boyd and descent into heroin addiction (the guitarist had passed out mid-performance at the Concert For Bangladesh). Anyway, LITMW remains a record that’s a bit underrated and forgotten compared to ATMP, whose size and scope cast a long shadow over the rest of Harrison’s output in the seventies. Though it did provide an appropriate title for Martin Scorsese’s epic 2011 documentary on the musician’s life. Like its predecessor, the LP is also impressive for its lavish packaging: the front and back cover uses electro-photography and the interior sleeve incorporates artwork from the Bhagavad-Gītā. Living In The Material World peaked at number 2 on the UK album chart. Ironically it was kept off the top spot by the soundtrack album to That’ll Be The Day, a British rock ’n’ roll nostalgia movie starring… Ringo Starr.
 

Steely Dan / Countdown To Ecstasy

ABC, 1973
I first heard Countdown To Ecstasy as a teenager — before that the only Steely Dan track I was consciously aware of was “Reelin’ In The Years.” My parents had seen Steely Dan at the Rainbow in London on the band’s only visit to the UK back in 1974, an evening they often referred to as though it were a religious experience. Countdown To Ecstasy was always my dad’s favourite Steely Dan record, and one year for his birthday somebody gifted him a copy of the album on CD, back when the convenience and sonic perfection of a compact disc was still considered infinitely preferable to a worn and dusty LP. This must have been around 1994, and our CD player at the time was the kind used for deejaying, that lays flat with all the controls on top. (We had a friend who worked in the hi-fi business and he always hooked us up with stereo equipment — he’d given my dad the first model Walkman back in 1979). Anyway, this meant that when a CD reached its end, instead of stopping it simply started playing from the beginning again. I remember one afternoon listening to Countdown To Ecstasy on a continuous loop in shuffle mode, by the end of which every guitar solo and horn chart had seared into my brain. More significantly, I’d discovered my new favourite band. Steely Dan may have skewed the conventions of California rock with their clever jazz chord structures and obscure, erudite lyrics, but Becker and Fagen’s experience as Brill Building songwriters had imbued them with a pure pop sensibility. Their songs tended towards wry East Coast critiques of the contemporary L.A. scene, but their compositions were also catchy, memorable, and never indulgent — even when the band got to “stretch out” or trade fours like a bebop combo. These peculiar qualities, combined with an uncluttered studio production style, made every track Steely Dan ever recorded sound ready-made for radio, and essentially timeless. I’d heard and loved a lot of different music up to that point, but this album — though already two decades old — jolted me upright in a way that few others ever have.
 

Stevie Wonder / Innervisions

Tamla, 1973
Stevie Wonder was still only 23 when he released Innervsisions, but it was already his sixteenth studio album, having signed with Motown when he was just eleven. For much of the sixties, the Tamla label had churned out LPs that cashed in on the musical and vocal talents of “Little Stevie Wonder.” But by the start of the seventies the “boy genius” had emerged as a progressive, singular artist that merited absolute creative control.The resulting sequence of five albums Wonder made between 1972 and 1976 are widely considered as constituting his “classic period.” Innervisions has always been my favourite of these, though thematically the record might also be the bleakest. Wonder was intent on addressing topics central to the black American experience during the turbulent days of 1973 (and 2023, for that matter): drug abuse, inequality, systemic racism, political disillusionment, even spiritual transcendence. In doing so he became both an establishment-friendly representative of the black community and, for white America, a benign messenger of its plight. Only rarely did gritty realism get the better of Wonder’s hope for social idealism, such as on the epic, cinematic “Living For The City,” whose dramatic interlude is impossible to hear without mentally directing the accompanying movie visuals. I must have quoted the line, “New York City… just like I pictured it,” out loud a dozen times during my first visit to Manhattan. The sound of Innervisions was dominated by Wonder’s innovative use of synthesizers, but he played almost every other instrument on the album as well, confirming his status as the decade’s foremost one-man-band. It perhaps also reinforced the theory that his extraordinary musical vision was directly related to the fact that he had lived his entire life without the ability of sight. Ironically, three days after Innervisions was released, Wonder was involved in a near fatal car crash in North Carolina, when a log flew off the back of a truck and struck him in the head. He lay in a coma for ten days but when he awoke his extrasensory perception only became heightened.
 

Jackson Browne / For Everyman

Asylum, 1973
For Everyman, Jackson Browne’s self-produced second album, came out fifty years ago this month. The record’s opening track was “Take It Easy,” a song Browne had been struggling with until Glenn Frey (who happened to live in the same Echo Park apartment building) offered to help finish it. Frey apparently came up with the now-iconic line about the girl in a flatbed Ford. The Eagles’ rendition appeared on their debut album in 1972 before Browne recorded his own version. Side one closed with “These Days,” another old composition that Browne had written for a music publishing company while living in New York. The song was first recorded in 1967 as a string-laden track by German model-turned-singer and Velvet Underground associate, Nico, on her Chelsea Girl LP. Several other versions (including those by Jennifer Warnes and Gregg Allman) were released before Browne finally cut his own. The title track was written as a sort of response to the Crosby, Stills & Nash song, “Wooden Ships.” Despite the So-Cal arrangements and soaring vocals, Browne’s music was always a repudiation of sixties idealism. His songs were drenched in apocalyptic imagery and steeped in the paranoia and dread of the early seventies. With its broader social and environmental implications, “For Everyman” was at odds with the so-called “me decade,” and set the tone for Browne’s more consciously political work of the eighties. This album was the first Jackson Browne record to feature David Lindley, whose guitar and fiddle provided new texture to the music, and came to help define Browne’s sound for the rest of the seventies. Joining the aforementioned Frey are precisely the guest musicians you’d expect to find listed on a Los Angeles recording from 1973: Don Henley, David Crosby, Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell… Even the honky tonk piano of Elton John (credited as “Rockaday Johnnie”) pops up on side two. The original die-cut LP cover featured a photo of the artist sitting in the courtyard of his childhood home, Abbey San Encino, in Highland Park. Using rocks from the Arroyo Seco, it was completed by hand in 1921 by Browne’s grandfather, Clyde, and is still owned to this day by his brother, Edward.
 

Bruce Springsteen / The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle

Columbia, 1973
Bruce Springsteen’s second album, The Wild, The Innocent & E Street Shuffle, arrived just eleven months after his debut LP, but in terms of ambition and execution, the distance between the two records is better measured in light years. Some observers have suggested that Springsteen borrowed the title from The Wild and The Innocent, a 1959 romantic western starring Audie Murphy and Sandra Dee. Certainly, in their scope and imagery, these poetic tales of boardwalk life and urban romance are nothing short of cinematic. There are just seven tracks on the record, four of which stretch out over seven minutes. The album moved beyond the acoustic folk-rock of Springsteen’s first record, incorporating elements of R&B and jazz into a Jersey soul stew, while wringing every eccentricity out of a carnivalesque band whose sound is as expansive as it is hyperactive. This change in direction is reflected in the band photo on the back cover, taken by David Gahr in the doorway of an antique store in Long Branch, NJ. This line-up still included David Sancious on keyboards and Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez on drums. Aside from his extraordinary piano intro to “New York City Serenade,” Sancious’ other indirect contribution to Springsteen folklore is the fact that his mother’s Belmar home was located on E Street — the band had used her garage as a rehearsal space. This album (and its title track) was the first official mention of the now-mythical address, though the band only became known as The E Street Band in September 1974, by which time Sancious had left the group with Lopez’s replacement, Ernest “Boom” Carter, to form a jazz-fusion band called Tone. Springsteen never sounded like this again: as the lives of his characters got harder and leaner, so did his songs. Following his next album, 1975’s Born To Run, his star entered the stratosphere, never to return. To this day this record remains by far his most musical, but perhaps also his most overlooked. I don’t have a favourite Springsteen album (this and the six that came after it are all essential) but I still think side two of this LP is the finest suite of music he ever recorded.
 

Paul McCartney & Wings / Band On The Run

Apple, 1973
Band On The Run was Paul McCartney’s fifth solo album, and the third credited to Wings, though by the time recording began the band’s line-up had been reduced to just three people: McCartney, wife Linda, and loyal sideman Denny Laine. Lead guitarist Henry McCullough quit after an argument with McCartney during rehearsals for the album on his farm in Scotland; drummer Denny Seiwell followed him a week later. Perhaps inspired by the title track’s themes of freedom and escape, McCartney asked EMI to send him a list of their overseas recording facilities, from which he chose their studio in Lagos. But the exotic setting was not quite the creative idyll McCartney had anticipated. Still under military dictatorship following the end of the civil war, Nigeria was hardly a safe haven. One night Paul and Linda lost a bag of demo cassettes and notebooks of lyrics when they were robbed at knifepoint after ignoring local advice and going for an evening walk. The group only received EMI’s warning about an outbreak of cholera once they’d returned home, but during one session McCartney did suffer a bronchial spasm brought on by heavy smoking. Located in the port suburb of Apapa, the ramshackle studio had a faulty control desk and was prone to losing power, but somehow the band got enough basic tracks down to finish overdubs back in London. McCartney’s solo career had yet to reach the critical or commercial heights he’d enjoyed as a Beatle, but Band On The Run was an international success. It’s probably still McCartney’s best-known post-Beatles record, thanks also to Clive Arrowsmith’s cover photograph, which, in addition to the band, featured various notables such as Clement Freud, Christopher Lee and Michael Parkinson. My copy is actually a 1978 Dutch pressing, picked up at my go-to LP emporium Academy Records back in 2017. It’s missing the large poster included with the original version, but the opaque lilac vinyl more than makes up for it!
 

Joni Mitchell / Court and Spark

Asylum, 1974
They used to call the seventies “the decade that taste forgot.” Admittedly, some of the music released in 1974 has aged about as well as a bottle of Blue Nun. Which is why Court and Spark — Joni Mitchell’s sixth album and arguably the most confidently stylish record of the seventies — a reminder that there was more to that decade than bell bottoms and garish wallpaper. Instead, through its lush arrangements and extraordinary lyrical imagery, this record evokes elegant interior scenes of Halston dresses perched on Cesca chairs. To me it’s the audio equivalent of Annie Hall or the Citroën CX. Though I enjoy her earlier work, Court and Spark was the moment Mitchell shed her folk-pop origins and began a new creative ascent. Having spent most of 1973 in the studio assembling the right group of musicians to suit the jazz-oriented arrangements her sophisticated new material required, she ended up hiring saxophonist Tom Scott, whose fusion band, the L.A. Express, provided most of the backing tracks. The record also includes cameos by the Band’s Robbie Robertson, old flames David Crosby and Graham Nash, and even comedy duo Cheech & Chong. Despite the jazz line-up, it was the closest thing Mitchell ever made to a true pop album, and remains her most commercially successful release. Sales were boosted by the hit singles “Help Me” (later referenced by Prince on “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”) and “Free Man In Paris,” written from the point of view of Asylum label boss David Geffen (who failed to convince her to leave it off the record). Combining complex studies of modern romance and jaded social critiques, Court and Spark is certainly of its time but also the first in a series of albums that represent Mitchell’s most mature and enduring work — though she alienated many casual fans in the process. My LP is an original 1974 Santa Maria pressing with embossed text and a gatefold sleeve. I’m not sure what happened to my CD copy. But you need some kind of physical format to listen to this album since Joni removed all her music from Spotify, proving once again that she is an artist in the truest sense of the word.
 

Steely Dan / Pretzel Logic

ABC, 1974
Compared to its predecessor, the material on Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan’s third album, adhered to pop convention. But these radio-friendly songs belied sophisticated bop devices, plus a cynicism and paranoia that by 1974 had all-but pervaded American life. Much of the music seemed to seek refuge in an already-forgotten past — no other Dan album was packed with quite so many overt references to its leaders’ jazz heroes. The first track and lead single, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” flagrantly extrapolates the piano from Horace Silver’s 1964 composition, “Song For My Father.” Side two opener, “Parker’s Band,” is a swinging paean to the titular sax pioneer and the clubs on 52nd Street, even referencing two separate “Bird” tunes in the second verse. There’s even a cover of Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” on which Jeff “Skunk“ Baxter imitates a muted horn with his guitar’s wah-wah pedal. In May 1974 my parents saw Steely Dan at the Rainbow Theatre in London (decades later I found a bootleg CD of the show at Norman’s Sound & Vision in the East Village and sent it to them). Though by this point the touring group had expanded to include the likes of Jeff Porcaro and Michael McDonald, Pretzel Logic was the last album the Dan made as an actual band. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen cut short the tour, trading in the road for the safe haven of the recording studio. For the rest of the decade, the duo — in an at times obsessive pursuit of sonic perfection — plucked musicians as needed from L.A.’s stellar roster of session aces (as recalled with typical grandiloquence in the liner notes for the 1999 CD reissue). My gatefold LP is an original 1974 Santa Maria pressing. The cover photo was taken by Raenne Rubenstein on the west side of Fifth Avenue near the 79th entrance to Central Park, just south of the Metropolitan Museum. On the back cover the twin towers of the San Remo apartment building on Central Park West are clearly visible through the bare trees. In fact half a century later little in this photo has changed, with the exception of 15-cent “pretzles.” Those days are gone forever, over a long time ago… oh yeah.
 

Stevie Wonder / Fulfillingness’ First Finale

Tamla, 1974
Though Stevie Wonder was still only 24 at the time, Fulfillingness’ First Finale was already his seventeenth studio album. Though it went to the top of the Billboard album charts, this record is definitely the most forgotten and overlooked of Wonder’s so-called “classic period” (even by me). That might be due to the awkward, alliterative title: is “fulfillingness” even a word? On top of that the sleeve was printed on a matte cardboard, stripping detail from Bob Gleason’s elaborate artwork and rendering the package a bit dull and murky. Having said that, this is a contemplative and strangely beautifully LP that rewards repeated listens, and one that is truly emblematic of the sophisticated one-man band studio wizardry and mind-altering chord progressions that by 1974 put Wonder in a genre of futuristic art-soul entirely of his own creation. Michelle Obama calls this her favourite album of all time, and it’s not hard to imagine why. FFF (as probably nobody else calls it) is perhaps best-remembered for its singles, the funky “Boogie On Reggae Woman” and the angry “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” a bitter diatribe aimed at Richard Nixon (the disgraced president resigned from the White House two days after the 45 came out). The LP’s most sombre track, “They Won’t Go When I Go,” was covered by George Michael on his second solo album, which I actually prefer to the original. In 1975 Wonder took home his second consecutive “Album of the Year” Grammy. In 1976 the award went to Paul Simon, who thanked Wonder for not making an album that year.
 

Jackson Browne / Late For The Sky

Asylum, 1974
If you’re anything like me, you can probably summon a mental shortlist of albums that mean more to you than all the others. I’m talking about the records that through repeated listens over many years have passed the point of mere familiarity, to the extent that they feel more like a part of your personal history or even an extension of your own self. For me, this album is one of those. Late For The Sky was Jackson Browne’s third LP, and expanded on some of the heavy themes — love, death, identity, alienation, adulthood — mapped out on the first two. But unlike those records, on this one there we no hits, and barely any hooks. There are only eight tracks on this album, six of which stretch out like expansive poems. At just 25, Browne had already proven himself a lyricist of rare eloquence and perspective, but there was nothing indulgent or pretentious about his writing. These songs were more like sermons, and a perfect match for his extraordinary voice: simple, soaring, searing. It all feels as natural and as transcendent as flying. Browne became the quintessential Los Angeles singer-songwriter, but he’d cut his teeth as a precocious teen in the Greenwich Village scene. In traversing these two seemingly disparate pop schools, no artist so accurately encapsulated the American mood of the first half of the seventies, as a generation’s youthful idealism and aspirations gave way to disillusionment, resignation, paranoia and fear (the title track was used, somewhat incongruously, in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver). Though the seemingly mellow West Coast arrangements make this record sound very much of its time, it was also years ahead of it. With its apocalyptic imagery and universal chorus of hope, side two closer “Before The Deluge” warns of the dangers of indifference — both environmental and social — predicting the rise of yuppie culture and pre-empting Browne’s own political activism of the eighties. The iconic cover was shot on South Lucerne Avenue in Windsor Square. The concept was Browne’s (“if it’s all reet with Magritte”), as was the car, a 1953 Chevrolet Bel-Air, apparently given to him by his former roommate, Glenn Frey.
 

Tom Waits / The Heart Of Saturday Night

Asylum, 1974
The cover for Tom Waits’ second album, The Heart Of Saturday Night, was apparently inspired by the artwork for Frank Sinatra’s 1955 album In The Wee Small Hours, but I never liked it — it always felt too literal, and a bit corny. The two photos taken by Scott Smith in front of a Los Angeles newsstand on the reverse sleeve would have made a much better front and back cover pairing. There’s even plenty of dark negative space where the text could go. But perhaps instead of retroactively redesigning LP artwork half a century after the fact I should talk about the record itself. The album expands upon the after-hours folk-jazz of Waits’ 1973 debut, but this time the setting is a night on the town, consecrating the artist’s enduring seventies persona as a boozy nocturnal troubadour. This album was also the start of a decade-long partnership with Bones Howe, who went on to produce all of Waits’ LPs on the Asylum label. The title track tackles the kind of themes that Waits’ contemporary Bruce Springsteen was writing about circa 1974. But while Springsteen’s early songs were fueled by the possibilities of youth, Waits’ characters seemed already resigned by life’s limitations. Waits himself always appeared like a man out of time, a product of L.A.’s early-seventies nostalgia for the jazz age who, by twenty-five, had seemingly already lived a life’s worth of heartbreak. Most tracks incorporate a standard rhythm section of seasoned jazz session players, though some include strings arranged by Mike Melvoin (Wendy’s dad). Two tracks — “Diamonds On My Windshield,” on which Waits raps like a Beat poet over a relentless bassline, and the almost spoken word closer, “The Ghosts Of Saturday Night” — hint at the direction Waits would take on subsequent albums. On The Heart Of Saturday Night his caramel croon was still intact, but by the time Small Change came out in 1976, his music had become more idiosyncratic, and his voice raspier, at times approaching a soon-to-be-customary growl. I love all of Waits’ seventies albums, but this is probably the one I’ve played the most. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve never listened to it in the daytime…
 

Wayne Shorter featuring Milton Nascimento / Native Dancer

Columbia, 1975
I was well into my thirties before I discovered Native Dancer, a collaboration between Wayne Shorter and the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento. I kept seeing it at my local used vinyl emporium, Academy Records; eventually I picked it up and it immediately became one of my favourite albums. I played it a lot at our apartment on East 11th Street, but I have two distinct memories of hearing it in less likely places. The first was on an extremely expensive stereo at an audiophile friend’s house during a ski weekend upstate (he’d actually met Shorter once). The second was through cheap headphones on a flight from Buenos Aires to São Paulo in 2014. I put this album on as we started our descent, and spent the next forty minutes gazing out over the sprawling metropolis as it passed by my window, seemingly without end. The album finished before the plane landed.
 

Bob Dylan / Blood On The Tracks

Columbia, 1975
Bob Dylan’s inconsistent output in the first half of the decade had thrown into question his relevance in the seventies; Blood On The Tracks secured his enduring reputation as an elusive artist capable of surprise reinvention. Though Dylan has typically refused to be drawn on the subject, this “comeback” record’s confessional lyrical content is famously noted as relating to the breakdown of his marriage to Sara Lownds. Their son, Jakob, has described the songs as “my parents talking.” In early 1974 Dylan began a relationship with Ellen Bernstein, an employee at Columbia Records. Around the same time he began attending art classes five days a week with the painter Norman Raeben, an experience that made him reconsider his understanding of space and time. Dylan credits Raeben for showing him how to create narratives that placed “yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room.” It was Raeben that described one of Dylan’s paintings as being “tangled up in blue.” Dylan once said he wrote that song after spending a weekend listening to Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album, Blue, whose intimate sound he also sought to emulate. Indeed, he initially intended to cut the new songs with an electric band before reverting to simpler acoustic arrangements. The sessions took place in New York in September 1974, but after playing the album for his brother, Dave Zimmerman, Dylan was convinced to re-record five of the ten tracks with different musicians in Minneapolis just after Christmas. Three of the LP’s songs have been performed only once in concert; several others were reimagined for the Rolling Thunder Revue tour in late ’75, and have remained part of Dylan’s live repertoire ever since. As someone who was born too late to experience Dylan as a cultural phenomenon in real time, navigating his vast discography after the fact was a daunting task. But this record soon became one of my favourites: its literary yet relatively direct relationship songs were perhaps easier for a nineties teenager to connect with than those borne from the distant folk or blues traditions that Dylan had written just a decade prior.
 

John Lennon / Rock ’n’ Roll

Apple, 1975
Rock ’n’ Roll, John Lennon’s sixth post-Beatles album, came about after New York music publisher Morris Levy belatedly noticed that the opening line of “Come Together” (on the Beatles’ Abbey Road) was lifted from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.” As part of the lawsuit settlement, Lennon would have to record three Levy-owned songs on his next album. Instead, he chose to cut an entire LP of covers, tentatively titled “Oldies But Mouldies.” By this point Lennon was living (at the urging of Yoko Ono) in Los Angeles with the couple’s personal assistant, May Pang. Lennon would later refer to this period as his “Lost Weekend,” after the Billy Wilder film. Though Lennon’s 18 months on the West Coast became infamous for his public displays of drunkenness, at Pang’s encouragement he also reconnected with his son, Julian, whom he hadn’t seen in two years. Eventually the couple returned to Manhattan, renting an apartment on East 52nd Street and adopting two cats, Major and Minor, before John returned to Yoko in February ’75. The idea of an oldies record wasn’t new: both David Bowie and Bryan Ferry had put out albums of sixties covers in 1973, by which point a rock and roll revival was in swing, a fad spurred in part by nostalgic movies such as American Graffiti. Even Ringo Starr had, er, starred in a hit British flick called That’ll Be The Day. In early ’74 the sitcom Happy Days launched on ABC — John and Julian were early visitors to the set. Lennon brought in Phil Spector to produce the album, but the October ’73 sessions soon descended into alcohol-fueled mayhem. After an intoxicated Spector fired a gun into the ceiling (while inexplicably dressed as a surgeon), Lennon was banned from the studio. Spector then absconded with the tapes, forcing Lennon to start from scratch. Today, much of this record sounds quite ersatz to my ears — maybe the best thing about it is Jürgen Vollmer’s cover shot of a young Lennon in a Hamburg doorway. In 1975 the oldest of these songs was just twenty years old, which I think speaks to the impact of everything that had happened, musically and culturally, since 1955. Or perhaps nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be…
 

Steely Dan / Katy Lied

ABC, 1975
Katy Lied, Steely Dan’s fourth album, took its name from a line in “Doctor Wu,” while the insect on the cover is a katydid, a visual pun on the title. It was the first Steely Dan album following the dissolution of the touring band in 1974; for the rest of the seventies Steely Dan would exist purely as a studio entity, with a rotating cast of L.A. session musicians selected by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen on a track-by-track basis. It was also the first Steely Dan record to feature the backing vocals of Michael McDonald, whose era-defining voice pops up on the second pre-chorus of “Bad Sneakers.” But Katy Lied is probably most notable for the emergence of Jeff Porcaro. The son of jazz drummer Joe Porcaro, young Jeff had played drums as a nineteen-year-old on “Night By Night” on Steely Dan’s previous LP, Pretzel Logic. Now barely into his twenties, he sat behind the kit on nine of Katy Lied’s ten tracks (the legendary Hal Blaine takes over on the tenth). Porcaro went on to form Toto, while also playing on hundreds of records as a session musician until his death in 1992. He’d become ill after spraying his lawn with insecticide; a coroner later determined he died from a heart attack caused by years of smoking and cocaine use. Becker and Fagen were typically dissatisfied with the finished album’s sound quality, supposedly due to a malfunction with a nascent noise-reduction system. Just last month a remastered UHQR edition was released, to the great excitement of audiophiles, but both my 1975 LP copy and my 1999 remastered CD have always sounded pretty flawless to me. I used to have an MCA vinyl reissue from the eighties, but I replaced it with this original ABC pressing (complete with innersleeve), which I found a few years ago at Arroyo Records in Highland Park. According to a sticker on the reverse, it once belonged to a South Pasadena resident named Thomas C. Oddone, who himself sounds a bit like a character from a Steely Dan song. Incidentally, that same afternoon who should I run into taking out his recycling but unmistakeable session bassist Leland Sklar, who somehow never played on a Steely Dan session.
 

James Taylor / Gorilla

Warner Bros., 1975
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve always had a certain affinity for JT, an unlikely bond that was assigned to me at birth. Luckily I’ve always liked his music (imagine the burden of going through life with the name “Phil Collins”). My parents had all of James Taylor’s records, but in 1979 they probably couldn’t have conceived he’d still be famous several decades later. It was only as an adult that I discovered James Taylor had a brother named Alex — which is also my brother’s name! Not a week goes by that a stranger doesn’t remind me of my wealthier and balder namesake. Over the years I’ve come to expect it every time I arrive for an appointment or call a customer service number, along with the requisite, “I bet you get that all the time, don’t you?” that inevitably follows. (Sometimes I respond, “No, actually you’re the first.”) Although in recent years I’ve noticed a growing number of younger people in whom my name fails to illicit any reaction whatsoever, suggesting there might come a time in my life when these comforting little exchanges are just a memory.
 

Prince / Dirty Mind

Warner Bros., 1980
Recorded mostly alone at his home studio and clocking in at just thirty minutes, Dirty Mind is the closest Prince ever came to making a punk record. But it’s not punk, it’s Prince, which by 1980 was already something unique but quite indefinable. “Don’t make me black,” the young musician requested of Warner Bros. vice president Lenny Waronker, shortly after signing a three-record deal with the label. At a time when the divergence between black and white music was perhaps never wider, Prince was starting to bridge that gap. His sound — a raw, spare, new wave funk characterized by intricate keyboards, clean guitar and limber falsetto — questioned the stifling definition of black music, while his androgynous image and explicit lyrics challenged ideas of black masculinity. The album’s title may have hinted at the nature of its content, but few were prepared for “Head” and “Sister,” the LP’s most notorious tracks, which packed a one-two sucker punch of unprecedented lewdness. The former led to original keyboardist Gayle Chapman walking out of Prince’s band; she was replaced by Lisa Coleman, who delivers the lines of the song’s virgin bride with deadpan detachment. Dirty Mind positioned Prince as a sexually ambiguous provocateur par excellence, which for years would prove an obstacle for conservative critics. The album’s accompanying tour — on which Prince performed in bikini briefs and “played” an ejaculating Telecaster — unsurprisingly failed to win them over. In 1981, not long after the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau had suggested Mick Jagger “fold up his penis and go home,” Prince and band were pelted off the stage while opening for the Rolling Stones at Los Angeles Coliseum (a quart of Jack Daniels reportedly missed his head by a matter of inches). Had they looked past his erotic exuberance, they may have also recognized Prince as an artist of singular talent already evidenced by Dirty Mind. Every track on here could have been a hit — that is, had the radio stations been allowed to play them…
 

Bruce Springsteen / The River

Columbia, 1980
Bruce Springsteen’s fifth album, The River was the culmination of a prolific and productive period: no less than fifty new songs were recorded during the live sessions at the Power Station (a former ConEd plant) on 53rd Street. Twenty of these ended up on the album, resulting in Springsteen’s first double LP (I believe all the discarded tracks have since shown up on various box sets and expanded editions). By 1980 Springsteen’s epic live shows were already the stuff of legend — I always think of this album as harnessing some of that performance energy and encapsulating what I’d consider to be the classic E Street sound and spirit. The River is cleaner, brighter and funnier than its predecessor, and was Springsteen’s first album to reach number one. But it’s still often overshadowed by his more celebrated work, perhaps because it’s harder to define. If his previous two albums, Born To Run (1975) and Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) were clearly the artistic statements of a neurotic perfectionist, The River felt like the contents of Bruce’s brain scattered over four sides. The extended running time provided space to switch between a range of musical moods and complex emotional concerns with the ease and breeze of a radio dial, from goofy garage rock to boardwalk soul and even solemn introspection. Amid the depressed national psyche of the post-Vietnam years Springsteen had developed into a writer of rare social consciousness. The lives of working Americans (including that of his own brother-in-law on the title track) became a rich subject, and he’d sometimes even inhabit his characters in the first person. It was the shift towards this type of material in the eighties that led to Bruce becoming a highly misunderstood artist. To this day conservatives consistently reduce him to a patriotic champion of old-fashioned blue collar values, while I’ve heard him dismissed by snobbier liberals as a purveyor of mindless rock, a jingoistic simpleton. But clearly neither party was ever really listening, because musically and otherwise, Springsteen was always everything but simple.
 

