About This Time 40 Years Ago…

It’s The Hits Of August-ish 1985!

The Hottest Hit On The Planet…

“Do you know who I was?” Tina Turner asks Mel Gibson, when they met in her apocalyptic penthouse, towering above Bartertown.

“Nobody. Except on the day after, I was still alive. This nobody had a chance to be somebody.”

Tina Turner had been a nobody went she was growing up in Nutbush, Tennessee, on Highway No. 19. 25 was the speed limit. Motorcycles weren’t allowed in it.

She had been a nobody when she had forced herself into Ike Turner’s band, grabbing the microphone off of the drummer and taking over the show.

Later on, Tina had escaped an abusive marriage with Ike Turner.

Fleeing from a Dallas hotel room with only 34 cents in her pocket. 34 cents, and – for most of the next decade – no hits. She had to decamp to Europe to find an audience. One day she was cock of the walk, the next she was a feather duster.

The third installment of a series about Max Rockatansky, an ex-policeman driving around an apocalyptic landscape that looked strangely like the area where I grew up (because it was), as the world turns to dust, constantly being dragged into the role of hero, when all he’s really interested in is filling his tank so that he can keep on driving.

The other component of Tina’s pinnacle was being the oldest women to score a Billboard Hot 100 Number One – until fellow survivor Cher knocked her off her perch over a decade later. That Number One was “What’s Love Got To Do With It?”, a mixture of reggae flavoured synth burbles, and the wisdom that comes with middle-age (it’s a 7.)

Tina, whose chart fortunes had never been as impressive as you might think – a handful of R&B hits in the early 60s here, a “nice and rough” cover of “Proud Mary” there, “River Deep, Mountain High” had famously been a flop, a case of being too Black for white radio and too white for Black radio, except in the UK, where they got it right! – managed to grab a Number One right at the peak of the MTV boom, when looking bright and colorful was the only thing that was important.

Fortunately for Tina, she now had bright and colourful hair.

A hairdo so iconic that it seems to be the primary inspiration for every Halloween 80s rockstar wig. Appropriate really since it turns out that it really was a wig! BUT WHAT A WIG!!!!

The “Thunderdome” is an official part of the title. Tina sings it in the chorus.

There may be other movie-tie-in hits that are more blatant, but there can’t be many. It isn’t just blatant marketing though; the song actually pushes forward the plot. Or would have if this were a musical, and one of the kids had sung it, instead of it playing over the closing credits. Or if it didn’t completely contradict the plot.

Sadly, in order to explain this contradiction, we need to introduce the Lost Tribe of Planet Erf:

Everybody hates the Lost Tribe of Planet Erf. For those of you who have never seen Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and are not up on your Mad Max lore, the Lost Tribe are basically the Ewoks of the Mad Max-verse. They are a group of children, the survivors of a crashed 747, who have formed a society in the wilderness, based on what scraps of knowledge – including scraps of the English language – they were able to understand before their parents left them to look for help and they lost contact with what few members of the human race remained.

Specifically they were left behind by their parents who went off to search for whatever remained of civilization, before presumedly dying in the desert. Not only their parents, but the pilot as well: Captain Walker.

One of the sacred beliefs of The Lost Tribe Of Planet Erf is that one day, Captain Walker would come back for them. He was the hero that they needed. The kids believe that Max – who they found dying in the desert after Tina Turner threw him out of the town she ruled – is that Captain Walker.

Although they are annoying, let’s let the kids tell the tell:

So the kids need a hero. They may not need another hero, but they certainly need one.

They also needed to know the way home… or at least they wanted to know the way back to Sydney, or as they put it, Tomorrow-morrow Land.

They get there in the end, it is, of course, all in ruins, and yet they still believe in their hero, Mad Captain Max Walker.

This is where “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” starts to make even less sense than Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and let me be clear, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome makes no sense.

“We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” is a theme song that contradicts the entire premise of the movie it’s a theme song for.

Had the writers of the song – the same team that had put “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” together, in case you couldn’t tell from the vaguely-reggae synthesizer bubbles – even read the script?

