Author: Nate Cull

Keep me away from the enemy
Please leave me out of the war

The 1969 Ford Capri 1600XL – ‘the car you always promised yourself!’ – was an extremely popular two-seater sporty coupe designed by Ford to break into the UK and European market. And Australian, apparently, as 15,000 of them were produced from 1969-1972 in Sydney.  So… a car like this was the natural name for a 1978 Sydney indie-punk band.

Meanwhile,  in 1972 New Zealand, a band named Dragon led by Todd Hunter and his brother Marc had formed and was putting out some pretty strange, Syd Barret-era Pink-Floydian psychedelia. As I’m discovering, time moves in strange loops and yes, I do remember hearing their first single Universal Radio. My reaction then was pretty much as it is now: ‘this is awesome! … wait… what… …. o_O  …. I don’t even….’

I returned to find the village dead
I was all alone, said fearless fireman Fred
Yes the situation’s getting grim
Someone tell me please just what it was I said
Universal radio, please don’t let me down
Universal radio, send someone around
Hello hello, I see you…

30 years later or so, I still don’t even. It’s about a fireman? And a dragon? And a radio? And a whole lot of vague self-indulgent Floyd-like synth and drum noodling in the middle? It’s not really science fiction and not really fantasy but it certainly says 1972 and probably inspirational consumption of herbal products. Take a listen if you want.

(But who the heck is that robot guy on the cover? Is it Darth Vader, five years ahead of schedule? Just shows there really aren’t very many unique visual ideas in science fiction.)

Anyway, it’s nice, but this is not the sound I’m looking for. Moving along into the 70s, Dragon and the Hunter brothers moved to Australia, dropped the prog-rock psychedelia, got famous, popped out some classics like 1979’s April Sun in Cuba which will never ever leave the New Zealand airwaves even after a nuclear war and is still not the sound I’m looking for, Marc got in trouble and the band fell apart.

In the fallout, Todd Hunter got together with Johanna Pigott from the XL Capris… and long story short, they’ve been together ever since, Dragon reformed, Pigott wrote the other Dragon classic everyone knows – 1983’s Rain –  with it’s vaguely apocalyptic acid-rain / fallout imagery –

Don’t you go out in the rain
Don’t go out in the pouring rain
If you go out in the rain
We’ll never have that time again

and a bit more upliftingly, she wrote John Farnham’s 1988 anthem Age of Reason, which still gives me chills today.

So why can’t we be still why can’t we love each other
Is kindness an ancient skill buried by our blindness
And if we look behind us there’s a wind blowing in
To create the age of reason

But the first single the Hunter / Pigott partnership produced was this one. And yes, I remember hearing it as a kid. I was younger than sixteen, and it resonated deeply. At the time it felt deeply implausible. Everyone knew World War Three would be mushroom clouds and over in seconds.

And yet.

It’s not synthpop but it is punk, with echoes of cyber, but more importantly, it catches the feeling of the time. Like Fay Ray. The simplicity, the honesty, the beauty, the terror of that lost decade, when it felt like the whole planet was spiralling into darkness with no hope in sight.

And somehow, unthinkably, we escaped.

Darkness falling on a battlefield
Darkness falling on some dream down there
Black oil slick on a headland
Me in battle gear

Creeping on my knees down Main Street
Underground assault on the undisclosed
My best friend lost me in the haze
Shockwave rips up the road

Oh, World War Three, World War Three
Sixteen years closing in on me
Keep me away from the enemy
Please leave me out of the war
Please leave me out of the war

Battle front rages on the news stand
TV, he soften the blow
We’re still planning our futures
We were never meant to know

World War Three…

Surrounded by soldiers glued to the screens
Hold back the invaders, their infernal machines

The years 1977 to 1981 were a watershed of sorts for public interest in space. It was less than a decade since the height of the Apollo landings, and the hardware was still in orbit; human space flight wasn’t old enough to be retro yet, but the glamour had already worn off .  Apollo 17 had left the Moon for the last time in December 1972, an Apollo had docked with a Soviet Soyuz in July 1975, and the imminent death of Skylab was filling the news (it had flown and been abandoned in 1973-1974), as the American space program waited for the launch of Apollo’s successor: the dangerous, over-budget and endlessly delayed Space Shuttle, which would still never be capable of reaching even the Moon, let alone beyond.

Meanwhile a small cancelled TV show called Star Trek (1966-1969; you’ve probably never heard of it) had ascended to immortality in syndication and merchandising, and was slowly and painfully struggling towards a sequel series (which would eventually diverge into the movie series and the Next Generation).

But the trigger point came in 1977 with the release of two blockbuster space movies: George Lucas’ Star Wars in May, and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind in November.  Both were huge successes for their studios, and the result was a shower of space and science fiction themed media products over the next few years. 1978 brought Superman, Battlestar Galactica, Blake’s 7 and Mork & Mindy. 1979 saw Alien, The Black Hole, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,  James Bond jumping on the spacewagon with Moonraker, and the disappointing but spectacular first Star Trek movie. The scene was set for the 1980s model of science fiction drawing large audiences.