John Lennon and Yoko Ono / Double Fantasy

Geffen, 1980
Credited to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy is subtitled “A Heart Play” and packaged as a celebration of the couple’s union. But if the record’s theme was love, its timing — or rather, the timing of Lennon’s assassination exactly three weeks later — resulted in it forever being associated with his death. Lennon’s return to the studio announced the end of a five-year, self-imposed exile from the music industry, during which the former Beatle holed up at the Dakota and assumed the role of kimono-wearing, bread-baking, diaper-changing house husband. His songs here are paeans to that domestic bliss, or at least the version of it he’d like us to believe. Notably, for the first time in his solo career Lennon sounds content. No longer troubled by the past, he’s embracing middle age and looking forward, but the material, while sentimental, is never syrupy. Aside from its showcasing Lennon as the master song crafter that he was, what I’ve always liked most about this album is its production and arrangements, which still sound warm, tight and essentially timeless. In contrast, Ono’s contributions feel more rooted in time, as if she was striving too hard to sound like 1980. In what would amount to little more than a futile attempt to rewrite (music) history, I sometimes imagine re-sequencing the Lennon tracks from Double Fantasy together with those from Milk & Honey, the album of outtakes from the same Hit Factory sessions released a few years after his murder. Even after all these years it’s impossible to separate Double Fantasy from the thought of what could have been.
 

Steely Dan / Gaucho

MCA, 1980
Gaucho was Steely Dan’s seventh album and the final release of the band’s original run (until 2000’s Grammy-winning Two Against Nature). The hiatus that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen imposed following this record was perhaps inevitable given that it represents an almost absurd zenith of the jazz-rock hipster duo’s obsessive studio perfectionism. For instance, Jeff Porcaro’s drums on the title track were assembled from forty-six different takes, while a satisfactory mix of the fade-out on “Babylon Sisters” was only achieved on the fifty-fifth attempt. Notoriously, a recording of “The Second Arrangement” was accidentally erased by an assistant engineer; rather than spend weeks re-recording the track, the song was simply shelved (a demo surfaced years later). Some say the resulting album is more sterile than its predecessors, but its immaculate production is tempered by its undeniable grooves and disreputable lyrical concerns (an alternative title might have been “More Songs About Hookers And Coke Dealers”). In 2014 while strolling the Caminito in La Boca neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, I came across the relief by Argentine sculptor Israel Hoffman, on which the LP’s artwork is based. Sadly I was not wearing my spangled leather poncho at the time…
 

Stevie Nicks / Bella Donna

Modern, 1981
Stevie Nicks’ first solo album, Bella Donna, has a lovely, late summer feeling. I was late discovering this album at all — I’d never heard it in full until I picked up the LP from Academy Records around 2009. But I always liked Stevie Nicks’ contributions to Fleetwood Mac. By comparison Christine McVie’s songs often seemed slight to me and lacking in lyrical or emotional complexity, while by the end of the seventies Lindsey Buckingham was beginning to buckle under the weight of his own frantic new wave aspirations. In contrast, Nicks’ material was poetic, personal, steeped in mystical symbolism and rooted in a timeless radio rock sound that is more evident than ever on Bella Donna. The title track — inspired by Nicks’ boyfriend’s mother — is probably my favourite song of hers, though the album is best remembered for the single “Edge Of Seventeen,” the odd title of which came about after Nicks misheard Tom Petty’s first wife, Jane, recall how she’d met her husband at “the age of seventeen” (evidently Jane had a strong southern accent). Petty himself shares the lead vocal on “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” a track left off his Heartbreakers album Hard Promises, and most of that band plays on this record. The rest of the personnel is a who’s who of the era’s top session players and Stevie’s biz pals, whose playing melds cohesively thanks to Jimmy Iovine’s unaffected production. Perhaps because I only heard it after we were living together and married, this album — maybe more than any other — always reminds me of my wife, Hillary. I remember “Leather And Lace” (a duet with the Eagles’ Don Henley) coming on the radio one grey afternoon as her dad drove us down to D.C. not long before he died. Some years later Hillary put this album on late one night as we drove through country roads in Mallorca with just our headlights to guide the way. Those moments don’t happen that often, but when they do it can be the best way to listen to music: in near darkness and without distraction, far from home but alongside the person you love.
 

The Rolling Stones / Tattoo You

Rolling Stones Records, 1981
Tattoo You was the Rolling Stones’ sixteenth studio album, though unusually this one was comprised of outtakes and discarded material from previous sessions, with some basic tracks dating back as far as 1972. This was borne of necessity: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were in the midst of a feud that would last (on-and-off) for most of the decade. Missing lyrics were completed and new parts recorded separately, before Bob Clearmountain mixed the ten tracks into a cohesive final product. Like many great Stones hits, side one opener “Start Me Up” hangs on a simple Keith riff, though the song was originally conceived with a reggae tempo. I’ve always loved the open, economical arrangement of the finished cut, and how Charlie Watts’ drumming really makes it swing (he was always a jazz man at heart). If “Start Me Up” was a number to which Mick could strut his stuff to the point of self-parody, its flip-side (in every sense) is side two closer “Waiting On A Friend,” whose lyrics reveal an age-appropriate maturity towards relationships, the kind you might expect from men on the cusp of forty — with the possible exception of the Rolling Stones. The memorable sax solo was performed by an uncredited Sonny Rollins, while the single’s accompanying video was famously shot on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. Production on some of the Stones’ seventies records could be damp and murky, with vocals buried deep in the mix, but this album really cemented the cleaner, taught style that has come to epitomise their sound ever since. I love this record and some of the band’s subsequent releases, but as good as Tattoo You still is, it was also the album on which the Stones essentially settled on a successful formula for the rest of their career. In the mid-seventies they were being written off as irrelevant has-beens; by 1981 they’d adapted to a shifting scene without ever betraying their roots or not sounding like themselves. Tattoo You was the album on which the Rolling Stones finally recognised and embraced their greatest strengths, as well as their own mortality. It’s no surprise they’ve been riding out middle-age for forty years.
 

Prince / Controversy

Warner Bros., 1981
Falling between the new wave R’n’B breakthrough of the previous year’s release, Dirty Mind, and the drum machine textures of his 1982 double LP, 1999, Prince’s fourth studio album, Controversy, is sometimes overlooked. A sonic continuation of its predecessor that also hints at the innovative sounds Prince was already developing, Controversy is probably best remembered for its uncharacteristic lyrical exploration of political themes. The album opens with the title cut, a seven-minute slab of synth-funk inspired by conservatives’ curiosity surrounding Prince’s public persona. Rather than ease their confusion or discomfort about his race, religion, or sexuality, Prince transcends such concerns by continuing to defy easy categorization on every front — the track is merely further provocation. He even pauses halfway through to recite the Lord’s Prayer before entering into a repeated refrain: “People call me rude/I wish we all were nude/I wish there were no black or white/I wish there were no rules.” It’s a startlingly confident manifesto for the then twenty-three-year-old’s philosophy towards music, sex, and society in general, and the most important statement of his career up to that point. Prince’s socially-conscious mood continues on “Sexuality” (“Don’t let your children watch television until they know how to read”), while on side two he tackles such hot topics of the day as Cold War relations (“Ronnie, Talk To Russia”) and gun violence (“Annie Christian”). Those two oddities are often cited as among the most curious entries in Prince’s vast canon, but they are a quaint document of America’s anxieties in the early eighties. Elsewhere, Prince still finds room for his most reliable subject, as “Private Joy,” “Let’s Work,” and “Do Me, Baby” perhaps suggest from their titles alone. The album closes with a hilarious and brazen dose of Minneapolis rockabilly entitled “Jack U Off.” It’s the only track on the album to feature additional personnel, but maybe most significant for introducing Prince’s trademark preference for minimalist spelling. Though proper words were no longer always necessary, the message was only getting clearer.
 

Simon & Garfunkel / The Concert in Central Park

Warner Bros., 1982
On September 19, 1981, 500,000 people gathered on the Great Lawn for a reunion concert by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. The free event was organized to raise money for the restoration and maintenance of Central Park, which by the early eighties had, like much of New York, fallen on hard times. Why not call on the city’s greatest pop songwriter and his one-time singing partner? Despite an enduring cultural significance the duo had been apart for over a decade, and old tensions between them quickly resurfaced, due in part to opposing ideas for the music’s direction. Garfunkel wanted to keep it acoustic, Simon wanted to use a full band. Rather than split the show into two separate sets, the pair performed almost entirely together, with Garfunkel having to learn the newer songs from Simon’s solo catalogue. In the end the concert was a success, though ironically Simon’s debut live performance of “The Late Great Johnny Ace” (which referenced the recent murder of John Lennon) was interrupted by a deranged fan. That track was left off the live double LP that was released in February 1982, which was followed by a film of the concert broadcast on HBO. Later that year Simon & Garfunkel completed a world tour and began recording a new studio album. But their working relationship had once again deteriorated, and the sessions become so acrimonious that the project was abandoned (instead Simon released the solo album, Hearts And Bones, in 1983). In 1991 Simon played another concert in Central Park on a similar scale to that of ten years earlier, but this time refused Garfunkel’s offer to participate. Incidentally, as I prepared to vacate my East Village apartment of twelve years last February, this album was the last record I played before I packed up the turntable. That wasn’t a conscious decision, but the thing about live albums is that the audience forms an extra layer of separation between you and the performer, creating a very specific sense of occasion and place in the imagination of the listener. In this case the very existence of this record owes everything to nostalgia: a document of another time that’s already remembering another time. And what a time it was.
 

ABC / The Lexicon of Love

Neutron, 1982
These days the Sheffield band ABC are routinely lumped in with other British acts on the rise in the early eighties, but neither Spandau Ballet nor Duran Duran ever came close to making a record as good as this. It probably ranks as the finest British pop recording of the decade and certainly one of the greatest debut LPs of all time. ABC were formed when Martin Fry was asked to join Vice Versa after interviewing the band for the fanzine Modern Drugs, of which he was editor. In 1980 the foursome evolved into ABC and the blond, debonair Fry had emerged as its lead singer, probably thanks to his literary leanings and penchant for gold lamé suits. Practically a concept album, the record’s lyrical concerns revolve around matters of the heart, as its title suggests. Each song is a romantic melodrama, lended extra panache by the swooning Fry’s affected yet effective delivery. The band hired progressive studiosmith Trevor Horn to produce the LP. The resulting album is loud, camp and immaculate, and packed with what would become trademarks of Horn’s glossy production style. Laden with lush strings, brassy horns and irresistible bass lines, the record’s energy and club-friendly beats have more in common with the polished post-disco sounds emanating from the American R’n’B charts in 1982 than the sterile synth-pop that cluttered the UK Top 40. Though essentially a dance record, the song craft on display elevates the album above soulless anglodisco, making it a funkier early example of the sophisti-pop that would dominate British charts by the middle of the decade. “The Lexicon of Love” entered the UK chart at number one and produced four top twenty singles, though every one of its tracks could have feasibly been a hit. ABC made five more albums before disbanding in 1991. They reformed in 1997 but now basically existed as a Fry solo project. By 2007 his new band were a headline act on the eighties nostalgia circuit, an experience that inspired Fry to release a follow-up album, The Lexicon of Love II, in 2016. It reached number five but sadly it’s not on Spotify so I’ve never even heard it…
 

Joe Jackson / Night and Day

A&M, 1982
Though it was his fifth album, Jackson himself has said that Night and Day felt more like a debut, given that it was a product of the creative inspiration and freedom he’d discovered since relocating to New York. He’d already made a jump blues record in 1981, but Night and Day was further rejection of the “angry young man” tag with which he’d been lumbered in his homeland. Jackson was no punk — he’d been trained at the Royal Academy of Music — and had more musical ideas to explore than new wave male posturing. While his themes and lyrics were based on observations of contemporary Manhattan culture, Jackson clearly aspired to write songs that were sophisticated in the Tin Pan Alley tradition — even the album’s title is a famous Cole Porter tune. The LP cover art may have suggested a midtown penthouse, but the music contained within had more to do with the tenements of Spanish Harlem or Alphabet City (Jackson’s next album even included an instrumental track entitled “Loisaida”). The guitarless record shimmers with Manhattan-centric sounds: cosmopolitan rhythms, salsa-tinged piano and percolating Latin percussion. This distinct sense of place is accentuated by the deep crossfade applied to the tracks on side one, an effect reminiscent of hearing music come and go from a passing car radio or open storefront, or even the familiar New York sensation of stumbling on an unknown world simply by turning a corner on a city block. Today Night and Day is remembered mostly for the hit “Steppin’ Out,” which reached number six on both sides of the Atlantic. Coincidentally, like the ABC record I posted the other day, Jackson also released a follow-up concept album in 2000 entitled Night And Day II, on which he revisits the ideas of the original. About ten years ago I found myself sitting two stools down from Jackson at Eisenberg’s lunch counter. I’d heard he could be a prickly character, so I was a little nervous to speak to him. But as he perused the menu I extended my hand and introduced myself as a fan. Jackson whipped his head in my direction, and without saying a word, told me he was in absolutely no mood to chat…
 

Elvis Costello & The Attractions / Imperial Bedroom

F-Beat, 1982
Imperial Bedroom was Elvis Costello’s seventh album, his sixth with his band The Attractions, and his third LP in eighteen months, consecrating the 27-year-old as the UK’s most prolific and ambitious pop songwriter. The record also emphatically confirmed Costello’s status as a lyricist of staggering eloquence, whose endlessly clever wordplay perhaps served to disassociate himself from these songs’ frequent themes of marital stress and political disgust. While his personal observations lay hidden beneath layers of rich metaphor, Costello continued to defy basic pop industry conventions. Imperial Bedroom included a ballad called “Almost Blue” (memorably covered by Chet Baker in 1987 and Costello’s own wife, Diana Krall, in 2004) which shared a title with his previous album, while the would-be title track of this one only appeared as the B-side to the single, “Man Out Of Time.” The LP also highlighted what a tremendously tight and tour-weary band the Attractions were by that point despite — or maybe due to — their much-documented fondness for the bottle. Imperial Bedroom was Costello’s first album of original material that wasn’t produced by Nick Lowe. Instead he enlisted the expertise of former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick to help create the sonic drama and baroque flourishes these adult songs warranted. Yet like Sgt. Pepper, for all its pop mastery and orchestral bluster Imperial Bedroom didn’t include an obvious hit single. Perhaps that’s why it only reached number 6 in the UK and barely cracked the top 30 on the Billboard chart. But it topped the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, which is probably a more reliable barometer with which to measure quality. The Picasso pastiche on the front cover, titled “Snakecharmer & Reclining Octopus,” was painted by graphic designer Barney Bubbles, though credited to “Sal Forlenza, 1941.” It was the artist’s final collaboration with Costello before his suicide in 1983. According to Costello’s 2015 autobiography, the original canvas now hangs on the wall of his Greenwich Village apartment.
 

Bruce Springsteen / Nebraska

Columbia, 1982
By the early-eighties Bruce Springsteen had already gained notoriety as a prolific studio perfectionist and indefatigable showman, but in stark contrast to the Spector-esque bombast of Born To Run, Nebraska was essentially a DIY solo album, and the closest thing he ever made to a lo-fi punk record. Using a TEAC Tascam Series 144 four-track cassette recorder mixed through an Echoplex, Springsteen began preparing demos of new songs at his home in Colts Neck, New Jersey, during the winter of 1981-82 (most of the tracks are said to date from January 3rd, 1982). In April 1982 Springsteen took the rough recordings to the E Street Band to flesh out in the studio, but after laying down tracks with the full band decided that the spare, unpolished original versions better suited the dark themes of the material (however, eight songs from the same sessions ended up on Born In The U.S.A. in 1984). So the tape that Bruce had been carrying around for weeks without a case in the pocket of his jeans became his next LP, though only after the application of sophisticated noise reduction techniques. The original tape recording was so raw and distorted that the album almost had to be released on cassette only since a record needle would barely track in the wax. If Nebraska was a sonic departure, thematically the record honed in on some of the bleaker subjects — primarily criminal behaviour and blue collar hardships — that Springsteen had begun to tackle on his previous two albums. Springsteen claimed some of these character stories were inspired by Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States. The title track is about 19-year-old Charles Starkweather, whose killing spree in January 1958 gained national prominence. The fact that Badlands, the 1973 movie loosely based on the case, is also the title of a Springsteen song can’t be a coincidence. Nebraska also boasts one of the decade’s great record covers, designed by Andrea Klein. Its use of an all caps, red-on-black Franklin Gothic condensed typeface says more about the quintessentially American music contained within than any elaborate artwork ever could.
 

Donald Fagen / The Nightfly

Warner Bros., 1982
I love this album so much that I bought it before I even had a record player, from the East Village Thrift Shop on Second Avenue, just a couple of blocks up from my first New York apartment. I think it only cost a dollar. I already knew it backwards by that point, which was true also of the music Fagen made as one half of Steely Dan. Like those records, The Nightfly was the product of meticulous studio perfectionism, allied by the usual cream of session players from which to pluck on a song-by-song basis (“I.G.Y” actually uses two different drummers). This tendency was compounded by the decision to record instruments separately (as opposed to performing live) and to use digital recorders (instead of conventional magnetic tape), making The Nightfly one of the first fully digital mainstream pop recordings. To understand the nascent technology three studio engineers were sent to take classes at 3M’s headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota. But to this day it is considered one of the best-recorded LPs of all time, and still a popular choice among audiophiles when testing hi-fi components. Of course, The Nightfly sounded great — more surprising was its content, which is free of the jaded sardonicism that typified Steely Dan’s lyrics. Without Walter Becker, his longtime songwriting partner, Fagen wrote a sophisticated set of semi-autobiographical songs from the viewpoint of a young person stuck in East Coast suburbia during the Kennedy years — the album’s one cover is Leiber & Stoller’s “Ruby Baby.” The result is an album that’s jazzy and urbane, and imbued with a nostalgia for the forward-looking optimism of the period. This may be why I connect with the record so deeply: the line in “New Frontier” about moving to the city, learning design, and studying overseas spoke specifically to my own teenage aspirations. Fagen never toured with The Nightfly — he spent the bulk of the eighties suffering from depression and writer’s block. But I did see him perform the album in its entirety at the Beacon Theatre in 2019, a memorable show that was released in 2021 as The Nightly: Live.
 

Prince / 1999

Warner Bros., 1982
“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. I only want you to have some fun.” With that robotic, half-speed spoken intro — part reassurance, part declaration of intent — I became exposed to Prince. 1999 was Prince’s fifth album and the first I ever heard. But before the needle even dropped I was drawn to the double LP’s packaging, which provided an intriguing introduction to the little man’s universe. The artwork became iconic, but it was the inner sleeve photography that encapsulated both Prince’s mysterious otherness and undeniable sense of humour. No matter his one-man-band studio innovations or blatant sexual metaphors, it was immediately clear to me that Prince was also a bit silly. It was the appeal of this persona that helped make his music incredibly fun and utterly accessible, especially to a child. I remember hearing 1999’s title track — a dance anthem set against the backdrop of an apocalyptic vision of the new millennium — one summer night in the garden of my childhood best friend, Joe, whose parents were throwing a party. “1999” glided into “Little Red Corvette,” a crossover hit readymade for FM radio (or, by late ’82, MTV) with lyrics that recalled Dylan or Lennon. I loved it instantly because it was about a car (even if it was really about a woman). Only when I saw Prince open a show in 2011 by performing the two songs back-to-back did I realise how deeply the first side of 1999 is connected to my childhood. To this day, whenever I hear the cooing baby at the end of “Delirious” (the album’s third track and single) I recall drifting asleep in the dark, the same song unspooling on my Walkman. Few albums can match 1999’s triple opening punch, but the remaining three sides’ panoply of funky sonic textures became the blueprint for what was soon dubbed “the Minneapolis sound.” Ironically, given his lyrical concerns regarding the encroachment of technology, it was Prince’s creative command of the Linn LM-1 drum machine that made this album truly revolutionary, and perhaps his most influential. I’m convinced that even had it been released in 1999 (the year), 1999 (the album) would have still sounded decades ahead of its time.
 

Aztec Camera / High Land, Hard Rain

Rough Trade, 1983
The ten songs that comprise Aztec Camera’s first album, High Land, Hard Rain, would be impressive by any standard. What makes them remarkable is that their composer, Roddy Frame, had only just turned nineteen. The record’s most epic and yearning track, “We Could Send Letters,” actually dated back to 1979! Despite (or maybe because of) his tender age, Frame exudes confidence on his debut, revealing a stunning mastery of melody, clever chord structures, and poetic, wistful lyrics that make you question what you’ve been doing with your life. Hailing from East Kilbride (a sort of Scottish equivalent of Milton Keynes), Aztec Camera’s wide-eyed, floppy-haired frontman soon drew comparisons with other highly-regarded songsmiths such as Elvis Costello, though Frame claimed he wanted to sound like a cross between his two idols: Joe Strummer and Wes Montgomery. Indeed, Frame’s guitar work on the album is extraordinary (apparently he used a different instrument on every track), and aside from a couple of synthetic drum fills, the production is acoustic and organic. Propelled by the flamenco-tinged opener, “Oblivious” (the sleeve of the UK single even featured a photo of a woman in a Cordovan hat), this warm, shimmering record was a welcome change from the brittle synth-pop cluttering British charts and airwaves in 1983. Though initially a band, Aztec Camera were always in essence Frame’s personal project. His next album, produced by Mark Knopfler, includes perhaps my favourite Aztec Camera song, “All I Need Is Everything.” Between 1984 and 1995 Frame released five more albums as Aztec Camera, scoring a massive hit in 1988 with “Somewhere In My Heart.” In 1998 he began using his own name, and since then he’s put out four more “solo” records. Over four decades Frame has developed his own unique brand of soulful indie pop, and remains in my opinion one of Britain’s most underrated songwriters and guitarists. Perhaps there’s yet time to change that — he’s still only 59. Incidentally, the artwork for this LP is by the late Glaswegian painter David Band, who also created covers for Altered Images and Spandau Ballet.
 

Talking Heads / Speaking In Tongues

Sire, 1983
David Byrne claimed the title of Talking Heads’ fifth album, Speaking In Tongues, was a reference to his lyrics, which at times seem like a verbal stream-of-consciousness. But it also reflected his increasing focus on rhythm over meaning, as well as a fixation with the music and culture of the American south. It was Talking Heads’ first record since their 1977 debut that wasn’t produced by Brian Eno — the result is an album that’s danceable, accessible and ultimately commercial: it was the band’s highest charting LP. The album is best-described as a sort of art-funk, and contains some of the band’s most popular and enduring songs, such as “Burning Down The House,” “Girlfriend Is Better,” and “This Must Be The Place” (which in recent years has become something of an unofficial millennial hipster anthem). The recording features Talking Heads’ expanded line-up — including Bernie Worrell, Steve Scales and Alex Weir — several of whom had performed on the Remain In Light tour of 1980-81. As you’d expect, the band is undeniably tight, yet I have always found the production on this record to be quite brittle, almost stifled. This is especially apparent when I compare it to the warm, supple grooves of Stop Making Sense. Six of the album’s nine tracks were performed in Jonathan Demme’s concert movie (recorded in December 1983) and I prefer the live versions of all of them. I have listened to Speaking In Tongues on LP, CD, and via Spotify, and every time I put it on I expect to hear it differently, but I always have the same reaction. Is it just me? Byrne himself designed the standard release artwork, though there was also a limited edition version created by none other than Robert Rauschenberg. This clam-shell package earned the artist a Grammy, and contained a clear vinyl LP plus three disc collages that could be spun to produce different effects. I’ve never seen one in the flesh but there are several right now on eBay.
 

Wham! / Fantastic

Innervision, 1983
This is the U.S. release of Wham!’s debut album, Fantastic, which is why it says “Wham! U.K.” on the sleeve, so as to not cause confusion with a short-lived Nashville-based outfit of the same name. The name of the British group had nothing to do with the 1963 Lonnie Mack song or the Roy Lichtenstein painting hanging in the Tate Gallery. Rather it derived from Andrew Ridgeley’s improvised lyric on what became the duo’s debut single, “Wham Rap (Enjoy What You Do).” Ridgeley had taken the chubby, bespectacled Georgios Panayiotou under his wing at school, where they had met almost a decade earlier. They were not yet out of their teens when they emerged as Wham! in late 1982, appearing as a couple of leather-clad tough guys (though any macho posturing was softened by their rolled-up jeans and espadrilles). Wham!’s initial look, carefree attitude and catchy disco-funk made them an instant easy target for the notorious British press, to the extent that many critics chose to ignore (or failed to notice) the social satire of George Michael’s lyrics. Wham!’s first four singles were essentially tongue-in-cheek celebrations of the fun-loving lifestyle of the unemployed and unattached young suburban male. George rapped with admirable confidence for a white teenager from Hertfordshire, but his extraordinary voice and gift for crafting horn-laden pop-soul hits was only revealed on the fourth single, “Club Tropicana,” the video for which also established Wham!’s enduring image as a pair of perma-tanned playboys. Despite its memorable hooks, the album only occasionally hinted at the heights Michael (both as part of Wham! and on his own) would soon reach. Fantastic contained two of the three Wham! songs for which both members are given equal writing credits. Indeed, Ridgeley was rapidly consigned to the role of best pal and silent partner once Wham! entered the studio to cut the LP. Years later George said that the album’s title was Ridgeley’s idea, conceding that Andrew’s greatest contribution to Wham! was “his sense of humour.”
 