Now, to be fair, maybe “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” is a song about how the only hero the children need is Mad Captain Max Walker, but that’s not the impression anyone could possibly get from the song. “

It sounds like the work of people who once believed in heroes, perhaps they believed in them too much, but those heroes disappointed them, so now they are OVER IT! I’ve had enough with these heroes… get them out of their sight!

Tina sells “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” despite her surely being aware that she was undermining and contradicting the entire premise of the plot. Or maybe not. After all, nobody else on the planet has been able to make head nor tail out of this movie, why should Tina be the only one to know what’s going on, even if she is starring in it?

But although Tina sounds convincing, she is wrong.

We DO need a hero! We need Tim Capello, providing “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” with the one thing a cheesy 80s pop hit needs to make it even cheesier:

And I know what you are wondering: Because surely there can’t be two oiled-up musclemen saxophone guys in the 80s, is this the same oiled-up muscleman saxophone guy as the one in The Lost Boys?” Not to be mistaken for The Lost Tribe Of The Planet Erf.

“We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” is a spectacle. It makes Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome sound like a spectacle. It makes me want to watch Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, even though I know that would be a mistake. And that’s really all you need from a piece of movie merchandise.

“We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” is an 8.

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Meanwhile, in Goth Land:

Back in 1982, The Cure released “Let’s Go To Bed.” A silly pop song.

At this point they had just released Seventeen Seconds and Pornography and Faith:

A trilogy of the gloomiest records in the store.  Coming in the aftermath of Ian Curtis’ suicide, the media started treating Robert Smith as though he was Ian’s replacement. Mad Bob wasn’t crazy about this idea. He wasn’t that mad. He knew where it led. He was paranoidly thinking that Melody Maker and NME and all the rest of them were secretly hoping he’d die. So he wrote a silly pop song to tell them to bugger off.

Ever since “Let’s Go To Bed”, Robert Smith has gone to great lengths to convince people that he’s not as dour and depressed as you might think:

• He wrote songs like “Love Cats.”
• He got into a feud with Morrissey, painting Moz as the genuine dismal human being (and how right he was!)
• He allowed this to be on the cover of Smash Hits.

He gave interviews filled with almost as many punch lines as your favourite comedian. He was a hoot!

This is a guy who lied to his record company that he couldn’t tour America because he was afraid of flying, so they’d buy the band tickets on a cruise ship instead.

Now, you all have to imagine Robert Smith on a cruise ship.

(There’s a video on YouTube, interesting, but not interesting enough to embed, including an interview with what I’m assuming is the Activities Organizer: “they are different from the rest of our passengers… they are younger, they only wear black and they only come out at night, they sleep during the daytime”… so there you have it, confirmation that The Cure are indeed vampires)

What did The Cure do on a cruise ship in the middle of the night?

And yet somehow that message never quite got through (Disintegration wouldn’t exactly do him any favours), despite the fact that in interviews, Robert rarely looked like anything but a socially awkward cheeky schoolboy.

When The Cure were inducted into the Rock’N’Roll Hall of Fame and Robert uttered those immortal lines: “by the sounds of it, no” there were still people who were like “classic Robert, still moping around.”

“Let’s Go To Bed” is far from the best Cure song, but it set an precedent for much of the rest of their career.

Although they’d continue to write doom-laden poems that seemed to go on and on, they’d also scatter quirky pop songs here and there. Something for fans of both suicide rock and sea-shanties.

“A lot of people want us to be serious. I mean we are serious… there’s a side to us that is serious, which would be dreadful to lose. If we purely did things like “The Love Cats”, I’d hang myself. It’s nice to be able to do both.”

Some considered such tangents a cynical commercial move.

But it appears to be more of a strategic move, to wipe out the rubbish on the charts. Naturally, it didn’t work.

“If I wasn’t in a band, I’d start The Cure up now because I still detest the people in the Top Ten as much as I did when we started.”

Robert seemed particularly offended by the very existence of WHAM!

Instead he wrote songs like “In Between Days,” a deliriously happy sounding song, with the saddest of lyrics, if also, the simplest of rhymes:

“Yesterday I got so old
I felt like I could die
Yesterday I got so old
It made me want to cry”

Ploughing through ear-worm hook after earn-work hook, before Robert even opens his lip-stick smeared mouth.