In our real skies, the nuclear-powered Russian satellite Kosmos 954 fell to Earth and scattered radioactive debris over Canada in January 1978; Skylab crashed over Australia in July 1979; and Columbia, the first Space Shuttle, finally launched – only 20 years after Yuri Gagarin – in April 1981.

There was something spacey in the air in music too. A strange little 1976 song by the Canadian band Klaatu – (who had a bit of a Beatles sound) – was remade in September 1977 by Karen and Richard Carpenter and became an instant hit. A musician named Dominico Monardo went disco on the Star Wars soundtrack as “Meco“, and that became a megahit too. (It was sort of the ‘Crazy Frog’ of its era).

In fact let’s just have some disco Star Wars right now because why the heck not, right?

In September 1978 Jeff Wayne, a working composer and producer, dropped a musical version of the War of the Worlds on everyone and that became a megahit too. (The odd thing though, like Klaatu, is that he started in 1976: before the Star Wars phenomenon. What was it in the air?)

“The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, he said…”

And in yet another strange case of synchronicity, a Japanese videogame developer named Tomohiro Nishikado was working on a space themed shooter game, and also drew on War of the Worlds for the imagery of the alien lifeforms. It seems to be pure coincidence that his game crashed into a pop zeitgeist freshly primed to watch the skies. But the world would never quite recover from the advent of these strange… invaders… from space…. I’m not quite sure what we should call them.

WHICH BRINGS US TO THE MAIN EVENT. The Australian musicians Russell Dunlop and Bruce Brown – like Jeff Wayne and Dominico Monardo, career producers and engineers, rather than stars – briefly jumped to immortality in 1979 as ‘Player One’ with a quickie single which is probably the best videogame parody ever (don’t look at me like that, there’s so many that it’s actually a genre. Don’t make me break out Pac-Man Fever. ) The B-side, ‘A Menacing Glow in the Sky’ is, to my mind, much better:  a subtle, realistic take on the UFO invasion.  But it’s so rare that it’ll probably evaporate. Take a look while it’s still up:

Player One followed the single with an album which I would love to get hold of: ‘Game Over’ which, if Menacing Glow is an indication of the quality, would be right in the tradition of experimental 1980s art-synthpop that so intrigues me now. But in its absence…

Ladies and gentlemen, the one, the ultimate, the legend in the Pacific: SPACE INVADERS.

You may dance when ready.

 Through dark sunken eyes
I see another pale sunrise
Surrounded by soldiers glued to the screens
Hold back the invaders, their infernal machines

We fight to survive
Running to stay alive
Our bodies aching and tired
There’s nowhere to hide
Our cover’s been blown away

Space invaders, space invaders, space invaders, space invaders

They’re closing in on me
Dark forces cold and unseen
Oh my hip pocket nerve is aching again
I must go back in and fight it out to the end

Space invaders…

We fight to survive
Running, running to stay alive

Well the people stand in line behind the glass
In the human arcade the image brigade see race and class

This one is just a mystery.

Discogs.com indexes it as the B-side of a vinyl 7″ single, Dizzy, from 1982, on “SiJenn Records”, whose only other release was a 1983 single by Rat Patrol. The band is Daemion. There are two voices, male and female.

The A-side  (preserved on at least one other Youtube but for who knows how long): is a resolutely  generic love ballad:

Dizzy, I’m so dizzy my head is spinning
Like a whirlpool it never ends
And it’s you girl making me spin

But Human Arcade! I remember that! Or at least I seem to. I don’t know how, but I have a distinct sense memory of both the song – with its sci-fi premise of a robot uprising, the chirpy music, the band name  – and, improbably, that cover image: a jester on a square-wheeled unicycle. And yes, I also seem to remember hearing ‘Dizzy’ and the disappointment of how lame it was compared to the B-side.

I seem to imagine remembering it as a 45 single rather than a cassette. A found artifact, discovered out of place on a street or in a room. But how would I have played it?

These things haunt one. Is it possible to completely fake such a memory? It seems so real.

And the song itself? Well, it seems to have lasted for others besides myself. To me, it’s a perfect little Twilight Zone episode in a song.

If it vanishes from Youtube tomorrow… at least someone may remember.

In the human arcade there are things to do
The corridor shines while I trace the lines on the mirror you
And in the human arcade there are things to see, hee hee
A penny here a penny there your very own favourite fantasy
And when the evening calls we’ll follow you
To where you have to go
But if the night comes down too fast we’ll run from you
And it’s time that you should know

That the human arcade’s been here for a while
A year or two, or maybe three
No-one is too sure you see
Well the people stand in line behind the glass
In the human arcade the image brigade see race and class
And when the evening calls we’ll follow you
To where you have to go
But if the night comes down too fast we’ll run from you
And it’s time that we should go

(robot voices) Source corrected… vector… space orbit…
Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!