Madonna / Madonna

Sire, 1983
Though Madonna’s eponymous debut LP introduced arguably the biggest global pop star of the eighties, its genesis was rooted in Manhattan’s downtown club scene. But Ms. Ciccone was no disco diva, and her first record came about thanks to the undeniable qualities she exuded as both a young woman and a fledgling artist. In public, Madonna oozed confidence and ambition, whether it was sartorial, social or sexual. Madonna had arrived in New York in 1978 with just $35 in her pocket. She found an apartment in Alphabet City, served coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts and worked as a coat-check girl at the Russian Tea Room. These jobs funded her pursuit of dance, for which she took lessons at Alvin Ailey and studied under Martha Graham. Following the break-up of her first band, The Breakfast Club, Madonna began writing songs with Stephen Bray, an old boyfriend from her native Michigan. They called themselves Emmy and the Emmys until Madonna decided to promote herself as a solo artist. She foisted her demo tape into the hands of Mark Kamins — a DJ at Danceteria on West 21st Street — and when the dancefloor responded positively to the early version of “Everybody,” he helped get her a deal with Sire Records. By now Madonna was dating painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who introduced her to producer Reggie Lucas. Lucas programmed the Linn drum machine tracks but was unreceptive to Madonna’s input, so she hired John “Jellybean” Benitez to finish the album. The record established a new kind of synth-driven post-disco, setting a template for white dance-pop that remained for the rest of the decade. Three of the album’s five singles — “Holiday,” “Lucky Star,” and “Borderline” — are radio staples to this day, though one critic described Madonna’s vocals as sounding like “Minnie Mouse on helium,” a label that stuck for years. But to note Madonna’s shortcomings was to miss the point, and misunderstand her innate appeal. She was never just about the music, making her the perfect pop star for the MTV generation. If anything, Madonna’s initial boho-punk image — bleached hair, crop-tops, fishnet gloves and bangles — had a greater impact than the album itself.
 

Elvis Costello & The Attractions / Punch The Clock

F-Beat, 1983
Punch The Clock was Elvis Costello’s eighth album but the first that didn’t receive universal acclaim, with many critics and fans taking issue with the glossy production. Costello had engaged former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick on his previous album — the baroque pop masterpiece Imperial Bedroom — but following that LP’s disappointing sales he recruited British hitmakers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, best known for their work with Madness and Dexys Midnight Runners. The duo brought in a four-piece horn section, dubbed The TKO Horns, plus session backing vocalists Claudia Fontaine and Caron Wheeler, collectively known as Afrodiziak. The album’s artwork also suggested a change in direction: Costello is barely recognisable in a Lennonesque cap and wire-framed glasses. The title itself might acknowledge a surrender to 1983’s commercial tastes, as the artist compromises his creative vision for professional survival. Either way, it worked: “Everyday I Write The Book,” a pop-soul tune wrapped in literary metaphor, was his first single to crack the US Top 40. If anything, the bright and shiny sound actually provides a disarming juxtaposition to Costello’s tales of stale romance, social ennui, and political disgust. Among typically dazzling wordplay are perhaps his two most blatant anti-Thatcher protest songs up to that point. An eloquent critique of the war in the Falkland Islands, “Shipbuilding” was originally written for Robert Wyatt, who released it as a single in 1982. Costello’s own version features a memorable trumpet solo by Chet Baker (who later covered Costello’s “Almost Blue”). In contrast, the scathing “Pills and Soap” is almost a pseudo-rap (Costello said the track’s relentless beat was influenced by Grandmaster Flash). The single was credited to The Imposter, a pseudonym Costello used periodically until it eventually inspired the name of his backing band in 2002. I saw Costello perform both of these songs at the Beacon Theatre last month, and can confirm that after four decades they have lost none of their potency. Further proof (were it needed) that the pen is always mightier than the sword.
 

Tom Waits / Swordfishtrombones

Island, 1983
Swordfishtrombones was Tom Waits’ eighth studio album but represented a stylistic reinvention. By the end of the seventies Waits’ after-hours barfly raconteur schtick was bordering on self-parody. In 1980 he met Kathleen Brennan on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s One From The Heart — within a week the pair were engaged. Through his new wife Waits discovered the music of Captain Beefheart, which greatly influenced the new direction of his own sound for the rest of the eighties. Waits’ records had, up to that point, their roots in some form of nocturnal jazz, but Swordfishtrombones was a sonic departure — it was his first album not to feature any saxophone. Instead the self-produced record was dominated by acoustic bass, marimba, unconventional percussion instruments and odd time signatures. Waits’ gravel-soaked voice meanwhile was now stripped of its former caramel warmth, fluctuating from a menacing howl to a raspy whisper. The songs themselves are a tenuously-connected suite of obscure tales, meandering from the Hong Kong waterfront to the Hollywood freeway and several locations in between. Though the album slips by and feels slight, it is cinematic in its lyrical and musical evocations (there are three instrumentals and one spoken-word track), almost like a soundtrack album to a film that never was. Waits’ label, Asylum, refused to release the finished LP, deeming it too experimental, so he signed with Island Records. In keeping with the record’s peculiar themes, Waits appeared on the album’s front cover with wrestler Lee Kolima and three-foot tall actor Angelo Rossitto. The artwork was by Berlin-born photographer Michael Russ, who used a unique proprietary hand-colouring process that he called “TinTone.” Russ also directed and choreographed the video for the only single taken from the album, “In The Neighborhood.” In December 1983 Waits was a guest on NBC’s Late Night, performing “Frank’s Wild Years” — the first of many regular and memorable appearances on the show (he was also a guest on Letterman’s last ever Late Show on CBS in 2015).
 

Huey Lewis & The News / Sports

Chrysalis, 1983
Huey Lewis & The News were my favourite band as a child, and the first band I saw in concert. This was in no small part thanks to Back To The Future, for which they wrote two songs (Huey even made a cameo in the film as a schoolteacher). A poster for the band’s third album, Sports, can be glimpsed in two near-identical scenes that take place in Marty McFly’s bedroom, bookending the main action of the movie. Anyway, Sports turns forty today. I listened to it yesterday for the first time in ages, and unlike a lot of music from 1983, this record sounds very much rooted in the Reagan era. Some of the production (especially on side 2) has aged about as well as an episode of Knight Rider. The album is probably best-known these days for being the subject of yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman’s critique in American Psycho (both the book and the movie). As anyone who recalls the band’s videos will attest, Huey Lewis & The News never took themselves too seriously, but for many they exist solely through a postmodern lens of glib irony, which inevitably precludes any genuine contextual assessment of their music. Either way Sports produced four top ten singles and was the band’s biggest selling album, shifting seven million copies in the U.S. alone, where in 1984 it was outsold only by Thriller. Later that year Huey Lewis issued a lawsuit against Ray Parker Jr., accusing him of ripping off “I Want A New Drug” for his hit song, “Ghostbusters.” Ironically, Lewis himself had been approached initially to write a theme for the supernatural comedy but declined due to his involvement in the aforementioned time travel comedy. The case was settled out of court. Huey Lewis & The News were always at their best when they leaned into the qualities that make a great bar band. So it’s perhaps appropriate that the album’s front cover was shot inside a bar, specifically the 2AM Club in Mill Valley, California (which is only one letter away from “Hill Valley”).
 

Paul Simon / Hearts and Bones

Warner Bros., 1983
Paul Simon’s sixth solo LP, Hearts and Bones is probably my favourite of his solo records, though perhaps also the most overlooked. It had initially started out as an all-new Simon & Garfunkel studio album, but that plan was derailed when the same old tensions that had caused the duo’s initial split resurfaced during their 1982-83 world tour. Simon also felt the new work was too personal to be performed with his singing partner. Eventually Warner Bros. reluctantly agreed to release it as a solo album; Garfunkel left the project and Simon erased the tracks with his vocals. The album had initially been titled “Think Too Much” until label president Mo Ostin suggested Simon change it. Much of the material deals with the mind’s tendency to get in the way of adult life and relationships, and includes two completely different songs with this original title (Simon’s idea of a self-deprecating joke, perhaps). The new title track’s “one and one-half wandering Jews” are Simon and Carrie Fisher, whom he married in August ’83. Side two contains, in my opinion, three of Simon’s best songs: “Train In The Distance,” “Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War,” and “The Late Great Johnny Ace” (the Beatlesesque coda to which was composed by Philip Glass). The latter was debuted live in September 1981 during Simon’s reunion concert with Garfunkel in Central Park. But when he got to the final verse about the death of John Lennon, a distressed fan stormed the stage. After a barely perceptible pause, Simon proceeded to finish his performance. In May 1982 he played it during an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman — this time a problem with a guitar fret led Simon to conclude that the song was jinxed. He finished it after a commercial break and then played part of an incomplete composition called “Citizen Of The Planet.” I’m not sure if a studio version exists, but a live rendition was included on the live album Old Friends, documenting Simon & Garfunkel’s 2003 reunion tour. The words are also included in a book of Paul Simon lyrics given to me by my dad. Their sentiment could not be more pertinent today.
 

The Rolling Stones / Undercover

Rolling Stones Records, 1983
Undercover was the Rolling Stones’ 17th studio album. This underrated LP — whose original artwork included removable stickers — sold well initially, but is often maligned due to the graphic imagery of its lyrics and general toxicity surrounding its creation. At this point Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been working together for two decades so it was perhaps inevitable that by 1983 they were sick of the sight of each other. Keith would arrive at the studio around midnight, as his songwriting partner left for the club. Mick had long kept a close ear to what he’d heard in the discos of Paris and New York. Whether it was a reflection of his eclectic taste or a shrewd bid for chart relevance, the result was some of the Stones’ best dance records. A somewhat cleaned-up Keith insisted the band stick to its roots, but Mick was now reluctant to relinquish creative control. Plus ça change… Meanwhile, Mick’s career ambitions were becoming more suited to screen than stage. He embraced the concept of MTV and even positioned himself for acting roles, while hatching out in secret a solo deal with Columbia. Keith refers to this as “LVS” (Lead Vocalist Syndrome); it was around this time that he and Ronnie Wood began referring to Mick as “Brenda” behind the singer’s back. The rift was even played out to a dramatic conclusion in Julian Temple’s elaborate video for the politically-charged lead single, “Undercover Of The Night,” in which Richards shoots Jagger dead. Elsewhere the record lurches between unadorned rock ’n’ roll, hard grooves and self-parody. Side two opener “Too Much Blood” — on which a rambling Mick ad libs a deadpan monologue critiquing the violence of contemporary culture — is as disturbing as it hilarious. Given Mick and Keith’s diverging visions for the project, Undercover still sounds fantastic, and nothing like the well-received but otherwise tepid new album they released in 2023. Never again would the Stones sound this catchy, angry, lurid, menacing or… well, Stones-y. I wouldn’t expect Mick and Keith to be making the same music at 80 that they did at 40, but I definitely know which I prefer.
 

The Pretenders / Learning To Crawl

Sire, 1984
The Pretenders’ third album, Learning To Crawl, was released a full two-and-a-half years after their previous LP. The hiatus was due to the sudden deaths of two of the band’s founding members. By early 1982 bass player Pete Farndon’s drug abuse had made his position in the band untenable; in June, guitarist James Honeyman-Scott threatened to quit the group unless Farndon was fired. Two day’s after Farndon’s dismissal, Honeyman-Scott died from heart failure caused by cocaine use. Then in April 1983, Farndon himself was found dead in his bathtub, having drowned after overdosing on heroin. Despite the trauma of these losses, Chrissie Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers eventually returned to the studio. The new band sets the tone on the album’s gutsy opener, “Middle Of The Road,” as Hynde — pissed off, jaded, determined — describes the parallel duties of music and motherhood at the onset of (in purely rock and roll terms) middle-age. Learning To Crawl was the first Pretenders album not to include a Ray Davies song (Hynde married Jim Kerr of Simple Minds in 1984, though her child with Davies inspired the album’s title). Instead we get a version of the Persuaders’ 1971 hit, “Thin Line Between Love And Hate,” on which Hynde changes both the gender implied on the original and its grammatical person, thus subtly altering the song’s narrative. Other tracks address Hynde’s unborn daughter (“Show Me”) and the death of her hometown of Akron, Ohio (“My City Was Gone”), while “2000 Miles” has become something of a Christmastime staple. With a title and backing, er, grunts that pay obvious homage to Sam Cooke, lead single “Back On The Chain Gang” is probably the album’s most enduring track. Recorded just weeks after Honeyman-Scott’s death, it was initially written about Hynde’s relationship with Davies, though it emerged a fitting tribute to the late guitarist. The poignant middle-eight and soaring key change that follows may be the most emotionally affecting moment in the Pretenders’ entire discography, consecrating the key traits of Hynde’s hybrid persona — vulnerability and defiance — while also revealing a new purpose of perseverance.
 

Joe Jackson / Body and Soul

A&M, 1984
Like his previous Manhattan-centric album, 1982’s Night and Day, Joe Jackson’s seventh album, Body and Soul, also shared a title with a popular standard from the 1930s. The artwork was a precise pastiche of a 1957 Sonny Rollins record, and even the back cover faithfully recreated the format of an old Blue Note LP, right down to the effusive liner notes. All of this served to convey to the listener that by 1984 Jackson had little interest in tussling for chart supremacy, and that they held in their possession what essentially amounted to a jazz record. Side one begins with the drums and saxophone of “The Verdict,” a bold opening statement that outlines Jackson’s internal conflict about being true to his authentic self. Like much of the material here, the lyrics could be applied to a romantic relationship or Jackson’s own artistic direction. A similar message is presented more directly on the horn-heavy funk-bop single, “You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want).” To achieve this vast sound Jackson and band recorded the basic tracks live inside the ballroom of the Grand Lodge of New York’s Masonic Hall on the corner of 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue. Though he eschewed synthetic studio sounds, the album was his first to be recorded digitally, a technique that eliminated tape hiss and preserved the integrity of the performances. The drama of his album has often made it feel to me more like a soundtrack to a film that never was. There are two highly cinematic instrumentals on side two, “Loisaida” and “Heart of Ice,” and even the sixties pop perfection of the lightest tunes — the Northern Soul stomp of “Go For It” and the Spector-esque duet “Happy Ending” — sound like they’d be equally at home on a Broadway cast recording. Jackson first became famous as an “Angry Young Man,” before moving to New York and making a record as eccentric and neurotic as the city itself. On Body and Soul, his most honest and personal album up to that point, the cynical observations give way to a cautious kind of optimism. Every artist is plagued by self-doubt; at least this one knew himself, and what he wanted.
 

The Style Council / Café Bleu (My Ever Changing Moods)

A&M, 1984
Café Bleu, the debut album by the Style Council, was released by Geffen (with an alternative track listing and a different sleeve) as My Ever Changing Moods. Presumably this was because the original title was deemed too French-sounding for the American market, though such concerns weren’t enough to veto a front cover photo (taken outside La Belle Ferronnière in Paris) that depicted nascent francophile Paul Weller and loyal sidekick Mick Talbot as a pair of trenchcoat-wearing, Gitanes-smoking, Libération-reading flâneurs in tassled loafers. They couldn’t have appeared any less American if they’d been wearing matching berets. Weller had enjoyed chart success with the Jam, but a desire to explore broader directions led him to disband the post-punk mod-revivalist trio in 1982. Both visually and musically, the Style Council seemed, for some, to represent an active rejection of his previous band’s image and sound. This transformation was announced on an import-only EP in the summer of ’83, putting Weller’s new outfit at the forefront of a specifically British brand of soulful, jazz-tinged “sophisti-pop.” The Style Council’s apparently carefree vibe only heightened the impact of Weller’s increasingly political songs, which frequently took aim at the ruling classes while lamenting a popular indifference towards the UK’s social and economic demise. Only three of the British version’s five jazz instrumentals survived on the American release, though “The Paris Match” featured Tracy Thorn and Ben Watt from fledgling duo Everything But The Girl. But sometimes the Style Council’s ambitions were too eclectic for their own good: Weller’s gauche rap on “A Gospel” remains an unlistenable misstep. In addition to lead single “My Ever Changing Moods,” the other hit from this album was “You’re The Best Thing.” In July 1985 the Style Council opened their set with this song at Live Aid (they were the second act to appear at Wembley, after Status Quo), which is the first time I remember seeing the group on TV. By that point their second LP had just come out, which again the US label resequenced, repackaged and retitled.
 

The Blue Nile / A Walk Across The Rooftops

A&M, 1984
A persistent myth regarding The Blue Nile’s their debut album, A Walk Across The Rooftops, is that the record was commissioned by Scottish hi-fi company Linn (not to be confused with the American manufacturer of the LM-1 drum machine) as a means of showcasing their products. In truth, Linn heard some demos and offered the Glaswegian group a contract on their new label. This is the American version, which came out on A&M Records. Either way, in its blending of electronic and organic sounds and unusual sonic textures, the record remains an audiophile’s delight. Its slow tempos and atmospheric yet austere production are balanced by Paul Buchanan’s warm, rich voice, making it a great after dinner type of record. Part of the reason for the album’s reliance on synthesizers and sparse arrangements was in part due to the band’s own technical limitations on their instruments, in particular Buchanan’s guitar playing. They also didn’t have a drummer, which hampered their efforts to perform live without a backing track. Starved of cash, the trio initially rented a flat in Edinburgh during the album’s recording, until eventually the money ran out, leaving them little choice but to sleep on the engineer’s floor. The album was a critical success but had little impact on the charts. The single “Tinseltown In The Rain” only reached number 87 in the UK, but at the time of writing has over 18 million plays on Spotify. The follow-up album, Hats, didn’t arrive until 1989 but was worth the wait (Taylor Swift even makes reference it on her latest album). This was followed in 1996 by the more acoustic, guitar-oriented Peace At Last. By this point The Blue Nile had established their status as something of a cult band, renowned both for their avoidance of the spotlight and less-than-prolific output. Their fourth album, High, came in 2004. Around this time there was an apparent falling out between members, leading fans to presume The Blue Nile are over, though unsurprisingly there has never been an official announcement.
 

Bruce Springsteen / Born In The U.S.A.

Columbia, 1984
Like several multi-platinum-selling records, Born In The U.S.A., Bruce Springsteen’s seventh studio album, is probably as famous for its cultural impact as for the music itself. Annie Leibovitz’s cover shot managed to both celebrate and dispel various symbols of American iconography, while also immortalising Springsteen’s most enduring popular image. Long gone was the bearded, scrawny ruffian from the Jersey boardwalk; in his place was “The Boss,” a freshly-buff, denim-clad, indefatigable showman for the eighties. Seven of the album’s twelve tracks became top ten singles, propelling a 35-year-old Springsteen to global MTV stardom. The album’s subsequent world tour with the E Street Band chugged along until October 1985, but its legacy has never really stopped (there’s a chance one of either “Glory Days” or “Dancing In The Dark” is playing in your nearest CVS right now). It’s hard to put all of that baggage aside, but once you do, the album underneath it all is still probably the tightest, leanest and most political of Springsteen’s entire career. Though Born In The U.S.A. was one of the defining records of the decade, its songs were spiritually rooted in the death of the sixties, using specific stories to address universal issues. The title track remains one of the most misinterpreted songs of all time, its blatant message buried beneath booming drums and a wall of synthesizers. There is nothing cryptic about the verses’ lyrics, which describe the plight of an alienated veteran, betrayed by his own country’s institutions. Yet the chorus’ hollow rallying cry preempted the blind nationalism of those — from Ronald Reagan to MAGA diehards — who, over the last four decades, have lazily attempted to co-opt the track as a patriotic anthem. Those on the other end of the political spectrum are no less guilty of refusing to listen: to this day, Springsteen is routinely dismissed by some casual liberal observers as a jingoistic simpleton. But whatever your persuasion, few artists — and even fewer politicians — have successfully straddled that divide to convey the state of a nation with such consideration, humour, and empathy.
 

Elvis Costello & The Attractions / Goodbye Cruel World

Columbia, 1984
The title of Elvis Costello’s ninth studio album was borrowed from a 1961 teen pop hit by James Darren, who by 1984 was starring alongside William Shatner and Heather Locklear in the police series T.J. Hooker. By his own admission, this is not Costello’s greatest record, but he’d set such a high bar by this point that he could be forgiven for not always clearing it. Even by mid-eighties standards the glossy production sounds positively jarring, managing to mask Costello’s typically sharp material. Darryl Hall sang harmony on the opening track, “The Only Flame In Town,” while Green Gartside of Scritti Politti provided backing vocals to the album’s other single, “I Wanna Be Loved,” a cover of an obscure B-side from 1973 by Memphis soul group Teacher’s Edition. A version of “The Comedians” appeared on Roy Orbison’s 1989 comeback album, Mystery Girl. In October 1984 my parents went to see Costello on this album’s accompanying tour at Loughborough University (I think the Pogues were the opening act). My dad bought a t-shirt, which I wore to sleep in for years. I haven’t seen it lately, but here’s Hillary wearing it while snacking on Bucaneve (iykyk) in a Rome hotel room in 2007. In 2015 I saw the same shirt for sale in a vintage store on East 11th Street, where it was priced at an exhorbitant $250. For some reason I mentioned this to Costello not long afterwards, as he signed my copy of his autobiography in Barnes & Noble at Union Square, to which he responded, “If only we’d known.”
 

Prince & The Revolution / Purple Rain

Warner Bros., 1984
Prince released thirty-nine albums in his lifetime, though some people only own one of them. In those cases it’s usually this one. Purple Rain isn’t my favourite Prince album, but it was arguably his most assured and accessible for white audiences, and to this day the one even the most casual fans know. Indeed, for many, Prince remains forever frozen in 1984. His look from that era — purple coat, ruffled shirt, motorcycle, and plenty of eyeliner — is still his most enduring public image. That’s because Purple Rain was much more than just a record. Together, the album, its accompanying MTV videos, and the hit movie of the same name that was released a month later, launched the 26-year-old musician towards global stardom. Prince dominated the pop cultural landscape for the rest of year, and in August became the first artist to have the number one album, single (“When Doves Cry”) and movie at the same time. Purple Rain was the first Prince album to formally and explicitly introduce his band, The Revolution, and the first to feature both Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin. His closest collaborators in this period, Wendy & Lisa’s significant contributions (as fictionalised in the movie) helped define Prince’s mid-eighties sound and broaden his musical horizons. Three songs on side two — including the epic title track — were recorded at an August 1983 show at First Avenue in Minneapolis, making Purple Rain the first Prince album to include live recordings. The six-month, 98-show Purple Rain tour ended in April 1985 at Miami’s Orange Bowl Stadium (renamed “Purple Bowl” for the occasion). But by this point, as was his wont, Prince had already moved on. That same month he released his next album, though the baroque psychedelia of Around The World In A Day proved too much of a departure for some. While much of Prince’s output continued to astound and confound, never again would he achieve Purple Rain’s level of commercial ubiquity. When asked by a journalist why he wasn’t more inclined to reproduce that success, Prince’s response was typically enigmatic. “I’ve been to the mountain top,” he said. “There’s nothing there.”
 

Sade / Diamond Life

Warner Bros., 1984
Diamond Life, Sade’s debut LP, was the seventh best-selling album in the UK in 1984, reaching number two on the charts and picking up the 1985 Brit Award for best British album. The record was produced by Robin Millar, who’d also just worked on Eden, the debut LP by Everything But The Girl, and put Sade at the forefront of the soulful, jazz-tinged wave of sophisti-pop occupying the British charts in the mid-eighties. Sade’s cool vibe, timeless arrangements and thoughtful, conscious lyrics deflated criticism from the sneering and prejudiced British rock press that, despite the album’s success and acclaim, lazily dismissed the group as mere exponents of “yuppie wine bar music.” The band was fronted by Helen Folasade Adu, the 25-year-old daughter of an English nurse and a Nigerian economics lecturer. Sade (as she became known) was born in Colonial Nigeria and moved to Essex when she was four. In 1977 she went to London to study fashion design at Saint Martin’s School of Art. It was only after completing her course that she got involved with music. She was a model for a Spandau Ballet fashion show in 1981, around the same time she began singing backing vocals for the jazz-funk band Pride, where she met saxophonist/guitarist Stuart Matthewman, with whom she formed Sade. Inevitably, the name of the band and its singer were soon used interchangeably. Adu’s striking beauty proved a frequent distraction for interviewers, but on stage she was a performer of remarkable poise and presence. Some described her as aloof, but her warm, husky voice and calm, almost deadpan delivery also hinted at a down-to-earth humour. I’d seen Sade on Top Of The Pops, but I first saw her live during Live Aid where, as the only Black lead vocalist to appear that day at Wembley, she exuded an effortless elegance, style and confidence that had a not insignificant impact on my six-year-old self. I had the 1986 Live Aid calendar: April’s photo was Sade as seen from behind, instantly identifiable by her trademark gold hoops and long braided hair resting between her bare shoulder blades. I think May was Paul Young…
 

Lloyd Cole & The Commotions / Rattlesnakes

Geffen, 1984
Rattlesnakes was the first album by Lloyd Cole & The Commotions. The original LP cover used a photo by American photographer Robert Farber; my copy is a U.S. promo version, which uses a colour still of the band taken from the “Rattlesnakes” video shoot. This practice of repackaging British records for the American market was quite common at the time. Typically the replacement artwork was always inferior, but this is one instance where I actually prefer the cover design on the U.S. release. At least on this occasion they didn’t tamper with the track listing (although a couple were remixed by The Cars’ Rik Ocasek). Cole was born in Buxton, a spa town in Derbyshire, but after dropping out of a law degree in London began studying English and philosophy at the University of Glasgow, where he formed his band. By this point his father had taken a job working at Glasgow Golf Club, where the family also lived. Most of the songs on Rattlesnakes were written in the club’s basement. The record is probably one of the finest debuts of the eighties, and exemplary of the college-oriented jangly folk-pop coming out of Scotland at the first half of that decade. Cole’s literary aspirations are immediately revealed by the Dylanesque opener, “Perfect Skin.” The title track is a reference to Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays,” while “Speedboat” was inspired by the Renata Adler novel of the same name. Elsewhere Cole name-drops notable cultural figures with almost obsessive frequency. The lyrics aren’t printed on the sleeve but Greta Garbo, Leonard Cohen, Eva Marie Saint, Simone de Beauvoir, Grace Kelly, Truman Capote, Arthur Lee and Norman Mailer are all mentioned. Such youthful pretentiousness might have become unbearable were it not for Cole’s wry cynicism and self-depracating wit regarding his poetic failures at romance. On “Forest Fire,” he goes so far as to spell it out for anyone still scratching their heads (“It’s just a simple metaphor/It’s for a burning love”). That track’s smouldering groove builds steadily before releasing into Neil Clark’s epic tremolo guitar solo. It’s my favourite track and probably the best moment on the record.
 