“With all of them I think, in a perfect world, they’d be Number One. With “In Between Days”, I thought it’d get played on the radio because it was pretty chirpy, and if anything gets played on the radio it generally gets into the chart – a sorry state of affairs.”

I can’t believe it wasn’t a Number One either.

Other than the little detail that it zips past too fast to properly dance – rather than, I dunno, spinning around in a circle until you throw up – “In Between Days” is the perfect pop song (it’s a 10.)

The Cure didn’t reach new peaks of popularity purely due to their perfect pop though. This was the 80s after all, and like Tina Turner, it was all about the hair.

And in 1985 – the year of “In Between Days” and “Close To Me” – that hair spray budget was pretty big.

Within a year Robert would get so sick of people forever going on about his hair – and his fans copying him to the point that they “look more like me than I do” – that he cut it all off in 1986. This made the Goths sad. Fortunately, there was no Cure album in 1986, so he had time to grow it back again for the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me album – the one with “Just Like Heaven” on it.

One minute gloomy, the next minute day-glo, “Close To Me” might be the best of both worlds. In some ways it’s the most Cure single of all; a combination of the whimsical and the woeful, whilst also sounding like nothing they’d ever done. A song about “the sense of impending doom” over the top of a great big stompin’ clappin’ beat that you can dance to. One that, weirdly, doesn’t sound a million miles removed from “Footloose” (I’m serious!)

Not to mention a catchy dinky little keyboard riff that stands out as a classic of the form even in that golden era of catchy dinky little keyboard riffs.

At the same time there’s the constant sound of Robert’s heavy wheezy breathing in the background, as though he’s having a panic attack. Equal parts catchy and claustrophobic; that’s how you create a classic Cure single.

“I’ve waited hours for this, I’ve made myself so sick
I wish I’d stayed asleep today”

I like to think that this a reference to Robert’s famed habit of staying in bed until the afternoon, an apparently productive use of his time.

“I’m blessed, or cursed, with the ability to remember what I’ve dreamed. When I was 11 or 12, I used to write them down as soon as I woke up, and after doing that for about two years I found that I didn’t have to. It’s good and it’s bad – it’s awful waking up and remembering you’ve just axed to death a family of 15.”

“I used to get these horrible, nightmarish visions of this head that used to hover in the chink of light that would come when the bedroom lights were turned off and the door was just ajar. The shaft of light that came from the hallway used to illuminate this patch of wallpaper and it would come to life and prophesy doom to me through the night whenever I put my eyes in that general direction.”

It was a “horrible grinning man who’d appear on top of the bedroom door and laugh.”

If all of this sounds like a bit much, take into account that Mad Bob had chickenpox at the time.

Also take into account that Robert liked to lie a lot. It’s the only way of keeping interviews interesting.

So that’s what “Close To Me” is about. Or not. Or maybe it is what I always thought it was: about feeling nervous and nauseous because you have a hot date.

“Close To Me” is a 9.

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Meanwhile, in Raspy Rockers Land:

Is it about the year, or the sex position? That is the fundamental question everybody asks about “Summer Of ’69.”

The ultimate 80s rock party record has been reduced to a question of whether or not Bryan Adams is singing about what you think he’s singing about.

So what exactly is Bryan Adams singing about on “Summer Of ‘69”?

But it doesn’t really matter, because you have accomplished the only real goal of any boy who starts up a band when they are young. You’ve gotten laid!

Congratulations Bryan Adams! Bryan Adams got laid!!

More thematically, “Summer Of ‘69” is about nostalgia.

Bryan Adams, it appears, is a very nostalgic lad. Bryan was thinking about his younger years. When there was only you and him, and you were young and wild and free. Bryan seemed to think about his younger years a lot. And no wonder, they were the best days of his life.

“Heaven” and “Summer Of ‘69” are of course, very different songs.

One is fast, for example, and the other is slow. But they have more in common with each other than just Bryan’s tendency to look back to simpler times.

The more observant of you will have noticed that the girl in the video for “Summer Of ‘69” and the girl in the video for “Heaven” are the same girl.

