But we cast aside the reck’ning
for stars they were a-beck’ning
Music is a strange odyssey sometimes. In searching ’80s synthpop I came across this little gem: Hiroshima by the German singer Sandra. It fit the early-80s anti-nuclear mood perfectly, but it was recorded in 1990 – too late for the period I’m capturing. Or so I thought.
And the world remembers his name
Remembers the flame was
Hiroshima, Hiroshima, Hiroshima
But of course there’s more to it.
I was out by 20 years. The song Hiroshima was actually published in 1971 (recorded 1969 says Wikipedia) on the album of the same name by the English band Wishful Thinking, but it was written by a DaveMorgan.
Here, have some really slow 1971 folk-rock with wibbly guitar bits in, as was the style of the time.
I can’t emphasise enough to post-Gen-Xers just how much Hiroshima dominated my thoughts as an 80s teenager. There’s plenty of terrifying things in 2015 – terrorism, anti-terrorism, government, lack of government, economic crashes, economic booms, climate change – but they absolutely pale in comparison to the grim certain knowledge we all had that were were all going to die, vaporised in a preordained apocalypse, and none of our leaders could or would stop it.
What I’m saying is there will be a lot more songs about nuclear war before this blog is over.
So who was that Dave Morgan guy? What else might he have done? Oh, not much, he was in a little band nobody’s ever heard of called ELO. (Eleven studio albums 1971-1986, revival in 2001.)
The funny thing is for a huge 70s rock band the only ELO album I actually care for is something of an anomaly: the 1981 synth-heavy science fiction concept album Time (1981). Something about the idea of a citizen from the 1980s trapped in an alienating 21st century future works for me.
Dave Morgan did second vocals on Time, with Richard Tandy on keyboards. (Useful name that, with it being the early 80s and Tandy being one of the first microcomputers… tough crowd? I’ll come in again.)
I love so many tracks from this album, but Here Is The News is the one I remember best; it was a single, so it played on radio around 1980 and man, it was confusing hearing this coming up right before the news.
Here is the news, someone has broken out of Satellite Two
Look very carefully, it might be you you you you you
After Time, things get interesting. Dave Morgan and Richard Tandy worked on a side project under the creative name of Tandy Morgan Band: their main product was a fascinating little science fiction concept album called Earthrise. Released in 1984, this is one of those strange little gems which I know I’ve heard before but I can’t place precisely when.
Dave Morgan’s career goes quietly interesting places later; he became a born-again Christian in 1988, went into church worship music, hyphenated his name to David Scott-Morgan when he got married in the 1990s, and pastored a church in Birmingham for ten years to 2009. In 2011 he and Tandy rereleased Earthrise , and in the last few years he’s written an autobiography and released another album. The first single, Benediction, is low-fi but charming in its way.
But let’s get back to Earthrise. It’s a loose concept album about a lonely astronaut (a concept which appears in a lot of 1980s synthpop) trying to return to his lost love. The tone is midway between 1969 David Bowie and mid-1970s Klaatu. Almost all the tracks (with the exception of the bland elevator-ballad Ria, which appears to have been dropped from the rerelease) are strange and wonderful , from the haunting opening Earthrise to the manic Zero Zero (though Escape from the Citadel feels like it belongs more on Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against The Empire).
(A rare find: the full official lyrics, on a page which may not last forever. )
The second track Under The Blue / Asteroid has the best videogame lyric in any 80s song ever:
When I was a young boy with a bullet for a brain
I used to ride the space patrol across the Martian plain
Zapping all the aliens before they could zap me
You know you can be anything you want to be
When everything under the blue
is waiting for you
The distressed computer calling to aliens in The Third Planet is its own special brand of awesome: (please excuse Ria popping up at the end)
I come from the third planet
my sky is blue
All around is great confusion
I don’t know what to do
My master knows no way of stopping
all that is wrong
I work his maths, I do his shopping
I build his bombs
But the heart and soul of the album is the epic Princeton, placed as the climax when (I think) the protagonist’s rocket finally breaks the barriers of space and time to return home. There’s something about this song – a longing, a gentle grace, an inner serenity that’s more than either epic bombast or nostalgia – that sent shivers down my spine when I first heard it, and continues to resonate years later.
And I’m glad that the man who wrote it, and made my life that much richer, has found peace and purpose in his own.
If I ever go to Princeton
I’ll bow to nature’s wisdom
if ever I’m allowed to see
the wheels within the wheels
I will turn the clock on easy
and ask the ground to leave me
If I ever get to Princeton
I’ll remember how it feels.
We were linked along a sidewalk
lost in a time-warp
We stood and counted UFO’s
tumbling headlong ‘cross the sun
And we terrorised the freeway
with a humanising heat-ray
and If I ever get to Princeton
I’ll remember what we’ve done.
And in the space between the fooling
while the galaxy was cooling
I glimpsed the greater sorrow
of tomorrow never come
But we cast aside the reck’ning
for stars they were a-beck’ning
and If I ever get to Princeton
I’ll remember every one.
Then a traveller from Venus
set a force field between us
I had the strangest feeling
I had seen it all before
In a tale by Dennis Wheatley
he saved the world so neatly
and If I ever get to Princeton
I’ll remember what it’s called.
If I ever go to Princeton
I’ll bow to natures wisdom
and wonder how on earth
I had the nerve to let it fly
For in Princeton I ran into
a planet I’d not been to
and in Princeton I was happy
for a moment of my life