Wham! / Make It Big

Columbia, 1984
Whether the title of Wham!’s second LP was a reflection of the duo’s pop aspirations or merely instructions given to their hairstylist remains unclear. The UK release came out two weeks later with different artwork, using an alternative shot from the same photoshoot. The American version’s innersleeve uses a photo that’s clearly from 1983, which by late ’84 seemed practically archival given how frequently the group’s look changed in this period. The album itself is a blatant homage to the soul sounds of the sixties, anchored by four chart-topping singles, starting with the bubbly “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” before seguing into the slinky club favourite “Everything She Wants.” There are a couple of tracks on here that to my ears are pure filler, but the other two non-singles are quite good: “If You Were There” is a cover of a 1973 song by The Isley Brothers, while “Heartbeat” is probably the best song Ronnie Spector never recorded. In April 1985 Wham! became the first Western act to perform in China. The video for “Freedom” uses footage from this tour, of the band on stage at the Peoples’ Gymnasium in Beijing and visiting the Great Wall. There’s also the incongruous sight of noted Manchester United fan Andrew Ridgeley playing football in a Chinese park while wearing a 1984-85 Queens Park Rangers kit, to the evident bemusement of onlookers. The song itself is probably my favourite Wham! track — had it been written by Smokey Robinson I’m sure it would be ranked alongside “The Tracks Of My Tears” as one of the great Motown singles. The part were George improvises “Can’t you see you’re hurtin’ me?” always reminds me of Diana Ross’ “And there ain’t nothin’ I can do about it!” This deliberately retro record is saved from descending into pointless pastiche by the strength of George Michael’s songwriting and extraordinary voice. The last song on the album, “Careless Whisper,” was in some markets credited as a George Michael solo single — the first official hint that the inevitable end of Wham! wasn’t too far away.
 

Madonna / Like A Virgin

Sire, 1984
Like A Virgin, Madonna’s second album, was her first record to reach number on the Billboard chart, producing four top-five singles. But aside from its commercial success, the album established Madonna as a mainstream cultural provocateur for the MTV age. Whether channeling Marilyn or gyrating aboard a gondola through the canals of Venice, Madonna represented a capitalist eighties version of women’s liberation (both sexual and sartorial). Her savvy self-confidence and knowing ambition may have been a product of the Reagan era, but they also made her a feminist icon for that decade, and a positive role model for millions of young people around the globe. Though Madonna was in complete control of her image, her record company, Sire, refused her request to self-produce the album. Instead, she hired Nile Rodgers, who’d recently worked on David Bowie’s Let’s Dance. Rodgers brought in the Chic rhythm section (bassist Bernard Edwards and drummer Tony Thompson) lending key tracks an organic wallop that no programmed drums or synths could match. Though the international release included “Into The Groove” (as featured in the film Desperately Seeking Susan), the songs on this album are more varied and less focused on the dancefloor than Madonna’s first LP. An unlikely cover of Rose Royce’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” began a career-long penchant for earnest ballads, while “Shoo-Bee-Doo” evoked the sixties girl groups of Madonna’s native Michigan. Like A Virgin was also the album on which Madonna began to play overtly with the inescapable religious and sexual connotations of her name beyond the confines of her Catholic upbringing. Predictably, the irony and innuendo of the title track was entirely lost on conservative groups who reacted in the most literal terms, recoiling from the very use of the word “virgin” and accusing the singer of encouraging sex outside of marriage. The song’s ambiguity became the subject of a scene in the movie Reservoir Dogs, though Madonna herself disputed Quentin Tarantino’s interpretation, later handing him a copy of the record with a signed inscription: “It’s not about dicks — it’s about love.”
 

Band Aid / “Do They Know It’s Christmas”

Phonogram, 1984
“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was one of the first singles I ever bought. It’s easy to forget what a huge deal Band Aid was at the time, but despite selling a million copies in its first week alone, the well-meaning single soon came in for criticism as a white saviour mission, and for its condescending depiction of Africa. Notably, the only Black voices on the record were the American singer Jody Watley and members of Kool & The Gang, who just happened to be in London. Even Peter Blake’s cover artwork was knocked for juxtaposing Christmas scenes of yore with the image of starving Ethiopian children. Hastily written by Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats and Ultravox’s Midge Ure, the song was recorded in late November ‘84, when a bevy of the biggest names in British pop convened on a Sunday morning at Sarm West studio to lay down vocal tracks. Most of these artists probably weren’t used to rolling out of bed at such an ungodly hour, although Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes looked like he’d spent a few in hair and make-up. An absent-minded Boy George woke up in New York and only made the session thanks to Concorde. Particular scorn was reserved for the caustic line sung by Bono, “Well, tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you,” or maybe it simply cut too close to the bone. I always thought that was the key lyric in the whole song, as it explicitly called out western apathy towards humanitarian crises in far away places, a tendency that’s no less familiar today. The single’s intended audience was clearly the record-purchasing middle class; if it forced them to reckon with their own indifference or provoked the discomfort of white guilt among listeners living in “our world of plenty,” then it had at least served one objective. Over the years “Sir Bob” has re-recorded and remixed new versions of the single to aid various issues in Africa, often tweaking the lyrics accordingly, regardless of claims that the song’s problematic legacy only perpetuates negative stereotypes of the continent. For the fortieth anniversary it’s been dusted off yet again, though in 2024 a charity single seems a rather quaint medium for such worthy causes.
 

Whitney Houston / Whitney Houston

Arista, 1985
Whitney Houston once said that, to her, singing came as naturally as speaking. She began performing in public as a child, first at the New Hope Baptist Church in her native Newark, where her mother, Cissy Houston, was Minister of Music. Whitney’s godmother was Darlene Love, she was cousins with Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick, and even a distant cousin of opera singer Leontyne Price (many music journalists even falsely assumed that she was related to Thelma Houston). By the late seventies Houston was singing with her mother on the Manhattan club circuit, and by the time Clive Davis signed her to his Arista label, she was keeping busy as a session vocalist and model for teen fashion magazines. She’d even begun to act, appearing on the NBC sitcom Gimme A Break! Given Houston’s fresh-faced appeal, her eponymous debut album — released on Valentine’s Day ’85 — is an oddly conservative one by the era’s standards. There are a couple of tracks on side two that are the epitome of schmaltz; a common criticism of the record was that Whitney’s vocal ability was wasted on such MOR material. If some of the ballads already sounded dated it’s perhaps because they’d originally been recorded some years earlier, by the likes of George Benson, Diana Ross and Marilyn McCoo. One of these songs, “Saving All My Love For You,” became Houston’s first number one single, helping the LP top the charts for 14 weeks. Incredibly, forty years later it’s still the best-selling debut album by a solo artist. At this point Houston had everything going for her: girl-next-door charm, supermodel looks, and a pop voice that Rolling Stone ranked as the second greatest ever (behind only Aretha Franklin). Though Houston’s talent was evident on record, her rare musical gift came truly into focus when singing live. Her September ’85 appearance on Letterman — with just a spotlight and Paul Shaffer’s house band for company — showcases Whitney’s masterful presence, phrasing, clarity, and control. There’s nothing showy about it, no elaborate costume or distracting set. Just a 22-year-old woman taking her time, and giving the best live vocal performance you’re ever likely to see on national television.
 

Tears For Fears / Songs From The Big Chair

Mercury, 1985
The title of Tears For Fears’ second album, Songs From The Big Chair, was inspired by a 1976 made-for-TV movie called Sybil, which starred Sally Field as a woman suffering from multiple personality disorder who only feels safe when seated in the “big chair” of her analyst’s office. Tears For Fears’ successful debut, The Hurting (1983), had received critical acclaim, but its dark and moody themes had also painted Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith — at least within the British press — as a somewhat brooding and pretentious duo that took themselves far too seriously. Orzabal later admitted that, at the time, “rock and roll was a dirty word to us,” even dismissing some of his own lyrics as “sixth form poetry stuff.” Their second record was therefore a conscious effort to inject some variety and lightness into proceedings, while expanding on their already synth-driven sound with something warmer, bigger, and more organic. Side one opens with “Shout,” a political anthem that has frequently been interpreted as a song about primal scream therapy, though Orzabal described it as a “simple song about protest.” Another memorable single, “Head Over Heels,” to this day always makes me think of my former colleague, Beth, as it was one of her favourite songs. These days the album is probably remembered most for the international hit, “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” a last-minute addition that was initially considered too lightweight for inclusion. With its buoyant shuffle and uplifting power chords, the track was certainly a tad incongruous with the group’s prior work, but also reiterated their intention to appear more extroverted and achieve global appeal. The single reached number one in the US but, ironically, was kept off the top spot in the UK by “We Are The World.” The track’s radio-friendly pop sheen perhaps masked Orzabal’s rather dismal worldview, as outlined by his vaguely portentous lyrics, and it remains one of the most enduring songs of the decade.

“I always compare Tears For Fears’ success to that of Herman’s Hermits,” Orzabal stated in late ’85. “Like them, we too will be forgotten in twenty years’ time.”
 

USA For Africa / “We Are The World”

Columbia, 1985
“We Are The World” is still the eighth best-selling single of all time, and the third best-selling in my lifetime. The idea for the song came about following the success of the Band Aid single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” in December ’84. Like its British counterpart, the American relief effort successfully wrangled its roster of stars at short notice to record their vocal parts. Along with some names that you might not have heard mentioned since 1985, USA for Africa also recruited several of the biggest acts in American pop history — many of whom were herded directly to the recording studio from the American Music Awards. Motown legends rubbed shoulders and shared microphones with Dylan, Simon and Springsteen. “Check your ego at the door,” read a sign at the studio entrance. This is all neatly documented in the Netflix documentary, The Greatest Night In Pop. Organised by Harry Belafonte, written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, produced and conducted by Quincy Jones, and featuring the prominent vocals of Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, the song was a gleaming slab of gospel pop, and a triumph of America’s Black music establishment. It was also quite bloated by radio standards: the single version marches on for over six minutes, the inevitable result of having to squeeze in so many A-list soloists. Jones described this task as like “trying to fit a watermelon into a Coke bottle.” Inevitably, the record drew criticism for being overly sentimental and self-indulgent. Greil Marcus likened it to a Pepsi jingle, a remark that was cynical but perhaps valid: both Jackson and Richie were contracted to the soda giant at the time. Nevertheless, thanks to record and merchandise sales USA for Africa eventually raised over $80 million for its humanitarian fund. While it’s fun to identify the different voices I doubt anyone’s voluntarily listening to “We Are The World” in 2025 (besides me). Today the song’s musical legacy is vastly outweighed by the single’s significant historical impact, as the music industry, celebrity culture and corporate America began to merge towards a single entity.
 

’Til Tuesday / Voices Carry

Epic, 1985
I always liked Aimee Mann’s solo albums (plus the soundtrack to the Paul Thomas Anderson film, Magnolia) but it wasn’t until I moved to New York that I learned that she’d previously fronted a new wave pop band called, somewhat awkwardly, ’Til Tuesday. This information actually came to me from a slightly older colleague of mine who was headed that evening to see Mann perform somewhere in Brooklyn. Mann formed ’Til Tuesday with then-boyfriend Michael Hausman in Boston in 1982; the band released their debut LP, Voices Carry, in April 1985. The inner sleeve of my copy looks like it was gnawed off by the previous owner’s pet dog — luckily the disc itself is undamaged and sounds great. It reached number 19 in the US album chart and the title track single got to number 8, thanks to the video’s heavy rotation on MTV.’Til Tuesday made two more albums before breaking up in 1990. Hausman became Mann’s manager as she embarked on a solo career in the nineties, marrying musician Michael Penn (brother of actors Sean and Chris). Since 1993 Mann has released a string of albums to consistent critical acclaim, but none have matched ’Til Tuesday’s early commercial success. In 2024, the actress Kate Hudson released a half-decent cover version of “Voices Carry,” which I definitely didn’t see coming. In the autumn of that year it was announced that ’Til Tuesday were to reunite: in May 2025 they played their first live show in 35 years at the Cruel World Festival in Pasadena. I didn’t see that coming either…
 

Prince & The Revolution / Around The World In A Day

Paisley Park, 1985
Prince’s seventh album, Around The World In A Day, was released in April 1985. The 98-show Purple Rain tour had ended just two weeks earlier, but anyone anticipating a sequel to that album (or a repeat of its commercial success) was in for a surprise. The colourful new record began with the words “Open your heart, open your mind,” which might as well have been a direct invitation to those fans that would soon abandon Prince on his expectation-defying musical journey. And just when things were getting really interesting. Prince was always two steps ahead of the public, but even at its most esoteric, his music was never not accessible. While some of his audience struggled to make sense of the album’s psychedelic pop tunes, dreamy lyrics and exotic textures, it still sold over two million copies. Yet it remains Prince’s most overlooked and misunderstood record of the decade. Today it’s probably best recalled for the radio-friendly “Raspberry Beret,” the kind of bouncing, breezy pop hit that in Prince’s hands seemed effortless. Incredibly, the single stalled at number 25 on the UK chart; in the US it was only kept off the top spot by Duran Duran’s 007 theme, “A View To A Kill.” My favourite deep cut is “Condition Of The Heart,” a perhaps semi-autobiographical ballad, the wandering introduction to which exemplifies the musicality and mystery at the heart of the Prince persona. Though only three tracks on the album are actual band performances with the Revolution (all on side two), much credit for Prince’s shift in direction is given to Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, his closest and most creative collaborators in this period. The album’s title track was actually based on a demo by Lisa’s brother, David, while Wendy’s siblings, Jonathan and Susannah (whom Prince was dating at the time) provided backing vocals. This was also the first record released on Prince’s own label, Paisley Park, which was also the title of the second track. The spiritual utopia described in that song became an earthbound reality of sorts in 1987, when work was completed on Prince’s state-of-the-art studio complex in Chanhassen, Minnesota, which he also named Paisley Park.
 

China Crisis / Flaunt The Imperfection

Virgin, 1985
The first China Crisis album was called Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms, Some People Think It’s Fun To Entertain. The second one was Working with Fire and Steel – Possible Pop Songs Volume Two. If their album titles were anything to go by, this synth-pop duo from Merseyside (comprised of Gary Daly and Eddie Lundon) were keen subverters of industry convention. Flaunt The Imperfection was the group’s third LP, released in April 1985. Its title was more succinct but it may also have been an inside joke, since it’s hard to imagine a more sonically flawless record. That’s perhaps not surprising when you consider the album was produced by Walter Becker, one half of notorious studio perfectionists, Steely Dan. Becker’s influence is apparent from the album’s cool grooves, tasteful horns and jazzy guitar fills, most of which would not have sounded out of place on Gaucho. The songs themselves are deceptively catchy, almost naive melodies that are perhaps at times too subtle for their own good. I love this elegant record but there is something oddly restrained and deliberately understated about it. Nevertheless, Flaunt The Imperfection was China Crisis’ most successful album, reaching number nine in the UK album charts. The single, “Black Man Ray,” got to number 14. China Crisis made three more albums, working with Becker again on 1989’s Diary Of A Hollow Horse, before going on hiatus in the mid-nineties. More recently they’ve reemerged on the eighties nostalgia circuit, opening for the likes of Kim Wilde and even releasing a seventh album in 2015 called Autumn In The Neighbourhood. But Flaunt The Imperfection remains China Crisis’ most successful record, and next week the band is embarking on a tour of the UK and the Netherlands to celebrate its fortieth anniversary.
 

Eurythmics / Be Yourself Tonight

RCA, 1985
Eurythmics’ fourth album, Be Yourself Tonight, eschewed the cool synth-driven production of the duo’s earlier records, adopting a more varied and textured sound that blended electronic and organic elements so seamlessly it became at times impossible to tell the difference. This departure was echoed by the LP artwork (the images for which were taken directly from the video for the lead single, “Would I Lie To You?”) in which Annie Lennox — already arguably the eighties’ most striking frontwoman — abandoned her somewhat androgynous appearance for a more rock’n’roll-inspired combo of bottle-blonde pixie cut and leather jacket. The second single, “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart),” is a shimmering confection of celestial gospel-pop that remains the group’s only UK number one hit. Just when you think the album version of the track can’t get any more perfect, up pops none other than Stevie Wonder to lay down an extended harmonica solo. The R&B influence is further evidenced on the electronic soul of “It’s Alright (Baby’s Coming Back)” and the feminist anthem “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves,” which paired Lennox’s powerhouse vocals with the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin. The track was recorded in Detroit with Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench and Stan Lynch from the Heartbreakers (Dave Stewart also produced several tracks on Tom Petty’s 1985 LP, Southern Accents). And if that weren’t enough guest cameos, “Adrian” on side two includes harmonies by a certain Elvis Costello! The album reached number 3 in the UK and its global commercial success ensured that Stewart remained in demand as one of pop’s most innovative producers. Unfortunately the duo were unable to tour in support of the record due to Lennox’s recuperation from vocal fold nodules, which was also the reason Eurythmics didn’t appear at Live Aid.
 

Suzanne Vega / Suzanne Vega

A&M, 1985
Suzanne Vega is still often referred to as a folk singer (a label applied, it seems, to every woman with an acoustic guitar) but in both style and subject matter she was always a poetic and slightly tormented singer-songwriter — more Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell than Judy Collins or Joan Baez. Vega was born in Santa Monica but her musical sensibility was undeniably East Coast; she moved to New York aged two, taking the name of her Puerto Rican stepfather and eventually settling on the Upper West Side. While studying English literature at Barnard College, she began performing as part of a songwriter’s group on Monday nights at Greenwich Village’s Cornelia Street Café (which sadly closed at the end of 2018 due to a rent increase). Some of her songs were published on Jack Hardy’s affiliated Fast Folk anthology series. Wordy and intimate, the ten songs that made up Vega’s self-titled debut album were sharply observed studies of modern romance — and whatever else goes on inside a 25-year-old introvert’s head. Her cool, conversational, at times almost spoken vocal delivery recalled the city’s wry poets, such as Paul Simon or Lou Reed. With its feathery drums and subtle use of synths, the album’s overall sound evokes the silence of a snow-covered Manhattan morning, but you’d never mistake it for 1965. Though well-received by critics, this LP stalled at 91 on the US album chart. It fared much better in Europe, reaching number 11 in the UK, where the single, “Marlene On The Wall,” was also a hit. Incidentally, one of the album’s producers, Steve Addabbo, later opened a recording studio on Shelter Island, a five-minute ferry ride from where I’m sitting.
 

Dire Straits / Brothers In Arms

Warner Bros., 1985
Brothers In Arms, the fifth album by Dire Straits, became the first to sell a million copies in the CD format and in the UK is still the 8th best-selling album of all-time. I have nothing against Dire Straits — I always loved “Sultans Of Swing” and Mark Knopfler’s outfit at Live Aid is seared into my mind — but I’ve never really cared for this record. In fact, I remember it as much for its ubiquity as the music itself. So this morning I listened to it again, for the first time in ages. Recorded in Montserrat and New York, it was one of the first records made using a Sony 24-track digital tape machine. In further pursuit of perfection, Knopfler erased Terry Williams’ initial drum parts and flew in jazz session drummer Omar Hakim to re-record them. The album is immaculately played and produced, but seemed to signal a shift in music consumption. You can almost hear the money being spent, the corporate calculating, the cogs turning. The whole thing ends up sounding more like product, or worse, background music. Even the artwork (featuring Knopfler’s own 1937 National resonator) seems bland and lazy. As a child I loved the single “Money For Nothing,” (featuring Sting’s “I want my MTV” vocals) and its accompanying computer-animated video. And though there’s a fifty-fifty chance it’s playing at your local CVS right now, I still find the cajun/Booker T. vibes of “Walk Of Life” impossible to dislike. But it’s the only thing on here that saves this album from being entirely glum. I suppose the after hours ballad, “Your Latest Trick,” with its prominent Michael Brecker sax motif, has a certain charm — if, say, you’re looking to recreate the atmosphere of a yuppie wine bar circa 1985. The rest of these meandering tracks are surprisingly quiet, tasteful arrangements punctuated by Knopfler’s nifty fretwork and somewhat mumbled vocals. Side two, with its plodding, vaguely militaristic themes, starts to really drag, even though most tracks were edited slightly to fit on an LP. So I guess I should be thankful I don’t own the CD version, which was padded out for a further ten minutes…
 

Bryan Ferry / Boys And Girls

E.G., 1985
Bryan Ferry’s solo career had always run parallel to Roxy Music’s since the early seventies, but Boys and Girls (his sixth solo record) was his first release since the group’s final album, 1982’s Avalon. Sonically, this atmospheric record picks up where that one left off, incorporating many of the same musicians. Original Roxy guitairist Phil Manzanera is absent, but the likes of David Gilmour, Nile Rodgers and Mark Knopfler make sure he isn’t missed. The resulting suite of slinky, textured grooves glides and percolates beneath Ferry’s detached, seductive croon, making this record perhaps the truest musical embodiment of his consistently suave, debonair persona. In July 1985 Ferry performed three tracks from the album at Live Aid, including the hit “Slave To Love,” which reached the UK top ten. That track was partially recorded at Bette Midler’s home in New York and always makes me think of the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which a huge poster for the single is appended directly to the wall behind Matthew Broderick’s bed. There’s currently one such 60” x 40” poster in Melbourne available on eBay if you have a spare $1,455 Australian dollars (plus shipping from down under).
 

The Style Council / Our Favourite Shop (Internationalists)

Polydor, 1985
The Style Council’s second album, Our Favourite Shop, briefly knocking Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms off the top of the UK chart in June 1985. But like several British records released in the mid-eighties (and indeed the group’s previous LP) this one was retitled and repackaged for the American market. The original instrumental title track was omitted entirely and replaced by “Shout To The Top,” a hit single also featured on the soundtrack to the Matthew Modine/Linda Fiorentino movie Vision Quest. While the UK cover depicted Paul Weller and loyal sidekick Mick Talbot as a couple of dapper thrift store customers (see last slide), the US version transformed them into a pair of preening fashionistas — or perhaps Bond villains. The duo’s carefully cultivated image and sophisticated brand of jazz-soul-pop were calculated specifically to distance Weller from his previous act (The Jam), but also to provoke and expose a prejudice within the British music press and record-buying public. The group became a deliberate easy target: so committed was Weller to the project that he seemed intent on inviting ridicule or disdain, as a cursive sweep of this record’s back cover liner notes (accredited to “The Cappuccino Kid,” a pseudonym presumably) will testify. Put the record on and you will hear Weller singing inexplicably, at least on the opening track, with what sounds like a terrible cold. Though their records sold well, The Style Council were routinely dismissed as pretentious or inauthentic by those who weren’t in on the joke or simply didn’t get the message. This album’s immediately catchy tunes and breezy arrangements belied the fact that this was the angriest music Weller ever made. His leftist lyrics — whether a pithy satire or an earnest lament — were each a scathing critique of Britain’s social and economic decline under Thatcher. A month later at Live Aid, The Style Council were the second act on the bill at Wembley, where they performed two tracks from this LP, “Walls Come Tumbling Down” and the American title track.
 

Talking Heads / Little Creatures

Sire, 1985
Little Creatures is my favourite Talking Heads record, though many of the band’s fans routinely dismiss it (and the albums that followed) for sounding too commercial, as if producing great pop music means selling out, or is somehow a less worthy pursuit than making edgy art rock or exploring African funk polyrhythms. Or maybe they’re just afraid of a little steel guitar? I’ve also noticed that these fans are often among those who refer to the band as “The Talking Heads,” instantly diminishing the credibility of their opinions. Of course, how you appreciate music often has much to do with timing. I’m too young to have experienced Talking Heads’ first records as they happened (I remember my dad put “Once In A Lifetime” on one of the first compilation tapes he made for me), but by 1985 I’d developed an almost fanatical interest in music, and this album is certainly a big reason why Talking Heads were one of my favorite bands as a child. Either way, for me this album’s warm, radio-friendly production provides an ideal juxtaposition for David Byrne’s quirky observations and growing fascination with the nuances and absurdities of everyday American life. Every track sounds like a potential hit single, but the album is bookended by possibly the two best examples of Byrne’s pop genius. The surreal opener “And She Was” must rank as one of the decade’s finest opening tracks, while the gospel march of side two closer “Road To Nowhere” is so simple and direct that one could be forgiven for taking it for granted. The album packaging was designed by Hungarian graphic artist Tibor Kalman, using a commissioned painting by Howard Finster, an outsider artist from Summerville, GA (he also worked with fellow Georgians R.E.M.). Finster’s innocent style matched the relatively upbeat music contained within, but he wasn’t naïve: he was also a Baptist minister and inserted twenty-six religious verses into his front cover art. “They sold a million records in the first two months,” he noted. “So that’s twenty-six million verses I got out into the world.”
 

Scritti Politti / Cupid & Psyche 85

Warner Bros., 1985
Cupid & Psyche 85, the second album by Scritti Politti, was released in — wait for it — 1985. Forty years later, this record sounds absolutely amazing (especially on vinyl), but had it been made a few years later it might have seemed too slick. This album is certainly highly polished — and definitely of its time — but by the nineties developments in studio technology had made such immaculate production feel unbearably cloying. Scritti Politti were formed in Leeds in 1976 by Welsh art student Green Gartside (real name: Paul Strohmeyer). Initally influenced by leftist politics, the group took their name from Antonio Gramsci’s political writings — “scritti politici” — but Green changed it to Scritti Politti to sound more like “Tutti Frutti.” By the early eighties Green had abandoned his Marxist philosophy but retained an intellectual fixation with language. He also lost interest in the UK’s underground punk scene, turning his attention towards American soul, funk and hip-hop. Scritti Politti signed with Rough Trade who put out their debut, Songs To Remember, in 1982. The album was a minor success but Green couldn’t produce the sophisticated studio pop he desired on an indie budget. So he disbanded the group, signed with the Virgin label, and reformed Scritti Politti with a pair of New York musicians. Embracing the sound of the streets and the clubs, the group developed their distinctive pop sheen. With his blond coiff, Green himself was almost as pretty as his music, which in the MTV era certainly helped Scritti Politti shift some LPs. Green’s love of American pop was apparent on the record’s first single, “Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin),” the title of which referenced “I Say A Little Prayer,” on which veteran co-producer Arif Mardin also worked. The album produced four other singles, three of which broke the UK Top 20. One of these, “Perfect Way,” was the group’s biggest hit in the US, and was covered by none other than Miles Davis on his 1986 album, Tutu. Green returned the favour on Scritti Politti’s next album, Provision, inviting Davis to perform a trumpet solo on the single “Oh Patti (Don’t Feel Sorry For Loverboy).”
 