She’s also in the video for “Run To You”, racing towards Bryan playing guitar by himself in the middle of a snowstorm, both dressed far too lightly for such weather, because they are Canadians and they can’t feel the cold.

Who was that girl, that kept on popping up in the Reckless album promotional material? And what does it all mean?

I feel pretty certain it’s a step-up from Krull.

Further investigation indicates that “Summer Of ‘69”, “Heaven” and “Run To You” are a trilogy:

Telling the story of Bryan’s first teenage love – or at least his first time – reuniting after years apart. This explains why in “Heaven”, once Bryan sees her in the crowd at one of his shows, he instantly races off after all. It’s not because he sees a cute girl in the crowd and suddenly must have her! They have a history.

This would have been extremely difficult for casual fans to follow at the time however, since the order of the single releases – first “Run To You”, then “Heaven”, the “Summer Of ’69” – was the reverse order of how the story was supposed to be told.

The video for “Run To You”– despite being the first single – is the happy ending (and “happy ending” is definitely the wording that Bryan would choose – he is after all, the one responsible for turning “Summer Of ‘69” into a dirty joke…) The only way these videos – the only way this love story makes sense, is if you watch the Reckless video album.

These videos were not just for MTV. These videos were made to the consumed as a story. These videos are part of a Bryan Adams’ musical!

Bryan spends a lot of time sitting on abandoned cars, in the middle of a field, with a dog. He gives a good impression of a guy who spent his childhood on a farm in Canada, instead of jet-setting around the globe with his father, who was in the Canadian diplomatic corp.

Within the narrative of this “video album”, “Summer Of ‘69” sets everything in motion.

We see – in a series of flashbacks – their teenage love affair, and then, at the end, Natalie rides past Bryan and the boys, rockin’ out in a garage, her useless boyfriend at the wheel. She smiles. “Who’s that?” useless boyfriend asks.

But now Bryan is on her mind. So she goes to the show in “Heaven”, they reunite in the snow in “Run To You”… there are other songs but they are unimportant… Bryan gets his happy ending. None of which really answers the fundamental question though: Summer Of Love, or 69-ing?

Now Bryan – as it has often been pointed out-  was nine or ten in the Summer of ’69.

Too young, in other words, to experience a single thing he was singing about.

Bryan would buy a guitar at a Five-and-Dime – it was an imitation Les Paul – but not until 1971. Before that he’d bought an imitation Stratocaster, but that one was not purchased at a Five-and-Dime, and anyway, that was in 1970. Young Bryan liked buying imitation guitars, begging the question: does an imitation guitar count as a “real six string”?

But Bryan’s fellow songwriter, Jim Vallance, was quite a bit older, and would have been in his late teens in 1969.

Nothing “Summer Of ‘69” mentions exactly meshes with the pop cultural memory of the “Summer Of ‘’69” – Woodstock, Vietnam, LSD – but for the vast majority of American youth all of that just passed them by. For most kids, it was just another summer, and buying a six string, playing it til your fingers bled, spending evenings down at the drive-in, and standing on your mama’s porch, was the sum total of their experiences.

In the debate of whether “Summer Of ‘69” was referring to the year or the sexual position, a common consensus has gradually formed, in which it is presumed that Jim wrote his bits about the year, but then Bryan had to go and ruin it all by singing “Me and my baby in a sixty-nine” at the end, just for the lols. Bryan was, after all, the more immature one of the duo, as well as the youngest.

For if teenagers like anything more than rockin’ out, it’s jokes about 69-ing.

As we would discover later on, rockin’ out wasn’t exactly Bryan Adam’s strong suit.

Sure, he looks as though he’s having fun rockin’ out with his friends in the garage in “Summer Of ’69.” Bryan also knows the basics, such as that he has to cry out “YEAH!” before every great big drum roll or guitar solo.

That early version of Reckless already included a version of “Summer Of ‘69” but apparently it didn’t rock… Bryan had to go back into the studio and rough-it-up a little. The end result – the record we know and love today – was apparently rockin’ enough…

Presumedly Kerrang! would never have granted him that honour if they knew in a few years he’d be recording “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)”, “Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?” and a duet with Barbra Streisand.

“Summer Of ‘69” is a 9.

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