And in the human arcade there is me and you girl
There is no-one left alive in here to watch us die and disappear
And in the human arcade we are on the run
Cause we remember the times when the people did jobs and machines could run
And in the human arcade there’s so much to do
Human arcade there is me and you
Human arcade lots to see
Human arcade there is you and me
In the human arcade there is so much fun
Human arcade we are on the run
Human arcade lots to see
Wander round quite aimlessly
In the human arcade
In the human arcade
Human arcade…

At ease with the thought
That this nova won’t burn out

Spoons are a Canadian New Wave band based around the duo of Gordon Deppe and Sandy Horne, who have remained intermittently active from 1980 to today. Like many such bands, they have a website and are releasing remastered editions of their early albums as well as new material. (2011’s Static in Transmission).

From their second and breakthrough album, 1982’s Arias and Symphonies, the hit track was Nova Heart. Ominous, minimalist and yet anthemic and hopeful, it has a pulsing science fiction energy foreboding a world in the process of unimaginable transformation.  And the children for which constant change would become normal.

It’s really a song about the Singularity, in other words. The word didn’t really exist in 1982 – although only just, as Vernor Vinge was to introduce it in a January 1983 Omni Magazine editorial .  But the concept was certainly there, especially in the early years of the 1980s, very close under the skin of popular culture. They were years of extreme change both socially and technologically, and a sudden cultural shift to a “head first into the future” attitude which… well, was honestly both thrilling and terrifying at once. A kind of optipessimism I think, describes the early 1980s best. We felt were were on the verge of shattering change. It wasn’t just going to be better or worse: it was going to be all better or all worse. Or – as in Gibson’s cyberpunk – both at once, “just not evenly distributed”.

There was especially a lot of optipessimism about artificial intelligence; more than we have now in the Internet-connected world we could only dream about with our 8-bit micros. The fears usually revolved around either automation causing mass unemployment (which is coming back on the radar again in the 2010s), or automated war machines starting World War III or hunting humans (also coming back).

You can trace the shape of some of these AI ideas as an argument evolving through pop culture: Knight Rider (1982), WarGames  (1983), Terminator (1984), Short Circuit (1986). Robots would save us or destroy us, or maybe both. By the mid-80s, though, computers (and especially videogames) had become a little less novel, less scary, and the shape of the stories shifted from computer-as-God to computer-as-business-tool.

Were we just ahead of our time, or on the edge of a wave that hasn’t yet crested?

Either way, we were sure that the future was going to be way different; and now that we’re in it, a mixture of relieved, disappointed, and scared that it might yet all come true just as we imagined it.

 

But I’ve always got a battery pack
In case I get another heart attack

This kind of song is the reason the Internet exists. It appears to be a one-shot single, released in 1981 by Magnet Records (now part of Warners), with a not particularly memorable B-side: “Working Model”, which, well, here you go:

The band is The Quarks: the duo of Rod Bowkett and Martin Ansell . In 1982, the Quarks rebranded as President President and released a second single (All Good Men / b-side Skin of the Salamander), but neither of those quite do it for me. Bowkett and Ansell continued with separate careers and remain active today.

Update June 2016: Martin Ansell is still active! As of May this year, he’s released a compilation album of the Quarks and President President  material, as well as more recent work. It’s on Bandcamp, here: martinansell.bandcamp.com/album/the-quarks

I don’t recall hearing the song itself at all before I found it on Youtube; though the cover art and the name stirs faint resonances. I’m guessing I maybe saw it in a record store, or a magazine?

At over 6 minutes it feels a little long for radio and not quite high-energy enough for dance. But as a time capsule of that brief era when it was okay to make pop songs about industrial malaise and the fear of automation… or, well, any idea at all… it’s brilliant.

If anyone can help translate all of the words, I’d appreciate it.

He said I’ve got my father’s aching hands
I’ve got ulcers too
You’ve got your mothers looks but she’s forty-five
And I’m twenty-two
We go to work and we take the strain
Slip off the head and remove the brain
The technological 80s, oh it’s growing
Mechanical
Mechanical

I could’ve sworn I saw a key in your back today
He said it might be true
We took a look in the workshop window
And I’ve got one too
We clocked out and I drove you home
We talked of metal and the price of chrome
The technological 80s, oh it’s growing
Mechanical

Mechanical…

Somebody blew a fuse in our office
They told his wife
If he’d only had a circuit diagram
They could have saved his life
She cried and cried until she finally died
She wasn’t waterproof, it got inside
The technological 80s, oh it’s growing
Mechanical

We’re mechanical now, we’re mechanical now, we’re mechanical now

I have to spend a lot of time these days
Beside the sea
I have to keep well away from city life
My allergy
But I’ve always got a battery pack
In case I get another heart attack
The technological 80s, oh it’s growing
Mechanical

Mechanical…