England/New Order / “World In Motion”

Factory 12”, 1990
To fully appreciate the significance of this single one need only look up World Cup songs of the seventies and eighties, which routinely found British squads bellowing off-key while swaying awkwardly to belie their general discomfort. But in 1990, England enlisted one of the UK’s most critically-acclaimed bands, lending instant credibility to a sub-genre that up to that point had been a subject of ridicule. Of course, the track sounded great (the bar had been set low), but lyrically it was a revelation. Previous World Cup songs had invariably taken the form of tired pub sing-alongs, full of empty promises about learning from past failures and bringing the cup home. As its very title suggested, “World In Motion” had a broader concern beyond England’s results on the pitch. Its lyrics were more abstract and ambitious — at its heart lay the possibility of love and international harmony, using football as a metaphor for self-expression. Then, as if things couldn’t get any better, up pops John Barnes, a victim of merciless racist abuse throughout his career, to silence haters with a thirty-second rap: “We ain’t no hooligans/This ain’t a football song…” This lyric not only further elevated the track above its mediocre predecessors, but it also made a blatant distinction between itself and the hotbed of fragile masculinity that was English football in the eighties. The twin successes of “World In Motion” and “Nessun Dorma” (used as the BBC’s theme for Italia ’90) shifted the sport’s cultural domain in the UK towards a liberal middle class, signaling a turning point in the way the game was perceived and marketed over the next decade. “World In Motion” stayed at number one on the British singles chart for two weeks, but surprisingly, it did not pave the way for equally memorable tournament songs (1996’s “Three Lions,” while a ready-made terrace chant, felt like a musical regression). So today “World In Motion” exists as a football and pop music cross-cultural landmark, not just for how it sounded, but for what it meant. “When something’s good it’s never gone…”
 

Massive Attack / Blue Lines

Wild Bunch, 1991
Massive Attack’s debut album, Blue Lines, was the archetype for a peculiar sub-genre of British music initially referred to as the “Bristol sound.” Massive Attack were the first major act to emerge from Bristol’s soundsystem scene: its core members — DJs Grant “Daddy G” Marshall and Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles, and graffiti artist-turned-rapper Robert “3D” Del Naja — had been working as a loose collective known as The Wild Bunch since the mid-eighties. When they finally got together the motivation and funds to cut an album (a large chunk of which was recorded at Neneh Cherry’s house) they were joined by Tricky Kid, whose anxious monotone was offset elsewhere by the warm vocals of Jamaican singer Horace Andy and British soul siren Shara Nelson. The album is perhaps best remembered for its stirring first single “Unfinished Sympathy” and the accompanying video, in which a carefree Nelson paces Los Angeles’ West Pico Boulevard. Released in the midst of the Gulf War air strikes, the group had to drop the second word from their name to ensure radio airplay, but the track still reached number 13 and still ranks highly on critics’ lists. Today, Blue Lines’ odd textures, nocturnal atmosphere and cinematic samples perfectly suit its lyrical themes: the significance of love, positivity and selfhood in the face of general disillusionment. By the mid-nineties other acts had followed this lead, around which point this lucrative new category was dubbed “trip-hop.” I loved Massive Attack’s second official release, Protection (1994), featuring Tracey Thorn from Everything But The Girl, and Tricky’s first solo album, Maxinquaye (1995), featuring Martina Topley-Bird, which is arguably the movement’s zenith. I never really got into Massive Attack’s 1998 album, Mezzanine, though it included guest vocals by Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins and was the group’s most commercially successful release. But I’ve played Blue Lines consistently since I was a teenager — it might be my favourite album of the nineties, and is certainly one of the most evocative of that decade. I even remember it playing in my high school art class, but then my dad was the teacher…
 

Prince & The New Power Generation / Diamonds and Pearls

Paisley Park, 1992
Diamonds and Pearls was Prince’s thirteenth album in as many years and his fourth (!) double LP, though incidentally the first of his that I don’t own on vinyl (there were two versions of the CD; for some reason I have both). This was also the first studio album to be credited to the New Power Generation. The live band swings hard with a sound that’s warm and jazzy, though the record hints at a heavier production style that typified Prince’s work by the mid-nineties. The result was an album that felt rooted in some version of contemporary urban life, as Prince suddenly appeared to be looking outward — or at least onto the street. No longer operating solely in his own orbit, his insecurities concerning chart trends were perhaps exposed by a distinct influence of new jack swing and hip-hop. Evidently Prince had softened his stance on rap music since previously disparaging the genre, even deploying an MC, Tony M, on a handful of tracks. (I remember hearing “Gett Off” in the school playground, suggesting the ploy had worked.) But for all his innovation in the studio, Prince’s songwriting is refreshingly straightforward and his vocal performances unaffected. The most memorable songs on the album are devoid of excessive production flourishes and played totally straight, revealing their honest beauty and craft. On the title track, a gorgeous baroque rock (barock?) ballad, Prince takes a backseat to the considerable vocal talents of Rosie Gaines. It’s the kind of song that few artists would dare tackle and probably the last truly great single of Prince’s career. In contrast, “Cream” feels almost throwaway: a Bolan-esque ditty that bounces along on such an effortless groove you can’t believe it had to be written. Legend has it Prince composed the whole thing while looking at his reflection in the mirror. When he wasn’t fixing his eyeliner he was penning adult socio-political critiques like “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night,” a mid-tempo number whose message both timeless and prescient was given visual life by Spike Lee in a video that could have been made yesterday. Sadly it was deemed unsuitable for MTV. “And u think u got it bad…”.
 

Prince & The New Power Generation / Love Symbol

Paisley Park, 1992
Prince’s fourteenth studio album also introduced the unpronounceable symbol that would soon become his stage name. This gender-blending glyph was stamped directly onto the plastic CD case; today the album tends to be referred to as “Love Symbol.” Ironically, its lead single and opening track was called “My Name Is Prince,” a suggestion that the little man hadn’t entirely lost his sense of humour (or his ego). Indeed, the record was originally intended to weave a loose but elaborate narrative about an Egyptian princess played by Prince’s future wife Mayte Garcia. But most of these dramatic segues had to be cut to allow the album to fit on a standard-length CD (it still maxes out at a hefty 75 minutes). The concept was resurrected for a direct-to-video film called 3 Chains o’ Gold that eventually emerged in 1994 (I’ve never seen it). The three spoken-word interludes that made it to the finished album all feature Kirstie Alley in the role of dogged reporter Vanessa Bartholomew, following her vain attempts to secure an exclusive interview with the elusive purple genius (apparently Prince was a big fan of Cheers and befriended the actress on set). If you can put aside those quaint indulgences, the rest of the album divides itself between heavy slabs of danceable R&B and refreshingly unaffected mid-tempo ballads. It became Prince’s best-selling album since Purple Rain, and is evidence of the increasing influence of hip hop on his sound, packed with examples of the joking-not-joking sexually explicit bravado he’d appeared to have outgrown. Nevertheless, the record’s undoubted highlight is “Sexy M.F.,” a spiritual successor to “Sex Machine” that showcases the NPG as the tightest jazz-funk combo since James Brown hung up his cape. Inevitably, the single version had to be cleaned up for radio, but the incriminating refrain is repeated so many times on the original that by song’s end it essentially becomes benign, its power to offend lost beneath the track’s chunky horns and incessant, undeniable groove. The album’s other hit single was entitled “7,” which is also where it peaked on the chart.
 

Donald Fagen / Kamakiriad

Reprise, 1993
Donald Fagen’s second solo album, Kamakiriad, came out over a decade after his first one. Following the success of The Nightfly in 1982, Fagen had spent the bulk of the eighties suffering from depression and writer’s block. Instead he focused on session work and composing music for films, most notably the adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City (though unfortunately, Fagen’s version of Jimmy Reed’s song from which the novel took its name is not included on the movie’s LP soundtrack). He also penned a regular column in Premiere magazine. Steely Dan’s old website even lists the year’s 1988-1992 as “The Dark Ages.” Kamakiriad is a concept album of sorts, an eight-song cycle about an unnamed narrator’s steam-powered odyssey aboard the titular vehicle of the very near future (it even has a hydroponic farm in the back). Fagen’s retro-nostalgic vision is further brought to life by his fixations with Cold War era jazz and science-fiction, safe havens warmed by sun or fire, and alluring beauties that may or may not be out of this world. Though nominally a solo record, Kamakiriad was produced by Fagen’s Steely Dan co-founder, Walter Becker — by that point a resident of Maui — who also contributes bass and lead guitar. Not counting their involvement on Zazu, a record by model-turned singer Rosie Vela, in 1986, it was the first time the pair had collaborated since the last Steely Dan record, Gaucho, in 1980. In 1994, Fagen returned the favour, playing keyboards and co-producing Becker’s own solo debut, 11 Tracks of Whack. Later in 1993, Steely Dan began touring again for the first time in nineteen years, and didn’t really stop until Becker’s death in 2017. Today Fagen continues to tour as “Steely Dan” at the behest of promoters.
 

Elvis Costello / Brutal Youth

Warner Bros., 1994
Brutal Youth was marketed as Costello’s first album with the Attractions since 1986’s Blood & Chocolate, though that original foursome only appeared on five tracks. Most of the rest featured Nick Lowe on bass, until a reluctant Costello was convinced by producer Mitchell Froom to invite Bruce Thomas — with whom he’d barely spoken in the ensuing years — to reassemble the old line-up. After he’d spent the early part of the nineties working on music for soundtracks and string quartets, Costello’s fourteenth studio album was hailed by critics as a “comeback” and a “return to form,” in that it evoked the raw energy and clever wordplay that had made him famous. Costello was keen to insist that the record wasn’t a retro pastiche, even if its bright production — laden with hooks and harmonies — owed a lot to the radio-friendly guitar sound of the sixties. Does that make it Britpop? This CD still reminds me of the 1994 World Cup, and is definitely my favourite mid-period Costello album. I listened to it while driving to work recently and had forgotten how good it is. Costello’s songcraft, and vocal performance, are masterful. The last time I’d heard it in a car was probably in Italy during that same summer — I can still picture the flags hanging from every balcony. Coincidentally, the sleeve notes include a bizarre dedication in crude Italian that reads, “Io strombazzo! Io dedico questo assurdo scarabocchio e mormorio per la mia bruta gioventù con stufacente desiderio.” I found an interview from the left-wing newspaper L’Unità in which Costello reveals that the phrase came about from an Italian course he’d taken in Florence. “Yours is a fascinating language, but also a difficult one,” he explained. “I’d hoped to learn it quickly, also to be able to speak with you. But I was a bad student.” Costello was clearly in his Italophile phase: the following year he appeared as a football pundit alongside James Richardson at the Genoa derby, in what ranks as one of the best bits of live television I’ve ever seen.
 

Blur / Parklife

Food, 1994
At the start of the nineties, Damon Albarn had prophetically announced that Blur would become the quintessential English band of the nineties. A miserable tour of the United States in 1992 had extracted in Albarn an anti-American sentiment, and Blur’s knowing satire of British culture was often interpreted as a celebration of same — or maybe it was the other way around. Certainly, in its brilliant evocation of sixties pop and sharply-drawn character sketches, Parklife, the band’s third album, came to define the eclectic style and tongue-in-cheek humour of what the media had already dubbed “Britpop.” It’s probably the most emblematic album of that genre, even if the term never had much to do with music. Despite a Scandinavian subtitle (“Folkmusik då Svenska”) not listed on the album sleeve (which I only discovered when I popped the CD in the car stereo yesterday), Parklife essentially recaps every English pop music trend of the previous thirty years. The record’s biggest hits were the synth-disco throb of “Girls & Boys” and the mainly spoken-word title track (featuring actor Phil Daniels), which became something of an anthem. But I always preferred Albarn’s more personal songwriting. “End Of A Century,” “Badhead” and “Clover Over Dover” reveal his finest pop sensibilities in the manner of mid-era Beatles or his idol, Ray Davies. I also loved the baroque chanson “To The End,” which was later re-recorded with Françoise Hardy. Another fan favourite is the atmospheric “This Is A Low,” featuring a lengthy Graham Coxon guitar solo and perhaps the only song inspired by the BBC shipping forecast. What could be more British than that? If Parklife’s subject was the UK’s lower classes, its 1995 follow-up, The Great Escape, took an even more scathing aim at the aspiring bourgeoisie. I loved it. By that point the frenzied British media had pitted Blur against their northern “rivals” Oasis, even though, besides hailing from the same island, the two bands had nothing in common. For Britpop, that was the beginning of the end. In 1997 Blur released a self-titled low-fi album influenced by American alternative rock. I hated it.
 

The Rolling Stones / Voodoo Lounge

Virgin, 1994
I remember watching an interview with the Rolling Stones around the time Voodoo Lounge came out in which Mick Jagger was questioned about the album’s title. “It’s not like we’re into voodoo or anything,” he said. “But we’re very good at lounging…” Musically, the album follows the blueprint of all late-era Stones releases, as established on the band’s 1989 “comeback” record, Steel Wheels. Ironically, that album came out just three years after the poorly-received (but underrated) Dirty Work; it took another five years for its follow-up to arrive. Following his departure from the group in 1993, this was also the first Stones album not to feature founding bassist Bill Wyman. The first half of this disc is pretty strong, revealing the Stones at their unapologetic and eclectic best, but the material starts to wane a bit on what would be side two. With its clunky religious imagery and references to warfare, “Blinded By Rainbows” strains in vain for an elusive, lofty message and ends up distinguishing itself as possibly the worst lyric the Stones ever recorded. The best track on here is perhaps Keith’s quietly menacing “Thru And Thru,” which was later used to great effect on an episode of The Sopranos. In August 1994 the Voodoo Lounge tour kicked off, a thirteen-month series of dates that grossed a record-breaking $320 million. By the end of the nineties the Stones had completed a decades-long transition from original rock and roll outlaws to corporate establishment certainties, a reflection of the band, the music industry, and even the public’s attitude towards both.
 

Prince / Come

Warner Bros., 1994
Largely ignored upon its release, Prince’s sixteenth studio album, Come was dismissed as merely a contractual obligation — in 1993 Prince had already adopted the unpronouncable “love symbol” as his stage name in an attempt to free himself from the restrictions imposed on him by his label. A surprisingly palatable mix of chilled funk and experimental grooves, most of the music on Come emerged from the same sessions that produced the more commercial material that ended up on The Gold Experience. Prince’s intention was to release both projects simultaneously but Warner Bros. refused; The Gold Experience didn’t see the light of day until September ’95. Come’s already slim chances for chart success were further diminished by Prince’s own indifference towards marketing the record, but it still debuted at number one in the UK. Similarly, an album that begins with an eleven-minute title track on the subject of oral sex clearly isn’t too concerned with producing hit singles, but Prince’s most loyal British fans pushed “Letitgo” as high as number 30. The album is probably most memorable for its artwork. The cover photoshoot by Terry Gydesen took place on location in front of the gates of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. More significantly, next to the artist’s name appeared the years 1958 and 1993, symbolising the death of “Prince.” His next nine releases were attributed to the aforementioned glyph; the name “Prince” did not appear on a studio album again until The Rainbow Children, a jazz fusion concept record that came out in November 2001.
 

Oasis / Definitely Maybe

Creation, 1994
It’s difficult to extract Definitely Maybe from the cultural phenomenon it ignited in the UK and the media frenzy that followed. Aside from the music, perhaps the most important thing about Oasis’ debut album was that it introduced us to the Gallagher brothers, Noel and Liam, a genetically-connected odd couple who, besides a womb and a love of Manchester City, shared little in common. Most of the time they didn’t even seem to get along. But the pair were also striving for pop immortality — one through his gift for song, the other through the very act of being Liam Gallagher — and each seemed to begrudgingly recognise that they needed the other if they were to reach these unwavering ambitions. Much of what made Oasis so endearing was their almost comical northern bravado. Humour was a big part of their appeal, but unlike some of their contemporaries, they were never trying to be clever or ironic. They were committed to their yearning vision and played it absolutely straight — disliking Oasis said more about you than it did about them. There was nothing especially original about Oasis — perhaps their greatest trick was convincing us that there was. Many likened them to the Beatles, though their logo was inspired by the old Decca symbol that appeared on early Rolling Stones records. The cover photo was taken in rhythm guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs’ living room (he’s the one sitting in a chair looking a bit glum). The scene contains several clues that hint at the band’s identity and influences: there’s a Burt Bacharach gatefold propped up against the sofa, a framed picture of Rodney Marsh at Maine Road (until recently I always thought it was Colin Bell), while a Sergio Leone spaghetti western plays on the TV. I had a poster of the artwork on my bedroom wall. I also had a pale blue Oasis t-shirt with the album’s title on the back (I recently spotted one listed on eBay for $600).
 

Elastica / Elastica

Konk, 1995
Elastica’s self-titled debut album came out a full fifteen months after the band’s first single. Three more singles followed before the album was actually released, which helped it become (at the time) the fastest-selling debut in UK chart history. Aside from their catchy songs, a big part of Elastica’s appeal — at least for this listener — was the band’s tomboyish, Telecaster-wielding frontwoman, Justine Frischmann. Frischmann’s cool androgyny, deadpan delivery and knowing attitude of insouciance made me an instant fan of her band, before I’d barely heard their music. Elastica’s angular, pithy post-punk seemed refreshing on both sides of the Atlantic. But in addition to record sales and critical praise, they were accused, quite legitimately, of lifting riffs from both Wire and The Stranglers. Not even the band’s name was that original: in the early eighties there was a short-lived Edinburgh synth group called Hey! Elastica. Frischmann had co-founded Suede with Brett Anderson, whom she’d also dated. By 1991 she was living with Blur’s Damon Albarn. The pair became a frequent fixation of the notorious UK press, but despite being one half of Britpop’s preeminent power couple, “Queen Justine” only saw Albarn for three weeks in 1995, and described the next few years as her most miserable. She slipped into a heroin addiction and began living what she called “the life of a sad junkie.” After several aborted attempts, Elastica’s long-awaited follow-up album, The Menace, finally arrived in 2000. Frischmann later conceded that Elastica should have remained “a one-album project.” The daughter of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who’d become a prominent engineer, Frischmann had studied architecture at University College London before becoming a musician. In 2003 she hosted a BBC Three series about architecture and interior design called Dreamscapes (I have no recollection of this but it’s on YouTube). Then in 2005 she enrolled in a visual arts degree in Boulder, Colorado, and took up painting. Today she lives in San Rafael, California, with her husband (a meteorology professor at UC Davis) and several cats. On her former life she says, “I just wasn’t cut out to be a pop star.”
 

Oasis / (What’s The Story) Morning Glory

Creation, 1995
This record defined 1995: I remember hearing it at home, at school, at parties… In the end it came to define mid-nineties culture in the UK in a way that today seems quaint. Imagine if 2020’s major headlines concerned the CD sales, supposed rivalries and off-stage antics of a rock band. This period will always be referred to as peak “Britpop.” I always hated that label, mainly because it lumped bands together that otherwise had no connection besides having formed in the UK, as if nationality were a musical genre and all British groups — whether from London, Liverpool, or even Manchester — sought the same sound. It also meant that many mediocre imitation bands got to bask in the glow of fame earned by the more talented ones, resulting in clogged airwaves and an increasingly tiresome scene (I felt British music became notably looser and more varied once the media frenzy had faded by the end of the decade). Morning Glory is not my favourite Oasis album (that distinction still belongs to Be Here Now, much to the disbelief of most). But a quarter-century later it still sounds great and I still know every word, though I cannot disassociate it from endless days of cloud and drizzle. Noel Gallagher’s lyrics were always self-aware but vague, as if he was recalling a dream from a few nights before but also looking ahead a couple of decades, imagining a nostalgia for something that had yet to happen. Like a professional athlete, he seemed conscious of the fact that success would be fleeting, that the giant wave his band rode by nature could not last, and that this was his personal moment in pop history. I think that slight urgency gave Oasis an edge over their contemporaries, whose clever posturing and arch humour perhaps had less direct appeal. They also simply wrote better songs (though they still never really “cracked” America).
 

Oasis / Be Here Now

Creation, 1997
Oasis’ third album, Be Here Now, came out on August 21st 1997. I didn’t have to look that up: the date was included prominently on the CD artwork, no doubt as a reminder to fans that in purchasing the record they were contributing to a moment of historic cultural significance. This wasn’t a case of hubris: 424,000 people bought copies of Be Here Now on its day of release, making it the fastest-selling album in UK history. I was one of them, and it immediately became my favourite Oasis album, though this preference is still routinely scoffed at by those who took part in the “Great BHN Backlash” of late ’97. Though I enjoyed a lot of the music I never liked the term “Britpop,” and always considered it a political movement more than a musical one. At its height I found the hype-driven, tabloid-fueled frenzy quite tiresome, even provincial. Thankfully by 1997 there were signs that the flag-strewn hysteria had begun to subside. In February, Blur released an eponymous “lo-fi” record, a clear rejection of the media circus in their native country that, notably, proved to be their best-performing album in America. Few imagined Oasis could surpass the colossal success of their second album… except Oasis. Rather than tone down their aspirations for global domination, the brothers Gallagher (and those three other blokes) — still riding a high of unwavering self-confidence that only a seemingly endless stream of cocaine and adulation can provide — defiantly turned up their already grandiose sonic approach to Wagnerian proportions. I remember seeing the video for epic album opener and lead single “D’You Know What I Mean?” on MTV (in Germany, appropriately enough). It made the “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence from Apocalypse Now look like a low-budget indie film. Despite record-breaking sales and gushing initial reviews, critics, fans — and even Noel Gallagher himself — soon changed their tune on the album. Today it’s still frequently dismissed as an indulgent, bloated collection of over-produced, meaningless songs. But I also remember reading somewhere that Oasis “didn’t need to have a message because their message was the very act of being Oasis.” This is precisely why, love it or hate it, Be Here Now is the most Oasis album Oasis ever made.
 

Lauryn Hill / The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Ruffhouse, 1998
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was by far my favourite album of 1998, and certainly one of the decade’s most influential. Hill was already well-known as the voice (and face) of The Fugees, but her solo debut exceeded expectations. Though tinged by the warm sounds of the past (the lead single was called “Doo Wop”), this catchy record felt like both a celebration of black music and a critique of its broader culture, making its crossover appeal not only inevitable but also important. Hill was praised for her ability to sing and rap with equal authority, but her varied and honest songwriting was the album’s greatest revelation. Her confessional lyrics delved into the complexities of womanhood, motherhood and every other kind of ’hood, offering refreshing perspective on her struggles as a black female musician seeking to scythe through the lazy misogyny that blighted commercial hip-hop in the nineties (and beyond). Despite the consistent strength of Hill’s material, Miseducation wasn’t impervious to the industry trends of the period. The album featured A-list guest appearances from the likes of Mary J. Blige, D’Angelo and even Carlos Santana. Luckily these studio drop-ins didn’t distract, unlike the pointless spoken interludes inserted between songs (an irritating R&B tendency in the CD era). As a result the album clocks in at a bloated 78 minutes (that’s including the two hidden tracks). After Miseducation won five awards at the Grammys, Hill was the undisputed queen of neo-soul and perfectly primed for a long and successful solo career. But as of 2023 it remains her only studio album. By the turn of the millennium Hill had retreated from the spotlight, citing understandable disillusionment with fame and the music industry. In the past quarter-century she has performed and recorded only sporadically, prompting periodic and misinformed speculation as to the status of her professional and personal lives. Then this week she announced a 25th anniversary tour in celebration of the album, suggesting that even she recognizes Miseducation as her greatest statement and most lasting legacy.
 

Steely Dan / Two Against Nature

Giant, 2000
Though Two Against Nature, Steely Dan’s eighth studio album, turns twenty-five this year, the record was released on February 29th, 2000, so I suppose it was made to evade such banalities as anniversaries. After finally completing Gaucho in 1980, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen took an indefinite hiatus, opting out of the MTV era entirely to spend the next decade working on solo albums, film music, or writing and producing for other artists. By 1993 the pair had reunited, embarking on a Steely Dan arena tour and even debuting some new material (I remember hearing “Jack of Speed” at my first Steely Dan show in ’96). In an era when baring young flesh was seemingly a requisite for a career in music, Steely Dan were the antithesis of the frosted-haired, tank-topped boy bands cluttering the pop landscape at the turn of the millennium. What better time for the seventies’ most subversive band to stage a comeback? “I think the audience for Limp Bizkit is probably not going to be particularly interested in what we’re doing,” Becker noted at the time. “If you just compare the names Steely Dan and Limp Bizkit,” Fagen added, “you have the answer right there.” On the record, the duo were now joined by a new generation of session aces with peerless jazz chops. Though tighter and funkier than their earlier work, the album was unmistakably a product of Steely Dan. Lyrically, Becker and Fagen remained preoccupied by familiar concerns: dysfunctional relationships, unconventional sexual arrangements, self-loathing and existential dread, and the effects of drugs on all of the above. The difference was that this pair of eternal outsiders were now further isolated by middle-age. Two Against Nature came out during my second year at university and I played this disc to death. To the surprise of some, it picked up four awards at the 2001 Grammys, including “Album of the Year,” ahead of those by Beck, Eminem and Radiohead. In June 2000 Steely Dan released a DVD of a live PBS special recorded at Sony Studios in Hell’s Kitchen. It is an essential document of an extraordinary band and its characteristic wit, but also of the late flash of a fading culture.
 

Daft Punk / Discovery

Virgin, 2001
By the time Parisian disco duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, better known as Daft Punk, released their second album, Discovery, the record’s lead single and opening track “One More Time” had already become ubiquitous, both on the radio and in the club. I was a student in Italy at the time and must have heard that song every day and every night for months; I remember my roommate and I used to mimic with glee the overly annunciated vocals (“tonigh-tah!”). I’d enjoyed Daft Punk’s first album, Homework, so when the new disc came out I picked it up immediately, probably from Ricordi Mediastore or Messagerie Musicali (Milan’s equivalent of Virgin Megastore or Tower Records). Furthering Daft Punk’s reputation as technological innovators, the CD came with instructions how to join Daft Club, an online community for accessing exclusive bonus material. Prior to launching the new record, Daft Punk had begun wearing shiny robot helmets in public: a visual metaphor for the merging of man and machine, but also a means for hiding behind their synth-heavy retro sound. Though it’s an electronic album, much of the “samples” use live instrumentation, resulting in the warm sensation of believing you’re hearing an older soul tune even when you’re not, and providing the record surprising emotional resonance. The album’s unapologetic earnestness and hook-laden pop sheen almost comes off as faux-naivety, but that’s balanced by a trademark humour (clocking in at ten minutes, the album’s final track is titled “Too Long”). I played this CD to death for a year or two, but notably hardly at all since. Daft Punk announced their break-up last month, though such a formal statement hardly seemed necessary given their less than prolific output and faceless personas. Ultimately, I felt Daft Punk became a bit of a parody, a clever idea taken to its absolute zenith. Like an electro-house version of another perfectionist twosome, Steely Dan, they were perhaps too smart for their own good. At times their act felt like an inside joke at the audience’s expense, but it did remind us to take nothing seriously — except the music.
 

Red Hot Chili Peppers / By The Way

Warner Bros., 2002
By The Way, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ eighth album, was released during the same summer I finished university. I always loved this band, both for their unique sound but also their mystique and pervading sense of place. Not since the Beach Boys has a band’s music been so inexorably connected to southern California, and to me RHCP have always represented a distant and exotic version of Los Angeles life that to this day feels entirely foreign. I bought all the band’s albums in the nineties and like those, this one was also produced by Rick Rubin. But it marked something of a change in direction. Less funky, but more mature, melodic and textured than their previous releases, the record is characterized by John Frusciante’s extraordinary guitar work and multi-layered backing vocals. (Apparently bass player Flea felt so left out of the creative process on this record that he considered quitting the band.) The album almost feels like a distillation of California rock up to that point, laden with radio-friendly hooks, Wilson-esque harmonies, and even some lush string arrangements, all shot through a vague filter of sun-drenched psychedelia. Anthony Kiedis’ lyrics at times resemble a stream of consciousness, but still manage to convey a certain jaded optimism and a new self-reflective perspective on common subjects: love, drugs, and the wild contradictions of modern Angeleno culture. Ironically the artwork was painted by a New Yorker, Julian Schnabel, whose daughter Stella happened to be dating Frusciante at the time. I still have a poster of the cover that came free with an issue of Kerrang! magazine (which I never usually bought). If I have a criticism of this album it’s that at 69 minutes it’s probably a bit long, but it flies by in comparison to the band’s next album, a sprawling and somewhat indulgent double CD entitled Stadium Arcadium. By that point my obsessive interest in pop music had already begun to wane, and by the time I moved to New York I no longer had the time or energy to keep up with every new release. I like to think that says as much about the music (and the decline of record shops) as it does about me.
 

Bruce Springsteen / The Rising

Columbia, 2002
Bruce Springsteen’s twelfth studio album, The Rising, was a significant and highly-anticipated release for two reasons. Firstly, it was Springsteen’s first studio album with the E Street Band since Born in the U.S.A. in 1984, making it something of a comeback record. Secondly, it was the first CD by a major artist to address directly the events of September 11th, 2001, or at least the grief and paranoia of its aftermath, and in my mind will always be connected to that very uncertain period. The first new material I heard from the record was “My City Of Ruins.” Originally written about the dilapidation of Asbury Park, it acquired a different association when Springsteen opened the America: A Tribute To Heroes telethon by previewing a pared-down version of the song without introduction, a mere ten days after 9/11. Produced by Brendan O’Brien (best known for his work with grunge acts like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden), “The Rising” album presented some fresh textures that subtly updated the familiar E Street sound without ever diminishing it. The band had already reunited for a live tour in 1999, a series of epic shows that at times began to resemble a rock and soul sermon, with Springsteen in the role of Telecaster-wielding pastor. He sometimes assumed a similar role on this album, which provided a degree of comfort and reassurance during some of the most turbulent months in this nation’s history. Far be it from a musician’s responsibility to steer a country forward in a time of crisis, but in 2002 who else was going to do it? The opening track’s organ and chugging horn refrain (“It’s alright, it’s alright… Yeah!”) could have been applied to any roadside bar singalong in Springsteen’s catalogue, but in this context took on an unexpected meaning that still packs a surprise emotional punch two decades later. This uplifting affirmation of survival set the tone for the entire record, which bravely grappled with the question of how to continue living (and even have a party) in the face of such despair and fear. Springsteen’s answer was a vital and timely reminder that like it or not, for better or worse, life, one way or another, does go on.
 

Steely Dan / Everything Must Go

Reprise, 2003
Steely Dan’s ninth and final studio album, Everything Must Go, was the follow-up to 2000’s Grammy-winning Two Against Nature. That album had appeared after a hiatus of twenty years, so unsurprisingly EMG (as the kids on Twitter call it) uses most of the same personnel as 2AN, though it’s not quite a companion piece. For starters, it’s warmer and looser — even Walter Becker sings lead vocals on “Slang Of Ages.” My favourite track has always been “Godwhacker,” about a band of assassins on a mission to take out the man upstairs. The other songs cover the Manhattan-centric themes you might expect of late-era Steely Dan — material excess, divorce, internet noir, digital entertainment product, a date with a stalker, a folding business — and the general tone is one of defeat and resignation. To me this album represents two middle-aged men recoiling from contemporary culture, opting to bow out and take no further part, rather than risk sliding towards humiliation, depression, or worst of all, mediocrity. Judging from the title (and the title track that closes the album), Becker and Fagen had little intention of making another Steely Dan record. They never did: both released solo albums before Becker died from esophageal cancer in 2017.
 

Prince / Musicology

Columbia, 2004
Having spent the first years of the new millennium putting out a series of jazz fusion records (including the excellent The Rainbow Children), Prince had ambled back into the limelight in the early part of 2004, performing a medley of hits with Beyoncé at the Grammys. Then in March came his now-legendary induction ceremony to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (the footage from which is still unavoidable on YouTube). When Musicology arrived it was everything we’d come to expect from Prince — radio-friendly pop-rock ditties, disposable party jams, pleading boudoir ballads, some fairly obvious political observations and the kind of supple art-funk that had made him a star in the first place. At 45, Prince could be forgiven for sticking to what he did best, but none of the tracks on here felt like a retread of familiar ground. I always thought some of Prince’s best work in the mid-nineties was over-produced, but on Musicology he seemed to have settled on a more organic sound highlighting drums, bass… and plenty of horns. Unfortunately Musicology was just the latest Prince album from that period lumbered with ugly artwork. On the cover the little man appears partially in shadow and stroking his lip in contemplation, or perhaps devising an escape from the net of naked twigs in which he finds himself apparently trapped. The CD booklet even uses Papyrus, a font best known for being the butt of an SNL skit (Ryan Gosling, look away now). It was Prince’s first album for a major label (a one-album deal with Columbia) since 1999’s Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic (Arista). Borrowing the multiple guest star formula of Santana’s blockbuster, Supernatural, that cluttered record was a blatant (and failed) bid for a return to commercial relevance. Musicology on the other hand was lean, focused, and ended up being his most successful album since 1991’s Diamonds and Pearls. Some of the numbers were skewed since copies of the CD were included in the ticket price for the 2004 tour, but it’s not surprising Musicology was hailed as a Prince comeback, even by those of us for whom he’d never gone away.

Sócrates’ Short-Lived Season In Florence

“The horse that runs on grass doesn’t run on sand.” — Brazilian proverb

On a cold and sunny afternoon in February 1984, Fiorentina hosted Sampdoria. Less than five minutes into the second half, an innocuous challenge between Giancarlo Antognoni and Luca Pellegrini on the edge of the box left both players on the ground. The pair had to be substituted immediately, but Antognoni had come off worse. The diagnosis: a fracture of the tibia and fibula.

Despite this setback Fiorentina held on to finish the Serie A season in an impressive third. But by then it was apparent that doctors’ initial prognosis of a ninety-day recovery for Antognoni had been optimistic. Facing the entire 1984-85 season without the club’s captain and leader, Fiorentina president Ranieri Pontello turned to the transfer market.

Sócrates was already well-known in Italy; two years earlier he had captained Brazil at the World Cup, scoring a memorable goal past Dino Zoff in the famous defeat to Italy, the eventual champions. Tall, thin, and bearded, by the early 80s he was arguably the most recognisable midfielder in the world. Blessed with exceptional vision, passing and aerial ability, as well as an impressive shot, he was nicknamed “Calcanhar de Ouro” (Golden Heel) for his penchant for backheeling the ball.

The 30-year-old had already garnered the attention of Roma, but he ultimately chose Florence. “It’s the most beautiful city,” he said. “That’s where I want to live.” Other members of that 1982 Brazil side — Falcao, Cerezo and Zico — were already playing in Serie A, while Junior also arrived in Europe that summer. Fiorentina themselves boasted several players that had shone in Spain, including Claudio Gentile and Gabriele Oriali. But it was clear from the moment he touched down in Florence that Sócrates was different. “I’m not interested in cars or luxurious houses, or in growing old with my fortune,” he announced upon his arrival. “Italy appeals to me because I can learn things directly from books.”

Sócrates’ viola adventure began with a friendly against his old club Corinthians, organised as part of the 5.3 billion lire deal which had brought him to Tuscany. While he was signed to fill the hole left by Antognoni, on the pitch Sócrates was not a direct replacement for the Fiorentina captain. Experienced regista Eraldo Pecci took over the mantle of the number ten shirt while the Brazilian wore his usual number eight. Strolling about in midfield, Sócrates’ class was evident, and fans cheered whenever he performed his trademark backheel. His first goal for the club was a typically nonchalant chip, in a 5-0 home win over Atalanta. But such moments were sporadic, and critics soon picked up on his leisurely style and tendency to drift out of games for long periods.

Coaching the side was 41-year-old Giancarlo De Sisti, a member of Fiorentina’s 1969 scudetto-winning team. One Monday morning, after a typically lacklustre Sunday performance, he spotted Sócrates with his head in the newspaper. “Did you see what they wrote about you?” De Sisti asked. The player glanced up. “The sports pages don’t interest me,” he responded. “I’m reading the politics section.”

Indeed, Sócrates was almost as noted for his left-wing politics as his football. Born into an intellectual household, unlike many Brazilian footballers, Sócrates did not go by a nickname: he and two of his brothers were named after Greek philosophers. As a ten-year-old he saw his father destroy his beloved personal library after it came under threat in the 1964 coup d’etat, an event which sparked his activism. At Corinthians the midfielder co-founded the “Democracia Corinthiana” movement, which revolutionised the running of the club by involving players in institutional decisions and encouraging political engagement with its fans. A vocal opponent of Brazil’s dictatorship, it is no surprise Sócrates also opposed Italy’s militaristic approach to preparing for football matches. He wasn’t the first Brazilian to suffer from a case of saudade in Serie A, but Fiorentina’s rigorous training sessions, carefully monitored diet, and strict curfews imposed upon his iconoclastic nature.

The novelty of Sócrates’ unconventional ways initially drew curiosity from teammates, though some considered his political views idealistic and dated, even calling him a “sessantottino” (sixty-eighter). But his rebelliousness also created tension in the dressing room. Clashes with Argentina captain Daniel Passarella — a rival at international level and Sócrates’ opposite in almost every way — were frequent. One evening goalkeeper Giovanni Galli invited his new teammate over to his house for dinner. Sócrates showed up at two in the morning.

Meanwhile De Sisti became increasingly frustrated by Sócrates’ tactical indiscipline and casual work ethic. “He struggled to integrate,” the coach acknowledged. “When we travelled to away games he’d just lie on the backseat. Once I caught him with a cigarette in his mouth. ‘Don’t you dare light that,’ I warned. He just sighed and went to sleep.” But Socrates was a self-described “anti-athlete,” once stating, “I cannot deny myself certain lapses from the strict regime of a sportsman.” De Sisti resigned himself to the fact that the Brazilian would not bend. “We made a stop at a service station,” he remembered. “The others players all went inside, but Sócrates just leaned on the bus smoking one cigarette after another.”

Such excesses were all the more ironic given that Sócrates was also a qualified doctor, having earned his medical degree in Ribeirão Preto while playing for the local club, Botafogo. This qualification came in handy during a match with Lazio when he was able to administer assistance to an injured Lionello Manfredonia. But his medical expertise could not help De Sisti, who was forced to abandon his post mid-way through the season after developing a brain abscess. When the coach returned to health Fiorentina tried to pair him with the veteran Ferruccio Valcareggi, the man who had coached De Sisti at the 1970 World Cup. Instead, De Sisti resigned before Christmas and Valcareggi took over alone. Already out of the UEFA Cup, Fiorentina won just four more league matches before scraping to ninth place in Serie A.

It was clear to all that Sócrates’ Italian experience was over, but he seemed to blame others for his disappointing season. “I’m worth the money they spent on me,” he insisted. “But I can’t imagine they’d come all the way to São Paulo without getting to know me first. If they just wanted a world class player they could have taken Zico.” The Brazilian was not only critical of his club, but the game in Italy in general. In a bitter departing statement he referred to Italian players as “employees on the pitch.”

In November 1985, Antognoni came off the bench against Bari, nineteen months after breaking his leg. By that point Sócrates was back in Brazil, this time in Rio de Janeiro, where he’d teamed up with Zico at Flamengo. Another move to Santos followed before he ended his career with a return to his first club, Botafogo de Ribeirão Preto. Fifteen years later Sócrates came out of retirement to make a single appearance for Garforth Town, a lower league club from West Yorkshire. His beard had greyed and his pace had slowed to walking.

Sócrates once said that he played football professionally because it enabled him to buy petrol and beer, and though his movement relented his drinking never did. He died in 2011. Fiorentina wore black armbands for their next home match against Roma, and the minute’s silence before kick-off was applauded throughout. Two banners were unfurled on the Curva Fiesole honouring the departed Brazilian. The first read, “Un’ ultima pinta per il dottore” (One last pint for the doctor). The second, “Dottore vola in cielo a fare un tacco da Dio,” had a clever double meaning, inviting “the Doctor” to fly up to the sky and do a backheel. “Da Dio” could be translated as “in God’s house,” but also, simply, “a really good backheel.” Invoking both his footballing talent and intellect, it was a fitting tribute that confirmed the strange spiritual bond that remained between Sócrates and Fiorentina, even if theirs was not quite a match made in heaven.

When I was thirteen I bought a River Plate shirt from a small sports shop in my Leicestershire hometown. Prior to that Saturday afternoon I’d never laid eyes on an Argentine shirt in the flesh: in 1993 the replica industry was still in its infancy and mail order was the closest thing to online shopping. Even in today’s global marketplace South American club kits are seldom found in stores — it’s no exaggeration to say that for a young collector in the early-nineties they represented a football shirt holy grail.

Alongside the River shirt were a handful of other jerseys from Argentina. A friend and fellow enthusiast bought a Boca Juniors shirt (the one with the FIAT sponsor) and I seem to recall they also had Independiente. Quite how this modest establishment in Loughborough had managed to procure an exotic selection of Buenos Aires-based club shirts remained a mystery, but rather than ask further questions I snapped up the River shirt before a less-deserving soccer-mad peer did the same. It cost a mere £10, which even then was a bargain.

Made in Argentina under license by Adidas (la marca de las 3 tiras), the River shirt was a classic cotton-polyester blend template, with three red stripes down the sleeves and the Peugeot sponsor on the upper-right chest. South American jerseys in that period were still in essence utilitarian sportswear: with the exception of changes in sponsorship from season to season, River’s strip had remained practically unaltered since the mid-80s. What I liked most about the shirt was its construction: unlike the modern kit on which River’s famous red sash (“la banda roja”) is printed within the material, here it was sewn into the garment as a separate piece of fabric, lending the shirt and its most distinctive feature a little extra weight.

I’d never seen a River Plate match on television — any information about the club I’d learned from the pages of World Soccer, to which I was a monthly subscriber. Without the internet or even satellite television, this was the only way for a British schoolboy to stay informed of football taking place on the other side of the globe. From what I could tell from the magazine’s grainy images of the Primera Division, everything about the Argentine league seemed decidedly ad hoc compared to the increasingly corporate game in Europe. The Adidas Tango was still the match-ball of choice, penalty areas were often partially hidden beneath rolls of toilet paper, while the players tended to wear their hair long and their socks around their ankles.

Of course, the top Argentine footballers were all based in Italy or Spain; those left behind were mostly unknown to European fans, which for me only enhanced the mystique surrounding the country’s domestic game. As a young teenager I was desperate to be exposed to football in other (warmer) countries, where each Sunday colourful fans would pack into vast concrete stadia and convey their allegiance with spectacular displays of amateur pyrotechnics. I soon set my sights on Serie A, and eventually moved to Italy, where watching Zanetti or Crespo from my seat at San Siro or shopping on Milan’s Corso Buenos Aires made Argentina seem a little closer than it had in the UK. Yet despite its strong cultural ties to Europe (I’d even heard Buenos Aires referred to as “the Paris of South America”), Argentina — the place itself — seemed so unfathomably distant to me that it may as well have been the moon.

So when I visited Buenos Aires for the first time in January 2014, I was experiencing a reality that for so many years had seemed beyond reach. Not for the first time I found myself visiting a place that for a long time had existed only in my imagination, only to have it both live up to, exceed and defy my expectations. Buenos Aires’ exuded an immediate familiarity, its wide boulevards, fluorescent street lamps and balconied apartment buildings pleasingly reminiscent of cities in southern Europe. Meanwhile my football shirt collection had grown considerably over the years: naturally I packed the appropriate jerseys though not without first double-checking which were safe to wear in each part of town (rule of thumb: if in doubt, opt for plain clothes).

I faced no such dilemma the day I visited El Monumental. I’d hung onto my River shirt for over two decades, perhaps for an occasion just like this. It was a sweltering afternoon as I left the small apartment I was renting in Palermo and began my epic pilgrimage: a two-hour walk up Avenida Luis Maria Campos and Avenida del Libertador, through the affluent Belgrano neighbourhood to the leafy barrio of Núñez.

Unlike Boca Juniors’ home stadium La Bombonera, which is surrounded by concrete shacks daubed in blue and gold paint, Núñez is a middle-class suburb with individual homes boasting front gardens. But that’s not to imply that football passions are any less rife. As I approached the stadium, I noticed a sharp increase in pro-River and anti-Boca graffiti, while all billboards were plastered with election posters promoting candidates for the River Plate presidency. The tree-lined Avenida Lidoro J. Quinteros looks like any other residential street, except looming at one end like a giant Coca-Cola-emblazoned UFO parked opposite a handful of car dealerships sits the Estadio Antonio Vespucio Liberti.

Fittingly for a club that likes to call itself “El Mas Grande”, the Monumental is the largest stadium in Argentina. Though parts of the ground look as if they’ve barely seen a lick of paint since the 1978 World Cup, the ground’s ultra-modern Museo River is surely the benchmark against which I will measure all future stadium tours. They’ve literally thought of everything: hundreds of trophies, goals on video, an alphabetical listing of every player to represent “Los Millionarios”, a gallery of River-inspired artwork, plus an interactive time tunnel in which River’s successes and failures on the pitch are placed in context with important events in Argentina’s history. Alongside the vintage match-worn shirts on display is a graphic illustrating every River kit from 1901 to 2014, which is how I was able to finally pinpoint mine as the 1989-90 kit, the same season Gabriel Batistuta made a handful of appearances for River before finding fame at Boca.

It being January, Argentina’s domestic league was enjoying its summer hiatus — in fact that same week Boca and River were set to face each other in a friendly down the coast in Mar del Plata. Nothing compares to a live match, but without the action to focus on an empty stadium can be an oddly rewarding spiritual experience, the unusual space and quiet allowing memories, both remembered and imagined, to flicker through the mind. Staring out into the sunny arena from the comfort of the stands’ old wooden seats, I tried to picture what it must have been like to be here in 1978, when Argentina defeated the Netherlands to win their first World Cup, beneath brewing storm clouds and showers of ticker tape unleashed by hoards of bundled porteños. That historic victory took place the year before I was born: it was something I could never have witnessed, yet suddenly I was in the stadium where it happened and I felt like I could almost touch it. I thought of the thirteen-year-old boy who’d bought the River Plate shirt I was now wearing and what it had meant to him and how he’d imagined this place from the other side of the world. That world had now become smaller, and I was both sad and happy.

Incidentally, modern reproductions of my River Plate shirt can be purchased from the official club shop for 229 pesos.

In August Mundial magazine organized the official UK launch event of Fiorentina’s 2015-16 home kit at the Le Coq Sportif store in London’s Covent Garden. As a lifelong fan I was delighted to provide artwork and articles for “Viola”, a special newspaper produced especially for the occasion, in which the following profiles of two Fiorentina legends appeared.

 

Giancarlo Antognoni

As perhaps befits a man born on April Fool’s Day, Giancarlo Antognoni’s career can be reviewed as a series of cruel “pesce d’aprile” jokes. Considered one of the finest Italian players of his generation, and to this day revered by the people of Florence, the midfielder was also blighted by dreadful luck. Whenever success appeared a possibility, so that chance would be routinely snatched away. When triumph did arrive, it was twisted into bitter disappointment.

When Antognoni was a boy growing up in the Umbrian town of Marsciano, his father ran a bar in Perugia that doubled as headquarters for the local Milan supporters’ club. Like many football-loving Italians of his generation, young Giancarlo idolized Gianni Rivera. Just hours after his debut for Fiorentina at Verona in October 1972, Antognoni was already being mentioned in the same breath as the rossoneri’s famous number ten. High praise for an eighteen-year-old brought into the side to replace scudetto-winning hero Giancarlo De Sisti.

The young midfielder had been playing for an obscure team in Serie D just a few months earlier. But Fiorentina’s manager at the time, the giant Swede Nils Liedholm, never shirked away from giving youth a chance (he later granted Serie A starts to fellow teens Giuseppe Giannini and Paolo Maldini). When De Sisti followed Liedholm to Roma in 1974, he vacated much more than the number ten shirt and captain’s armband. For players and coaches, Fiorentina is often described as a “piazza difficile”, not least because of the city’s passionate yet demanding fans; Antognoni’s promotion was both an opportunity and an obligation.

With his Winwood-esque boyish looks and wavy golden hair, it didn’t take long for Florence to fall for “Antonio”, as he would soon become known. Italian football’s first young star of the seventies, it was Antognoni’s speed, elegance of movement and rare passing vision that compelled influential journalist Gianni Brera to describe him as “il ragazzo che gioca guardando le stelle” (the kid who plays while watching the stars). Recognizing their captain’s star power, the fans on the Curva Fiesole came up with their own, albeit more down-to-earth, nickname: “ENEL”, after the electricity company.

Antognoni continued to shine as Fiorentina started the 1980s brightly, until in November 1981 his lights went out — literally. Racing onto a ball from midfield, “Antonio” attempted to head past the onrushing Genoa goalkeeper Silvano Martina, only to receive a brutal and deliberate knee to the skull. Lying motionless inside the penalty area, the Fiorentina captain suffered a temporary cardiac arrest on the pitch before being rushed to hospital for emergency surgery on a cranial fracture. His return to action just four months later boosted la Viola’s ambitions in their race for the scudetto, but on the final day of the campaign they could only muster a goalless draw against Cagliari. Meanwhile in Catanzaro, a dubious late penalty converted by Liam Brady ensured Juventus won 1-0 and were crowned champions.

Later that summer in Madrid, Antognoni became a World Cup winner. For the twenty-eight year old it was undoubtedly the greatest moment of his career, but even this achievement was tarnished. Frustrated after seeing a fourth goal harshly disallowed in Italy’s famous 3-2 victory over Brazil, Antognoni had gone into the semi-final with Poland determined to right the wrong by getting his name on the scoresheet. His overzealousness led to a strong collision with defender Matysik as he prepared to shoot, and an injury that ruled him out of the final. A focal point of Enzo Bearzot’s national side for years, Antognoni was forced to witness the memorable triumph of his fellow Azzurri from the press box of the Bernabeu. To add harsh insult to his latest injury, burglars later broke into his home and stole his gold winner’s medal.

More setbacks followed. In February 1984 purple title hopes were dashed once again when Antognoni fractured his tibia and fibula in a challenge with Sampdoria’s Luca Pellegrini. As Fiorentina prepared to endure the 1984-85 season without their talisman, Socrates was brought in as a high-profile replacement. But the languid Brazilian seemed to oppose the Italian approach to training, and the team subsequently slumped. By the time their captain finally regained fitness Fiorentina had already signed Roberto Baggio (although his own debut for the club was delayed due to serious injury). Antognoni’s last two seasons in Florence were marred by injuries and managerial disagreements, and he left of his own accord to conclude his playing days in Switzerland.

A single Coppa Italia from 1975 was the only silverware to point to from his fifteen seasons with la Viola. Had he taken the opportunity to reunite with Liedholm at Roma, or accepted any of Gianni Agnelli’s several invitations to join his Italy teammates at Juventus, Antognoni would have surely earned a heftier trophy haul. Instead he traded in these successes for a much rarer reward: to become a bandiera, a club legend, and enjoy the mutual benefits that such status affords, even long after the boots have been loaned to the club museum’s permanent collection. Though his relationship Fiorentina’s ownership has been strained in recent years, the viola fans have remained ever loyal to Antognoni, just as he refused to abandon them. As he has often maintained, “The love of an entire city is worth more than a scudetto.”

 

Angelo Di Livio

To say that 2002 was not a good year for Fiorentina would be an understatement. The Tuscan side began the summer with relegation from Serie A after losing their final seven matches of the season, scoring just one goal in the same period. Three months later the club had declared bankruptcy and plunged a further two divisions, before finally being stripped entirely of their identity and history.

Almost overnight Fiorentina’s squad dispersed in all directions, and the new club — Florentia Viola, as they became legally known — was hastily assembled as a mixed bag of unknowns. The one exception was Viola captain Angelo Di Livio, who at thirty-six could have been forgiven for finding a one-year contract elsewhere or even calling time on an illustrious career. But instead, the Italian international — who’d played at the World Cup earlier that summer — accepted the challenge to start from scratch in Serie C2.

A native of Rome, Di Livio had arrived at Florence in the summer of 1999 after six years in Turin, where he’d been an important cog in Marcello Lippi’s Juventus side that reached three Champions League finals in a row. Discarded by the bianconeri, he’d reunited at Fiorentina with his former coach, Giovanni Trapattoni, the man who’d given the player his first taste of Serie A at the relatively late age of twenty-seven.

It was easy to see why Juve teammate Roberto Baggio dubbed him “il soldatino” (the little soldier). A tireless and versatile midfielder, Di Livio was content to patrol either flank like a tightly wound-up toy. If fresh orders arrived from the bench to move into a central position or drop back and support the defence, he’d simply adjust his game accordingly without fuss.

Di Livio had grown accustomed to winning, picking up three Serie A titles, a UEFA Cup, a Champions League and an Intercontinental Cup during his time in Turin. Following Fiorentina’s most successful campaign in years, there was a genuine chance he could continue that success in Florence. But an entertaining European run and a Coppa Italia victory in 2001 were as good as things would get. Following the departures of Gabriel Batistuta, Rui Costa and Francesco Toldo, Di Livio took over the captaincy. But the significantly depleted team struggled, and the fear of relegation quickly mellowed into inevitability.

In Serie C2, Di Livio’s hardwork and humility were just the attributes required if the side were to drag themselves out of footballing obscurity. Backed by the city’s tremendous and unwavering local support, la Viola won promotion up to C1, but the expansion of Serie B allowed room for one more team. Fiorentina (they’d bought back their name at this point) were granted entry into the second division on “historic merits”, and at the end of the season a play-off victory over Perugia sealed promotion back to Serie A, a mere two years since they’d left.

As la Viola adjusted to life back in the big time, Di Livio stuck around for one more turbulent season, in which the side eventually staved off another relegation. As the one player to survive the club’s rapid demise and dramatic return to top flight football, il soldatino has since come to symbolize Fiorentina’s plight and period of instability. His choice to focus on the team rather than the individual may have been the ultimate act of footballing loyalty, as well as proof that a good soldier never complains.

An afternoon at the Estadio Azteca

“REALLY? You don’t say!” Evidently our sarcastic taxi driver doesn’t need to be told where to take us — my unmistakeable mid-eighties Club América jersey is a glaring enough clue. We climb in to the back of his Nissan on the edge of Parque España; moments later we are heading south down Nuevo Léon, our destination the Estadio Azteca, where América is hosting Puebla in week three of the Liga MX’s Torneo Clausura.

Calz de Tlalpan is a wide highway leading to the vast forested borough of the same name. Unfortunately it is also susceptible to Saturday afternoon match-day traffic. I watch carriages of home supporters whiz past aboard the Treno Legero that runs parallel to the road. Meanwhile our car has become a stationary blue dot on my iPhone navigation app. I begin to regret not choosing public transport, but our driver assures us that we’ll make it in time for kick-off, which is less than twenty minutes away. I remain skeptical but I’m comforted by the site of more fans packed into cars and buses gridlocked alongside us, none of whom appear as nervous as me.

Pro-América graffiti tells me we must be getting closer, which our driver quickly confirms. “We’re now entering Aguilas country,” he explains, referring to the club’s most common nickname, as we pass dozens of street vendors selling giant yellow flags and blue novelty afro wigs. Suddenly, I glimpse part of the stadium’s roof out of the right window. Before I’ve time to take out my camera the car has come to a halt. “Here we are,” announces our driver, pointing in the stadium’s general direction. “El Coloso de Santa Ursula!”

With kick-off nearing, I reluctantly ignore the array of stalls offering replica jerseys, more flags and various gold and blue trinkets. Almost immediately our path is blocked, and we find ourselves trapped behind a line of police officers, their riot shields positioned to form a human barricade. Thanks to the initiative of some quick-thinking Mexicans we are able to round this initial obstacle — the row of cops reacts by snaking into an L-shape but is too late to stop us passing. Once beyond the first blockade we become part of a larger crowd of ticket-holders that is are being prevented from entering through the stadium’s old-fashioned subway-style turnstiles. Five more officers perch awkwardly atop the entrance’s sloping concrete wall, one of whom shouts inaudible instructions through a megaphone which she has neglected to switch on. All of this takes place just feet away from Alexander Calder’s giant sculpture, Sol Rojo, which is now silhouetted in the late afternoon sun. Clearly this isn’t the standard procedure at home games, and the local fans’ confusion quickly turns to frustration, which fortunately is expressed through humour rather than violence. The chief source of entertainment is a middle-aged man in a Puebla shirt, who despite his allegiance keeps the crowd chuckling with a series of witty one-liners.

Clutching my ticket in one hand, my wife’s palm in the other, we squeeze through an increasingly impatient mass of bodies into the calm open space of the other side. Everything about the Azteca is as I’d pictured it, right down to the little stone wall at the base of the stadium’s perimeter. There is little time to marvel at the stadium’s exterior for the match has already started, and collective gasps of anticipation waft at intervals from inside the ground. I follow a group of excited young fans and attempt to fathom the ground’s foreboding outer skeleton, a mid-century maze of sloping ramps and vast beams of concrete. The girl at the gate barely glances at our tickets as we push through a narrow opening and finally walk out into the arena directly behind the goal. Happily the score is still nil-nil, but I always notice that the match itself becomes almost secondary to the spectacle on special occasions such as these.

“Vaaaa-mos! Vamos Ameeee-ri-caaaa!” The home crowd is already in good voice, and I can barely hear the young attendant as he points us in the direction of Section 201, PAN-2, which stands for Platea Alta Norte. When we reach Row 3 a female attendant politely asks the family sitting in our seats to find room elsewhere. As I finally reach the vacant seat 13 a huge cold cerveza Victoria is thrust into my welcoming hand, which evidently can be ordered quite inadvertently simply by making eye contact with a man in a uniform a few rows below you.

Our seats are every bit as good as I’d hoped: we sit on the third row of the second tier, slightly to the left of the goal. Not bad considering our tickets were purchased two days before the match for a mere 125 pesos (around $8.50) each. To put that into some perspective, the last time I went to a match in England tickets cost £25 a head. And that was for a pre-season friendly at Leicester City — twelve years ago.

I choose not to dwell on that depressing thought and opt instead to marvel at my new surroundings. Designed by Mexican architects Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Rafael Mijares Alcérreca and inaugurated in 1966 (the roof was added just in time for the ’68 Olympics), the Estadio Azteca quickly grew into arguably the most iconic football stadium of the late twentieth-century, during which period it became the first venue to host the World Cup final twice. It could be suggested that those two tournaments bookend the World Cup’s golden age. Indeed, so ingrained are those colourful competitions into football fans’ collective psyche that I’ve always considered the Azteca to be the World Cup’s unofficial spiritual home, a notion reinforced by it having witnessed the trophy lifted by the game’s two most revered stars: Pelé in 1970 and Diego Maradona in 1986. If I were to ever lift the World Cup trophy myself (a dream that dims a little more with each passing year) I certainly can’t think of a place I’d rather be.

From my privileged vantage point I begin to replay the Azteca’s most memorable moments from those two sun-drenched tournaments. It quickly dawns on me that all the goals that immediately spring to mind were scored at the closest end to us, just feet from where I now sit. Gianni Rivera’s winner for Italy in their 4-3 extra-time semi-final victory over West Germany (a match referred to as “El Partido del Siglo” on a commemorative plaque outside the stadium) and Carlos Alberto’s famous fourth goal for Brazil in the final; Manuel Negrete’s spectacular scissor kick for the hosts against Bulgaria in 1986, Gary Lineker’s second against Paraguay, Maradona’s two goals against England (the Hand of God and the “Gol del Siglo”), his two oft-overlooked strikes against Belgium, as well as Jorge Burruchaga’s late winner against West Germany in the final.

Football stadia have changed a lot since then, some beyond recognition. Wembley has been demolished and rebuilt in recent years, while the modern Maracana bears little resemblance to the stadium that managed to contain 200,000 spectators for the 1950 World Cup final. Many of the world’s top clubs now play at new, corporate-funded arenas. In this regard the Azteca is no different. The stadium is now owned by Grupo Televisa, while vast banners displaying sponsors’ logos are rigged to the roof. The off-white benches that once lined the Azteca’s terraces have recently given way to proper seating, whose colours have been arranged strategically so when the ground sits empty the logos of Coca-Cola and Corona — the same logos that are emblazoned across the chest and shoulders of both teams’ shirts — span the entire stand. Of course, these aspects are invisible when the stadium is full, and I’m pleasantly surprised to find that the only other significant change since ’86 is the addition of two large video scoreboards at either end.

Just below the scoreboard at the top of our tier congregate América’s most hardcore supporters. A wire fence separates them from supposedly “casual” fans, although judging by their incessant chanting and fervent waving of yellow flags the only thing on their mind is to have a good time (and hopefully pick up three points along the way). A small pocket of away fans is nested high in the opposite end of the stadium, surrounded by helmeted police.

So far neither set of supporters has had anything to cheer about. América, captained by Mexican international Paul Aguilar, is dominating possession and creating plenty of early chances. The home side has seen some new arrivals since winning the Torneo Apertura in December. Among these is Colombian winger Carlos Darwin Quintero, who looks particularly lively. His defence-splitting pass finds another fresh signing, crew-cutted striker Dario Benedetto, who drags a shot beyond the far post. Moments later the Argentine gets on the end of compatriot Rubens Sambueza’s dinked cross and head goalwards, only for Puebla goalkeeper Rodolfo Cota to pull off the first of many excellent saves. Oribe Peralta is next to come close to scoring, racing onto Quintero’s low centre only to fire wide from inside the six-yard box. Before half-time the Mexican international spurns an almost identical opportunity, but this time his shot rebounds off Cota, onto his shins and out of play.

In honour of the home team’s nickname — Aguilas — an eagle is unleashed into the arena during the interval. The giant bird performs a couple of airborne laps of the stadium before swooping down into the centre circle and into the arms of its trusty handler. With the half-time entertainment out of the way, a stadium announcer now attempts to further warm up the crowd by conducting fans in cries of “Vaaamosss! Vamos Am-eeeeerr-iii-ccaaa!”

Early in the second half América’s Uruguayan coach Gustavo Matosas makes three substitutions in quick succession. The third of these — youth team forward Carlos Camacho — wears the number 101 shirt, which is the first time I’ve ever seen a player wearing three digits on his back. The team soon shifts into a higher gear and searches for the opening goal with relentless tempo. Quintero seems to be involved in everything from his advanced position on the right wing. First, his deep cross is met by Benedetto, whose angled header forces Cota to change direction and palm the ball to safety. Moments later, he receives the ball from a corner and shoots from a tight angle, only for Puebla’s rock solid goalie to parry.

Puebla’s forays into the opposition half are as cautious as they are infrequent, their five-man defence appearing more content to deny the Mexican champions from getting on the scoresheet. América are unfortunate not to break the deadlock on 75 minutes. Benedetto picks up a stray cross on the left and pulls the ball back for Quintero. The Colombian takes a touch to evade Orozco’s challenge before bending a right foot shot that rebounds off the outside of the post.

As the sun sets on the Azteca the sky above us turns a warm shade of pink, creating a dramatic backdrop. The closing minutes of the match are played out inside a now floodlit stadium, and the home fans’ restless anxiety becomes quite palpable. With neither side having found the net the loudest roar of the afternoon is reserved for the entrance of substitute Cuauhetémoc Blanco. Though the veteran international now wears the colours of Puebla, the local fans have clearly not forgotten the fifteen years he spent at the Azteca, and he is welcomed into the game with a rapturous reception fit for a local hero. A survivor of the 1998 and 2002 World Cups, the 42-year-old has clearly lost a little pace and gained a little weight in the ensuing years. Yet his arrival finally sparks life into the away side. Blanco’s cameo performance of positive runs, clever passes (most memorable of which is an audacious 25-yard no-look backheel inside his own half) and all-round creativity constitutes Puebla’s best spell of the match.

América struggles against its re-energized opponents for the next ten minutes, and the crowd starts to finally show its frustration, resorting to a chorus of deafening whistles. A late chance is presented in stoppage time, when a free-kick is won over on the near touchline. Sambueza swings in a deep and inviting cross. The other Aguilar — Pablo — meets the ball at the far post and looks set to score. But rather than nod home a certain winning goal, he opts to fist the ball into the Puebla net. Though the central defender’s technique would have received high praise had he been spiking a winning point on the volleyball court, from where we’re sitting the foul is plain to see even without the aid of a replay. The referee immediately rules out the goal and does not hesitate to show the culprit a second yellow card.

What compelled Aguilar to use his hand to score into the same net into which Diego Maradona had been assisted by the “Hand of God” 28-and-a-half years earlier? The irony of the situation is not lost on me, and I’m compelled to believe that some strange footballing variety of cosmic force must have been at play. Aside from the infringement itself, the two incidents bear no resemblance to one another — for a start Maradona got away with it! But where Diego jumped speculatively to intercept Steve Hodge’s lobbed backpass, Aguilar was the recipient of a cross aimed towards him. And while the little Argentine would not have reached the ball ahead of Shilton had he not used his left hand, the Paraguayan could have just have easily met the ball with his head. Instead his unnecessary actions instantly recall one of the Azteca’s most infamous moments, and in a bizarre way I feel privileged to have witnessed it.

The disappointment of wasting the chance and losing a man in such circumstances is a blow from which neither the team nor fans recover, and an entertaining match ends goalless. Having lost their previous match at Tijuana, today’s final whistle signals América’s second successive match without finding the net. In no hurry to bring an end to the occasion, we remain seated and watch as the stands empty, slowly revealing the giant logos of America’s chief sponsors. The hardcore home fans are still penned in their section by rows of police, and exiting the stadium proves a more straightforward task than entering had two hours earlier. Once outside we pass a life-size bronze statue of an unknown footballer. There is no plaque to identify him nor his creator, and according to even official sources his origin is a mystery. Maybe they should call him Pablo.
 

Club América 0-0 Puebla FC

Liga MX Torneo Clausura 2015
Estadio Azteca, Mexico City

América:

23 Moisés Muñoz, 2 Paolo Goltz, 6 Miguel Samudio (101 Carlos Camacho 64′), 12 Pablo Aguilar, 22 Paul Aguilar (17 Ventura Alvarado 62′), 3 Darwin Quintero, 5 Cristian Pellerano, 11 Michael Arroyo (10 Osvaldo Martínez 55′), 14 Rubens Sambueza, 9 Dario Benedetto, 24 Oribe Peralta. Coach: Gustavo Matosas.

Puebla:

30 Rodolfo Cota, 4 Facundo Erpen, 16 Michael Orozco, 26 Mauricio Romero, 7 Luis Noriega, 18 Luis Esqueda, 19 Flavio Santos, 22 Freddy Pajoy (10 Cuauhtémoc Blanco 78′), 28 Francisco Torres, 11 Matías Alustiza (29 Wilberto Cosme 45′), 21 Luis Gabriel Rey (24 Sergio Pérez 73′). Coach: José Guadalupe Cruz.

Referee: César Arturo Ramos Palazuelos (Culiacán, Sinaloa).
Bookings: Noriega 5′, Samudio 27′, Romero 33′, Goltz 66′, Esqueda 81′.
Sent off: Pablo Aguilar 91′.
Attendance: 62,300.
 
See more of my photos from the Estadio Azteca here.

When Donald Fagen sang of “Show Biz Kids” in their “Steely Dan t-shirts” in 1973, he couldn’t have expected that forty years later he’d be embarking on epic cross-country tours, singing the same line night after night to thousands of fans dressed in over-priced garb emblazoned with the name of his very same band. The irony is not lost on Fagen nor his Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker. Having given up touring in the mid-seventies, retreating to the studio to focus on the pursuit of jazz-rock perfection, the duo reformed a live band in the early nineties and have been on the road or in the studio ever since. They recently penned a song about their reincarnation called “The Steely Dan Show” (part celebration, part self-deprecation), suggesting the pair now warily embrace the commercial touring routine.

Tonight sees the band coming to the end of a 53-show U.S. tour, the cryptically-titled “Mood Swings 2013: Eight Miles to Pancake Day”. The final seven shows take place at New York’s Beacon Theatre, and as soon as I get off the 1 train at 72nd Street I am approached by several middle-aged men trying to sell me tickets and knock-off merchandise that goes for a third of the price of those inside the lobby. The bar offers a special $14 cocktail called “Deacon Blues”, which depressingly consists of Absolut vodka and Sprite. Why not a Zombie from a cocoa shell, I wonder. Or a Black Cow? Or even a Cuban Breeze, Gretchen? Tonight the crowd is the usual mix of aging hipsters and major dudes, kids with cool parents and couples of all ages who know a tasty horn chart when they hear it. I have a pretty good seat at the front of the lower balcony, and have time to admire the extraordinarily ornate interior of the old theatre, as well as the extensive selection of guitars lined up on stage.

At 8:45pm the band, minus its two leaders, swishes into a jazzy introductory overture, towards the end of which the two founding members of Steely Dan make their entrance. In bright red Nikes, customary Wayfarers and a grey shirt that he looks like he’s been wearing since last night, Donald Fagen slouches onto the stage with the purposefulness of someone who’s just awoken from an extended nap. Meanwhile, his partner in crime Walter Becker ambles into view from the left, his head bobbing from side to side as he noodles on a sparkling apple-green Stratocaster. Taking his place behind the keyboard, Fagen leads the band into an unlikely opener, “Your Gold Teeth”, probably the only pop song in history to make reference to Cathy Berbarian. Unfortunately it turns out to be the most interesting song choice of the evening, as the show which had been billed as “Request Night” quickly shifts into a run-through of the band’s most popular, radio-friendly hits (maybe that’s what the audience requested).

Fagen seemed in high spirits from the start. “Sit back, relax and let the good times roll!” he implored in a possible reference to his idol Ray Charles, whose performance traits behind the keyboard he has frequently appropriated. For a 65-year-old he sang really well, taking intermittent sips from an ever-present can of Coke and even wandering out from behind the keyboard a few times to play his melodica with gusto. I’d read reports of last week’s shows describing Becker’s stage presence as “confused”. Apparently one night last week he disappeared halfway through the show and never came back. Tonight he interrupted “Hey Nineteen” to perform his weird welcoming monologue (which I’ve seen him do twice before), only this time he rambled on for what felt like several minutes, and when the song finally picked up again I’d almost forgotten which one it was. Later he performed lead vocal duties on “Daddy Don’t Live In That New York City No More”. Becker’s evidently more suited to those slightly scathing, humourous songs (I’ve seen him sing “Haitian Divorce” and “Gaucho” before), whereas Fagen seems more at ease with the warmer, more human numbers, something that’s definitely reflected in their solo work.

Becker also had trouble settling on his instrument, frequently switching between at least six different guitars. In addition to the aforementioned sparkly apple-green Strat he also used a cherry-red Stratocaster, a cream Telecaster, a gold Gibson Les Paul, a Gibson Flying V and a Gibson Explorer. Jon Herington on the other hand was happy to rely only on a Gibson SG, Gibson Archtop and a Telecaster, coming up with a handful of devastating solos along the way. With his glasses and crisp blazer I always think he looks more like an interior designer or marketing director than lead guitarist, and I get the impression he’s reluctant to bask in the spotlight, preferring to hover near the curtain rather than soak up the audience’s roars of approval.

Clearly there is no discussion about stage presence or costumes, as everyone (with the exception of the girl singers in their little black dresses) seems to have shown up in whatever they happened to be wearing that day. Trumpet player Michael Leonhart sports a jaunty red fedora while his trombonist neighbor Jim Pugh looks like somebody’s dad in loose-fit jeans and running shoes. Although the juxtaposition is funny it only reinforces the sense that the show is more about expert musicianship than any kind of spectacle. When you read the bios of the individual band members on the official website you realize that these are among the very best musicians you’ll ever see, having between them played with everyone. The other stand-out performer is drummer Keith Carlock, who has probably one of the most challenging yet rewarding jobs in music. The rest of the band is referred to these days as the “Bipolar Allstars”, while the backing singers are known as the “Borderline Brats”. The all-female vocalists shared the lead on “Dirty Work” and a Joe Tex cover called “I Want To (Do Everything For You)”, the arrangement of which sounded exactly like “Chain Lightning”. During this song Becker introduced the band, describing Fagen in typically humourous terms: “…World traveller, organic gourmet chef and stern critic of the contemporary scene…”

They pile on the fan favorites towards the end, and the crowd seems very satisfied. Despite the hit-laden set list there is no room tonight for perennial live cuts such as “Bad Sneakers”, “Green Earrings” or “Josie”. Afterwards Fagen hands a pineapple that had been sitting mysteriously on top of an amp to a fan in the front row. The band returns for an encore and plays “Kid Charlemagne” (“Yes there’s gas in the car!”), allowing Herington to produce perhaps his best solo of the night. Becker and Fagen give a wave to the crowd and disappear again, leaving the band to play the audience out. It’s a slightly anti-climactic end to the show, and there is little sense of the musicians wanting to play any longer than the time allotted or give you a dollar more than your money’s worth.

This is the fourth time I’ve seen Steely Dan since they started touring again after an almost twenty-year hiatus: on the Art Crimes ’96 tour in Birmingham, at the Sanbitter Festival in Lucca in 2007, and once before at the Beacon in 2008. Over the past few years their week-long residence at the storied venue has become something of an Upper West Side tradition, and there is certainly a pervading sense of over-familiarity throughout the evening. Of course, there is no such thing as a bad Steely Dan concert, but this one was perhaps more for the casual fan of FM radio than for those of us who still have every note they’ve ever recorded on heavy rotation. The band is cooking throughout and as tight as ever, but I’d have appreciated a few less oft-performed album tracks to have been thrown into the mix, something that in the past I think they’ve always managed to do quite well. Rumours abound that Don ‘n’ Walt are working up a new record, so why not use the occasion to debut some new material, or at the very least throw in something off either of their most recent solo albums? Knowing Fagen’s encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and r’n’b I’m surprised he doesn’t branch out a bit and take advantage of that vast level of musicology to work some twists into the performances. They seemed to do that a lot when they first started touring again (see the live horn-driven version of “Reelin’ In The Years” on Alive in America), but tonight most songs were replicated exactly as they sound on the recorded versions. I kept listening out for how they’d come up with an ending for songs that fade out on record, which along with Herington’s solos and the backing vocals was the only element exclusive to the live performance.

A recent gimmick among aging rock acts has been the live reproduction of LPs in their entirety, something Steely Dan are not immune to, having performed shows this week devoted to the classic albums, The Royal Scam, Aja and Gaucho. Each of these shows began with backing vocalist Carolyn Leonhart dropping the needle on a spinning turntable on stage, a knowing joke that blurs the lines between live performance and recording. Tonight the newest song on the set list was originally recorded thirty-three years ago, but I think there’s a big difference between listening to old music at home and seeing/hearing it reproduced in person. A record is exactly that, and will always sound exactly the same. A concert is a totally different means of presenting the music, open to variation and spontaneity, with the exchange between performer and audience being more direct and reciprocal. I’ve always believed that a live act with any kind of longevity has to learn to keep things fresh, stay two steps ahead of their audience, even if it forces concert-goers to face the unexpected and even forgo hearing their favourite song. Otherwise it’s merely an exercise in nostalgia. Becker and Fagen surely know by now that those days are gone forever (over a long time ago… oh yeah).
 

Steely Dan

Beacon Theatre, New York
October 5th, 2013

Blueport (Gerry Mulligan cover — band only)
Your Gold Teeth
Aja
Hey Nineteen (WB extended monologue)
Show Biz Kids
Black Cow
Black Friday
Time Out Of Mind
Rikki Don’t Lose That Number
Daddy Don’t Live In That New York City No More (WB lead vocal)
Bodhisattva
Dirty Work (backing singers lead vocals)
FM
Babylon Sisters
I Want To (Do Everything For You) (Joe Tex cover, backing singers lead vocals, band intros by WB)
Deacon Blues
Peg
My Old School
Reelin’ In The Years

Encore:
Kid Charlemagne
Outro (band only)

When I was a boy my best friend was another boy named Joe. We must have met when we were about four or five, and from that point on spent what seemed like most weekends together. Thanks to this near inseparable friendship, Joe’s parents quickly became close friends with mine. Both were artists — his father a sculptor and his mother a ceramicist — and both were pretty successful in their respective fields. My family and his would often go to the cinema or have dinner together at the weekends, and then one of us would sleep over at the other’s house (Joe and I had met before my brother Alex was born, but once he was old enough to walk the two of us became three). Joe and his parents lived in a large house on the corner of a main road. It had three floors and a separate building that acted as his mum’s workshop, as well as a spacious garden, where Joe and I spent whole days doing what probably amounted to nothing much. In the far corner of the garden underneath a giant pear tree was a two story construction made of scaffolding and planks of wood, from the top of which we could see over the fence and into the street. One day we rested a piece of drain pipe across the scaffolding and the fence and poured water onto unsuspecting passers-by. When one particularly irked middle-aged gentleman asked us what we thought we were doing Joe told him we were watering the pavement. On another occasion we spent an afternoon tossing over-ripened pears into the street, which was fun until the police knocked on the door.

Perhaps in an effort to avoid further run-ins with the law, Joe’s dad used the same scaffolding and wood planks to construct a life-size biplane on the lawn. From his workshop down in the basement he’d fashion toy swords for us out of wood. On another occasion he crafted us a pair of walkie-talkies, equipped with a plastic wire aerial and a knob that turned. It’s hard to imagine what kind of fun could be derived from what were essentially two wooden blocks painted black, but somehow Joe and I managed to keep ourselves suitably entertained for hours on end. Joe’s dad had travelled across the western United States, bringing home with him a number of interesting Native American artifacts that adorned Joe’s bedroom. He even had a wigwam out on the lawn that we never dared sleep in overnight. I don’t know how many days and nights I spent in that house but I can still recall every last detail, right down to the pale green sponge-like texture of the upholstery on the sofa and the paisley pattern engraved into the handles of the family’s cutlery.

When I was about ten, Joe’s parents sold their house and moved to another town, some forty minutes away. The new house was much smaller, but with the money they made on the sale they were able to buy a rustic property in the northernmost corner of Tuscany. Joe’s dad wanted to have access to the stone from nearby Carrara, a town known throughout the world for its marble. I remember them going there that summer to work on the house (which from the photographs I’d seen needed some attention). We’d already begun spending long vacations in Italy, and the following year we jumped at the chance to spend a week or two with them, and did so every summer for the next five years.

While the house itself was located in an area of Tuscany called il Lunigiana, in the province of Massa, it was only a short distance across the Ligurian border to La Spezia. Consequently the local license plates seemed to be evenly split between MS and SP. Exiting the A15 Autostrada at Aulla, it was a short drive to a small town called Serricciolo. From there we drove up a winding hillside road to the tiny hamlet of Verpiana, where we turned left around a large brick barn and into the dusty courtyard. The area was dotted with semi-abandoned pieces of farming equipment, hens clucked across the hay and cobblestones and a cat slept underneath the wheels of an already-vintage Fiat. The house was on the first floor: beneath it were three ancient arches under which Joe’s parents’ Citroën was parked. To get up there you had to walk up a semi-covered stone staircase with a wobbly metal handrail, which brought you out onto a spacious terrace. The house itself was extremely roomy with several bedrooms, some of which you could only get to via the terrace. The other details were as one would expect: terracotta floors, whitewashed walls, painted wooden shutters and iffy wiring.

Beneath the house was a maze of cellars and rooms that had clearly not been inhabited in decades, if not centuries. I remember one day Joe and I entered a secret door behind the archways where we’d parked the cars. If we’d explored further we’d have probably walked in on someone having lunch, as it seemed every home in the village was connected, as if buildings had sprung organically from that central point. A long white tunnel — more in the style of the Amalfi coast or a Greek island — extended out of the courtyard and lead to another road. Inside there were several other homes. Occasionally we’d run into other kids, who our attempts to befriend weren’t met with much success. They were quite unlike the other young Italians I’d met. At the other end of the tunnel was an alimentari, a small convenience store, the kind of place you enter through a beaded curtain and where the owner is a woman in slippers. It was a handy enough place to pick up milk or a box of pasta, but for a real supermarket we had to drive down to the next town, Serricciolo.

* * *

Serricciolo also had a bar next to the railway tracks, where we’d often stop for a morning coffee or post-beach refreshment. Joe and I often spent our time playing a football video game that ran on 20 lire coins. In addition to the aforementioned Sidis supermarket, Serricciolo also boasted a florist, a newspaper kiosk, a wedding dress shop, and a hardware store that also sold nice things for the home. Yet Serricciolo’s most important contribution to its range of local amenities was its pizzeria. The place was everything you want in a pizzeria and nothing more: plastic tablecloths, no atmosphere to speak of, and a pyramid of chocolate-covered profiteroles rotating behind the door of a glass fridge. The pizza was so thin it was almost transparent and its circumference so huge that I don’t know why they even bothered putting it on a plate. Always a purist when it comes to pizza I never veered from the margherita. The mozzarella would rapidly melt into the tomato creating a delicious sauce the colour of sunburn. I’d devour the whole thing in about ten minutes.

Sometimes after dinner we’d drive past the pizzeria to Fivizzano. This pretty hilltop town was also damaged during the war and is prone to earthquakes, but its main square, Piazza Medicea, has remained intact. There we’d order un gelato from the bar and eat it by the fountain (commissioned by Cosimo III de’ Medici), distinctive for its numerous carved fish from whose mouths spring jets of water. I loved the energy of those summer nights and the fact that families would be out together after midnight, kids running around in the dark, illuminated only by buzzing fluorescent lampposts.

On the way to Fivizzano was there was a nearby swimming pool, with a great water chute and high diving boards. It was kept in the shade by a forest of pine trees, and I remember one day a bee managed to sing me underneath my watch. Alex’s thick mop of blond hair (a “thatch” as my mum used to call it) meant he always drew attention from Italians. This was especially true at the swimming pool, where he’d quickly impress local teenagers by showing no hesitation in leaping into the water from the highest diving board.

After Serricciolo was Aulla, a mid-sized market town whose old centre was destroyed by Anglo-American bombings in 1943. The modern town that had sprung up in its place was a lot of concrete and marble, and decidedly unpretty. Aulla hosted a bustling market which we’d go to browse and pick up cheap frying pans, flip-flops or unofficial football merchandise. Meanwhile there were the usual shops: Benetton, Stefanel, plus a somewhat no frills sports store, where I bought my Milan 1990-91 shirt. I also have a photograph of myself standing outside the shop next to a life-size cardboard cutout of Franco Baresi. One day we noticed giant posters of football players (Baggio, Gullit, etc.) on display in the supermarket. The cashier explained they could be ours if we saved the wrappers from 12-pack boxes of Kinder Brioche. So for several days, Joe, Alex and me ate more of these apricot jam-filled breakfast cakes than was possibly healthy, but it was enough to earn us a poster each. (Mine, of a 22-year-old Paolo Maldini, still hangs on the wall of my apartment.)

When we weren’t visiting other towns or picking up provisions, we’d invariably spend the day by the sea. A place I loved to visit was Portovenere, a busy fishing town built into the cliffs and best reached by boat from the elegant port of Lerici. There was no beach, just a long cluster of boulders, with steps down to the water. When a boat sped across the bay the water would bounce up against the rocks. Joe and I used to snorkel around the tied-up rowing boats, trying in vain to catch darting minnows with our hands. We also collected broken fragments of old ceramic pots, which we took home and used to make a mosaic on the floor of the house. In the late afternoon we’d walk up to the gothic church of San Pietro, which offered spectacular breezy views of the Mediterranean. My dad used to always point out the grotto named after Lord Byron and tell us the story of how the poet swam across the bay to see Shelley in Lerici, and that Shelley later died in a boating accident just off the same stretch of coast.

There were beaches at Sarzana and San Terenzo but they were a little cramped, and so usually we drove to Marinella. We’d park opposite an Agip station on a road lined with pine trees, and spend the rest of the day there, sometimes until dusk. Unlike Liguria’s rocky coastline, Marinella was a classic Italian beach, packed with multi-generation families gathered under umbrellas and ragazzi spending the afternoon sunbathing or playing volleyball. I’d often run and get ice cream or bomboloni con crema from a little hut. We’d usually pack our own sandwiches, after which I used to begin to doze off on my towel. Through my dreamy state I’d hear the voice of the man carrying a large icebox filled with coconut. “Cocco! Cocco bello!” it would sing, more loudly as it got closer, before drifting away again, getting lost amid the soothing murmur of unintelligible chatter and gently breaking waves.

* * *

Life at Verpiana revolved around the terrace. Joe’s parents had furnished it with several pot plants and safari chairs and fold-up wooden chairs. There was a large table — or rather, a table top and two trestles — to eat at. It was too hot to eat lunch outside but when the sun had shifted the terrace became a lovely place to sit before dinner. Across the courtyard and beyond a neighbour’s clothesline was visible a spectacular mountain range that would turn pink each evening as the sun departed. I often wanted to believe that the central peak was the mountain featured in the logo of Paramount Pictures. (Years later the mountain I was thinking of was pointed out to me in Piedmont.) In the evening we’d hang our beach towels over the wall to dry and play football with one of those mini plastic balls they sell on the beach (one of the goals was the spindly railing at the top of the stairs, which meant every time a shot went in that direction someone would have to chase down after the ball and retrieve it before it bounced into an old cellar or punctured beneath a rusty tractor). On rare afternoons when Verpiana suffered a brief yet biblical rainstorm I’d hole up indoors and spend an afternoon reading or drawing. There was no television and the only place to listen to music was in the car, so we’d instead engage in epic ping-pong or Subbuteo tournaments, for which I remember creating paper advertising hoardings out of Brooklyn chewing gum wrappers.

I always looked forward to the evenings. I still remember what a blissful feeling it was to be standing in the kitchen under the bright glow of a single light bulb, watching the pasta fall into a vast pot of boiling water. Fresh out of the shower, tanned from the beach, a clean t-shirt and starving from having not eaten since lunchtime, the anticipation of another fun dinner out on the terrace was blissful. Though there were a couple of outside lights, the table was decked with ceramic candle-holders crafted by Joe’s mum, between which Joe and I would try to build wax bridges as the candles burnt down through the course of the evening. In the total silence of midnight we’d be able to spot bats circling around the barn and constellations directly over our heads, which is when my dad would start saying slightly ominous things like, “They’d never find me here.”

One of the neighbours was an elderly war veteran named Guido. He always said hello and sometimes he’d bring us a bottle of his own wine that was probably best described as “rustic”. My dad spoke better Italian than any of us and sometimes chatted with the old man over a cigarette. When my dad told him the route we’d taken to get here Guido opened his eyes with a hint of recognition. “Ah yes, Germany,” he said, as if summoning some vague recollection. “They eat a lot of potatoes there, don’t they?”

I sometimes wondered what Guido and his wife — a typical rural home-keeper who never took off her apron — used to make of us. I’m sure they were utterly baffled why a bunch of foreigners would want to spend summer in a part of Italy that no Italian would ever have reason to visit. Even at a young age, there was something quite embarrassing about it all. In between my fun I felt uneasy being in Verpiana for two sunny weeks when everyone around us had to spend all year there, year after year, and probably hadn’t been anywhere else in a long time. This feeling was exacerbated by Joe’s parents’ other guests, whose visits sometimes overlapped with ours. As nice people as they obviously were, their presence made the house feel like a ready-made facility for middle-class Brits to live some idealized version of a rustic Tuscan lifestyle. Nowhere could have been further removed from Italy’s celebrated tourist destinations. Verpiana, Serricciolo and Aulla were unknown, unfashionable places where real people lived, but have as much to do with my love of Italy as Rome or Venice or Florence.

Our relationship with Joe and his family ended abruptly, the reasons for which I won’t go into here as many details are still unclear to me. I haven’t seen Joe since Christmas 1994, but I understand he’s now married with a young son. His dad died a few years ago, but his mum is still working and as far as I know still visits the house in Verpiana. About six years ago, when I was living in Italy, my girlfriend (now wife) began taking singing lessons from a retired opera singer in Carrara. One Saturday in early summer I went with her on the train from Florence. While she had her lesson I strolled around the town. I had been once before, and remembered how the marble had turned the river water white. It was a warm day, so after lunch we took the bus down to Marinella. We walked past the pine trees, took off our shoes and stepped onto the sand. Many years had past and we were at the opposite end of the beach, but the view of the hills looked the same from any distance. Staring down the coastline I could just make out the yellow sign of the Agip station several hundred metres away, peeking through the haze like a mirage. Then, through the hypnotic sound of the sea I heard his voice, faintly at first, but getting louder: “Cocco! Cocco bello!”. As soon as it had sung, the voice started to fade away once more. And then, it was gone.

 
 
A version of this article, translated into Italian by Elisa Sottana, is on the site of Rivista Inutile.

It has been put to me on more than one occasion (by more than one person) that a career in celebrity photojournalism may have been my true calling in life. I have always refuted the notion — frankly, the idea of spending my days hidden behind a hedgerow waiting for the latest B-lister to take out the recycling is less than appealing. That said, should I spot an actor or singer I admire on the street I will happily say hello, much to my wife’s embarrassment. But the suggestion that I would be happy to stalk the rich and famous probably came about because there was a time, around a decade ago, when I did indulge my inner paparazzo far more actively.

Flashback to November 2004. I’d been living in Florence for about a year and in the typical fashion of sporadically-employed Englishmen, often found myself with oodles of leisure time. The Saturday evening in question was no different: I’d spent the afternoon browsing old record shops, taking a few pictures, and enjoying a passeggiata along the pretty streets of the Renaissance city. With nothing else to do and no particular place to go I turned and found myself on Borgo Ognissanti, a narrow road lined with antique stores, though fairly quiet after dark. Turning into the piazza of the same name at the corner of the Hotel Excelsior, I was struck by the sight of an enormous blue-and-black bus parked a few feet in front of me. Standing next to the vehicle was a group of four people, the tallest of whom was wearing a tracksuit that matched the colours of the bus. At this point my mind finally caught up and realised that it was none other than Inter goalkeeper Francesco Toldo! Inter were due to play Fiorentina the next day, a match I had a ticket for; the bus was the team’s transportation and the team would be spending the night at the hotel.

Something of a living legend in Florence, Toldo had spent eight seasons at Fiorentina before moving to the nerazzurri, so I assumed he must still have friends in the city. The anonymous members of the group paused their conversation and turned to look in my direction, clearly waiting to follow Toldo’s lead. I’d always had the impression that the former Italian number one was a pretty down-to-earth guy (he married a supermarket checkout girl and arrived at his own wedding on the back of a Vespa), so I didn’t hesitate to ask him for a photo. He seemed more than happy to satisfy my request, and so I handed my Sony Cybershot-U to one of his friends so he could immortalise the moment. Toldo’s expression was so beaming that after seeing the resulting photo my friend Laura was convinced I’d posed next to a 6’5″ cardboard cutout.

After that unexpected encounter I wandered around the outside of the hotel for a minute, in the hopes of running into one of Inter’s many other star players. Aside from Toldo the piazza was essentially deserted, but through a window looking onto the Lungarno I did spy club captain Javier Zanetti, coach Roberto Mancini, plus Italian legends Giacinto Facchetti and Gabriele Oriali cheering excitedly in front of a television set. I ran to the nearest bar to see that Juventus had just lost to lowly Reggina. The following afternoon Toldo was back at the Artemio Franchi stadium to face his former club. The match ended in a draw, and the veteran goalkeeper left the field in tears, so moved was he by the home fans’ cries of “Tol-do! Toooolll-dooo!”

* * *

It didn’t occur to me to return to the Excelsior until exactly a year later, when Inter’s city rivals, Milan, came to town. After politely declining an invitation to meet friends at the bar I arrived at Piazza Ognissanti fully prepared for a repeat of my Toldo experience, only to find the square bustling with guests, taxi drivers and doormen. My plan had been to waltz into the hotel as a “guest”; if anyone tried to stop me I’d play the “oblivious foreigner” card. But on this occasion the hotel had engaged an employee to act as security and oversee comings and goings. Dressed in a black topcoat, which he accessorised with an earpiece and walkie-talkie, the young man appeared to relish his responsibility and was seemingly determined to refuse admission to anyone who dared to attempt to breach the lobby’s large revolving door. Alongside me was a young Italian couple whom I soon discovered were there for the same reason as me. I was unsure whether the pair would prove useful sidekicks or draw unwanted attention to my own agenda, but either way my plan was so far being foiled.

I wandered up Via del Moro and around the corner to the nearby Caffè Megara, a favourite locale of mine for having lunch or watching football. The Saturday night match between Roma and Juventus was just starting, so I took a seat at the bar and ordered a chiara media. At half-time I took a final swig of my beer and decided to check back in at the Excelsior. It was now around 9:30pm, the time most people would be eating dinner, and the square was a decidedly quieter place. The hotel’s one-man security team was nowhere to be seen, and as I approached the entrance I was surprised to find the revolving doors completely unguarded.

Now that I’d crossed that initial threshold I immediately set to putting my carefully thought-out plan into practice. Taking one cursory glance around the room to get my bearings, I sauntered over to the front desk, where I made some vague inquiry to supposedly justify my presence. From a selection fanned out on a table the woman handed me a brochure, an ideal prop as it turned out, and I pretended to read it while casually making my way around the lobby, naturally looking up every three seconds to check for passing footballers.

When I reached the far end I came to a set of elegant wooden doors with frosted glass windows leading into another large room. At that moment one of the doors opened, and out stepped Carlo Ancelotti. The Milan coach walked straight past me, across the lobby and into a vacant lift. He’d left the door to the room slightly ajar, and peering inside I saw that the Milan squad was inside eating dinner. Alessandro Nesta and Christian Vieri were seated at the same table in matching red tracksuits, so I began leaning my head from left to right in an attempt to spot other rossoneri players. Just then, I heard a bell ring to my left: ding! I turned as the doors of a second lift were opening: from inside its warm, wood-paneled glow stepped Paolo Maldini.

What happened next is something of a blur, but before I knew what I was doing I’d glided across the marble floor and was a foot away from the great defender, who looked every bit il capitano in his dark Milan blazer. Instinctively I stuck out my right hand, which Maldini received in his, and we made eye contact for a few fleeting nanoseconds. Uncertain how to sum up my years of admiration for the man with the economy that the moment required, I simply thanked him for nothing in particular. According to his profile Maldini and I are the same height, yet he seemed to tower over me — though maybe only because by this point my legs had turned to spaghetti. But that didn’t stop me looking to take things one step further. I reached into my bag and pulled out a pristine, glossy photo of the Milan captain, which Paolino was gracious enough to sign with the permanent black marker I’d brought along for this very purpose.

By now we were in the middle of a suddenly crowded lobby, and Maldini’s attention had already been diverted by someone with whom his relationship was older than sixty seconds. I then noticed that the young Italian couple had also made it inside, but their squeals of excitement were just the kind of behaviour that could jeopardise my progress. When I felt a tap on the shoulder, I knew my fear had been realised. It was the over-zealous security man from earlier.

“How did you get in here?” he asked accusingly.

“Um, the door,” I responded, gesturing towards the giant revolving entrance directly behind him.

Confident I’d committed no crime, I turned away from the hair-gelled pest to find myself face-to-face with Milan’s Portuguese number ten, Manuel Rui Costa. The ex-Fiorentina midfielder was exiting the bar area and had a friend in tow, who happened to be none other than fellow Viola legend, Gabriel Batistuta. Dressed in civilian clothes, the Argentine striker (who at the time was playing in Qatar) had evidently come over to catch up with his former teammate.

“Ciao Rui,” I said, thrusting my hand in his direction. Rui shook it but kept his gaze fixed somewhere in the middle distance.

“Ciao Bati,” I said. Batigol grabbed my hand in his, locked eyes and greeted me with a warm and friendly “Ciao!” as if we already knew each other, which, in a spiritual sense perhaps, we did.

I knew my time was running out, so I decided to quit while I was still ahead and leave the premises of my own accord.
Having met three of my idols in the space of five minutes I realised that the evening could unlikely be improved upon. I stepped back out into the cold piazza and began texting everyone I’d ever met.

* * *

Another year passed before I returned to the Excelsior. By now I was a skilled veteran in the fine art of loitering, and felt confident that my mission could be accomplished with the right amount of preparation and stealth. Again the visiting side was Milan, although this time the match with Fiorentina was scheduled for a Saturday night. So on Friday evening I arrived at Piazza Ognissanti to find the square all but deserted. Encouraged by this promising sign, I swept into the lobby fully expectant to be soon shaking hands with more calcio royalty.

Immediately I spotted a young man in a Milan tracksuit reluctantly making conversation with an eager journalist. It was Milan’s centre-forward Marco Borriello, who seemed to be attempting to take refuge between a giant stone column and an enormous Christmas tree. Irrespective of the fact that he was otherwise engaged, Borriello was hardly the calibre of player with whom I’d grown accustomed to rubbing shoulders. Convinced I could do better, I continued past him unchecked. At the far end of the lobby a group of large leather armchairs had been clustered together around a coffee table. In one chair, tapping idly on his mobile phone, sat Milan’s combative midfielder Christian Brocchi. In another, staring into the void, was seated a supremely bored-looking Filippo Inzaghi. Since he seemed like a man whose schedule for the next twenty-fours hours was fairly empty, I didn’t hesitate in asking for a photo. The Italian World Cup winner duly obliged and leaned in for an impromptu selfie with yours truly. Having clicked the shutter and checked that the resulting snapshot was to Super Pippo’s satisfaction, I was about to thank him and leave when I noticed a familiar presence standing to my right. It was my old chum from hotel security, still armed with a walkie-talkie and still doing his best to protect the establishment’s millionaire athlete guests from the persistent swathes of ruffians coming in off the street.

I don’t know if he recognised me, but he insisted on the same pointless exchange as last time.

“How did you get in?”

I began to gesture towards the revolving door but before I could say anything he interrupted me.

“Look, don’t talk to the footballers.”

I turned to my new pal for assistance, but Inzaghi didn’t want to get involved. Brocchi hadn’t looked up from his phone the whole time. The following evening I was at the Stadio Artemio Franchi to see Fiorentina and Milan draw 2-2. Inzaghi came on as a late substitute for Brocchi. Borriello stayed on the bench, Maldini was injured. Rui Costa had moved to Benfica and Batistuta had retired. Toldo was still at Inter, but was no longer first-choice between the sticks. I never went back to the Excelsior.

In August 1990, just weeks after Totò Schillaci’s exploits at that summer’s World Cup, a shared place of birth would have seemed the only connection between the newborn Mario Balotelli and Italy’s Golden Boot winner. Born in Palermo to two Ghanaian immigrants, Thomas and Rose Barwuah, young Mario had a difficult first few years, undergoing a series of intestinal operations as a toddler. Even after being placed in foster care with the Balotelli family in the northern town of Brescia, the idea that Mario would one day wear the blue of Italy, let alone become a national icon, would have seemed unthinkable.

Fast-forward to this summer and Mario Balotelli’s two-goal demolition of Germany in the semi-final of Euro 2012 cemented his fame and sealed his reputation as an explosive yet unpredictable talent. While a highly welcome addition to the Italian national team, his success is especially significant in a country that has often struggled with the concept of national identity as it attempts to reconcile its mixed feelings towards immigration.

Despite its epic history, modern Italy is a young country created from the merging of strictly autonomous regions, and today remains fiercely regional. During both world wars this phenomenon infamously hampered communication between “Italian” soldiers, and it is often stated that the existence of a common language in Italy is the sole result of the development of a state-run national network of television and radio.

For most of the twentieth century Italy was one of the great emigrating nations: between 1876 and 1976 the Italian diaspora numbered over 25 million. During this period the issue of immigration was essentially non-existent. Immigrants did not begin arriving in Italy until the 1960s, and only in the 1980s did their numbers start to multiply. Italy’s unique geographical position has made it a natural port-of-call for those arriving by sea from both Eastern Europe and North Africa. Today Romanians, Albanians and Moroccans make up the bulk of Italy’s legal immigrant population, which currently stands at over 4.5 million, a figure that has tripled since 2003.

The progress of the immigrant experience in Italy has suffered due to government indecision and indifference, as well as general bureaucracy. This combined with a cautious mixture of stereotyping and skepticism have naturally hindered integration and acceptance, while one-sided reporting often only perpetuates the problem. Balotelli himself has frequently been subjected to racial abuse by opposing fans, both in Italy and during Euro 2012. While many Italians recognize the complexities of the situation, many immigrants still find themselves socially marginalized. Yet statistics suggest that those who persevere are ultimately rewarded.

Indeed, Balotelli’s arrival on a global stage comes at a time when Italy finds itself at a turning point in its immigration history. As the children of the first wave of immigrants become adults, so a seismic shift in attitude is forced upon Italian society. Few Italian classrooms are without the son or daughter of an immigrant these days, a fact that can only have a positive long-term bearing on the way the matter is accepted.

The impact of Balotelli’s success with the national team is not lost on coach Cesare Prandelli. Shortly after taking control of the Azzurri he introduced a “code of ethics”, ensuring players representing their country maintained responsible conduct both on and off the pitch. The forward’s eccentric behavior has challenged this code on more than one occasion, yet Prandelli’s faith in the young talent is now being rewarded, and not only in a sporting sense.

Though he is the first black player to score for Italy (against Poland in November 2011) Balotelli is not the first player of African origin to pull on the famous Azzurri shirt. That distinction belongs to former midfielder Fabio Liverani, who was born in Rome to an Italian father and Somali mother. Yet after making his Italy debut in 2001 Liverani represented his country just twice more over the next five years, and despite enjoying a moderately successful Serie A career never became a household name. Likewise Algerian-born defender Matteo Ferrari (whose mother came from Guinea) made eleven appearances for Italy between 2002 and 2004 yet was not an international regular.

Other black athletes have represented Italy in other sports, but only after switching nationality. American-born long-jumper Andrew Howe changed allegiance after his mother’s marriage to an Italian. Similarly another long-jumper, Fiona May, was born in Britain to Jamaican parents, but enjoyed success with Italy after marrying pole-vaulter Gianni Iapichino. Following her retirement she moved into acting, and even starred in Butta la luna, a television drama series that tackled the issues of racism and social integration.

The subject of Italian identity and the national team is not a recent one. Until the 1960s the Italian national team was regularly graced by the presence of so-called oriundi, or nationalized Italians, often arriving from South America. Despite this long tradition, some still oppose the inclusion of such players, a sentiment perhaps fueled by Mauro German Camoranesi’s confession to feeling more Argentine than Italian after lifting the World Cup for Italy in 2006. Prandelli however has embraced the problem, openly welcoming several oriundi into the national fold such as Thiago Motta and Pablo Osvaldo.

But the oriundo situation is different to Balotelli’s, as these players are born with an existing connection to Italy through parents or ancestry. The French, English and Dutch national teams began featuring the sons of immigrants in the 1970s, yet these too were mostly players whose parents had arrived from former colonies. Even Germany’s current multi-ethnic squad cannot boast a player whose chances were as stacked against him as SuperMario.

What makes Balotelli’s case a rarity is that neither of his parents were born in Italy, nor grew up there, nor came from a country that had any significant historical ties to Italy, which is what makes the young Italian striker’s story all the more extraordinary and encouraging. Naturally, his parents’ nationality gave him the right to play for Ghana, but Mario instead opted for Italy, finally becoming eligible after earning his Italian citizenship upon turning eighteen. For Balotelli it wasn’t even a decision to make. Born and raised in Italy, he feels Italian simply because he is — after all, he knows nothing else.

Balotelli represents a new example of the immigrant experience in Italy. He finds himself the most high-profile of an increasing band of Italian-born players of African origin for whom the national obsession — football — is proving a medium with which to successfully integrate themselves (and thousands others) into the country’s consciousness. Torino defender Angelo Ogbonna (whose parents emigrated from Nigeria) was an unused substitute at Euro 2012, while Milan’s teenage forward Stephan El Shaarawy (whose father is Egyptian) looks set to form an unprecedented partnership with Balotelli at international level. That the pair have only one Italian parent between them can only aid the cause of numerous other Italians of African origin currently plying their trade in Italy’s lower leagues, further from the media’s glare.

Incidents of racism in Italian football often cause casual observers to misbrand the sport and its followers. Yet while the stadium is often sadly an outlet for racism, the sport itself cannot be held to blame. On the contrary, young Italians of have discovered that the democracy of the football pitch has provided them with the structure from which to build a positive future and possibly a career. What their stories repeatedly demonstrate, is that when it comes to acceptance, social integration and community, football is actually several years ahead of the rest of society.

One year on from the wedding of William & Kate, another royal event is already upon us, as Britain unites for a vapid exercise in fervent plastic-flag waving. This time the occasion is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, although the worthier cause for celebration, besides the ability of the grotesquely privileged to stay alive, is once again lost on me.

As is always the case with royal events, the enthusiasm of the national media and huddled masses is as baffling as it is predictable. Of course, royal appearances have always been accompanied by a sea of blinkered supporters, but among them can now be found many would-be anti-monarchists, whose attitudes appear to have veered from unwavering disapproval towards jolly acceptance. Have formerly staunch opposers of the royal family simply grown tired of Windsor-bashing? (Admittedly it’s a thankless and ultimately pointless task, and one that their European cousins are mostly spared.) Or has a rampant form of political correctness reached a point in which even the once overripe monarchy is today exempt from criticism?

In the late nineties Tony Blair’s New Labour government worked hard to enliven the country after almost two decades of bleak conservatism, but in doing so caused many heretofore disillusioned Britons to reassess the state of their own nation. One consequence was a swift reappraisal of British culture by liberal left-wing voters, and a general softening towards overt Englishness (something that had previously rarely been seen outside a sporting context). Likewise, as it limped into the twenty-first century, the royal family adopted shrewdly-timed PR savvy to smooth over the public (and private) cracks which appeared following the death of the Princess of Wales.

This genuinely shocking event had all but been forgotten by the occasion of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, a mere ten years ago. The bloated celebrations culminated with a concert (inaccurately dubbed “The Party in the Park”) held in the gardens of Buckingham Palace and involving the usual cast of pro-establishment musical legends (and S Club 7). In a stunt as preposterous as it was spectacular, the show opened with Brian May performing “God Save The Queen” as a guitar solo atop the Palace roof, his rock god hairdo windswept by an overhead jetstream provided on cue by the Royal Air Force. This was at the height of “Cool Britannia”, a government-generated and media-endorsed movement whose manifesto was the instant approval of all things British that matched a young person’s criteria of credibility.

Credibility is not something often associated with the royal family, but some still cling to the hope. A year ago, the wedding of William and Kate again foisted the foolish expectation on the nation that the good-looking newlyweds would haul the monarchy out of whatever bygone century it wallowed in and somehow lend it relevance. Yet shortly thereafter the happy couple faded into the usual royal state of general invisibility, ceding the tabloid spotlight to Kate’s sister Pippa and her ample derriere (which undoubtedly sells more newspapers).

“It’s a great day to be British.” So we’re told repeatedly on occasions like these by those who enjoy empty displays of pageantry. But what about the next day? What happens on Monday morning, after the last commemorative paper plate has been thrown away? Similarly, royal supporters’ insistence that events like today’s help “unify the nation” is equally bewildering. As far as I’m aware, the only thing that unifies the English (besides tea) is an insatiable appetite for mediocre television. That the “telly” holds such sway over the country is less alarming than the extent to which otherwise smart individuals choose to adhere without question to its monoculture with such mindless obedience.

Perhaps the most cringe-worthy aspect of modern royal events is the mystifying encouragement of so-called “street parties”, in which the notoriously reserved English, supposedly overcome with a sudden passion and fervor for the monarchy, emerge from behind net curtains to revel with neighbors in a painfully forced ritual of false community — one that is no doubt made easier by the combined pleasures of Union Jack serviettes and Tesco Finest Swiss rolls. But beyond suburban boredom or a deeply-rooted complex of inferiority, just what is it that causes the English to harbour a hysterical desire to project the UK as a bunting-strewn utopia of national pride? At the heart of it surely lies a desperate need to cling to a cherished yet fading sense of national identity — a tenuous concept at best, and one that is almost impossible to define, let alone maintain, in a reality of multi-cultural digital globalization.

Today thousands of the Queen’s tax-paying subjects will line the Thames to cheer with blissful ignorance for a family whose defining attributes are ineptitude and immorality. Meanwhile, a once active fight to abolish the monarchy appears to have mellowed against a wall of cultural oppression (a case of “if you can’t beat ’em — join ’em”). More than ever, the UK comes off as a nation not only under the thumb, but in a state of deluded fantasy or, worse, faux-naiveté — far more serious than the real thing because everyone ought to know better. Which begs the question of which is worse: not knowing your history or choosing to ignore it?

 
Screenprint by Andy Warhol, 1985.