My long essay about music, grief and nostalgia was published in the Economist. You can link to the article here (login required). I reproduce the full version below

Never Gonna Give You Up

On not growing out of Stock, Aitken and Waterman

 originally published in The Economist, May 2019

It’s the spring of 1989 – over thirty years ago now – and near the assembly-hall side of netball courts, three girls from my class are working on a cover version of Eternal Flame. A few pale-faced juniors are sitting on a wall, watching with rapt attention as the lead singer falls to her knees, in a passable impression of Susannah Hoffs, lead singer of the Bangles. The others face her as they go for the modulations, their wet-look-gelled quiffs set quivering with the strain of it all. They’ve perfected the nasal twang and the moves, coming in louder with a reach n’ grab, on the high bits. I stand at the far end near the goal post, then go the long way back for afternoon register. There might have been four Bangles but I wasn’t going to be the one stuck with the triangle.

Music, for me, has never been a group thing. Partly because the kind I like isn’t the kind you’re meant to like. And also because, for me, music is tied up with the experience of grief. I’d spent much of the previous year in my bedroom, waiting for my father to die. And music was my hymn book. Guns N’ Roses were slipping back down the charts, and the highest climber was Jason Donovan with Nothing Can Divide Us. Kylie Minogue and Belinda Carlisle and Big Fun had a strong showing. I clung to the relentless upbeat of Yazz and the Plastic Population, and the sunshine mix of Bill Withers. New in at 37 was Revolution Baby from Transvision Vamp. My father was still dying. Anthrax had gone down a spot with Make Me Laugh.

          I remember waking up to a sound. I could tell from the volume that my mother was standing somewhere near the airing cupboard, the one with the copper cistern wrapped in a red life jacket. The baby, my sister, started crying, too. I got out of bed. As a short, flat-chested 13-year-old with unfeasibly large feet, I spent a great deal of time thinking that I had nothing to wear. But that particular morning, I felt it more distinctly than usual. Neither Just Seventeen nor Good Housekeeping’s “A Look for a Lifestyle” had covered the matter of what to wear on the day your father dies – painfully and messily, before his time, when you have a day of corpse-viewing ahead of you. In the end, I put on the black skirt that I wore for choir, with panels that swirled on the bias, a three-quarter-length navy sweatshirt with an ersatz-Victorian plasticised picture of a floral bouquet on it, and my best electric blue loafers. The black tights were a mistake. It was going to be, as Bill said, a lovely day. 

There was a funeral. A cremation. A return to school. And a fortnight later, my best friend Emily’s dad dropped us off at Rachel South’s disco. It was an event that had involved us in exercises of almost military precision. There were multiple after-school practices where Emily patiently tried to teach me the double bounce before performing her own version of Flashdance on the shag pile. I watched with awe as she leapt off an armchair in her Christmas leg warmers. As with most of teenage life, the anticipation of Rachel’s disco was more pleasurable than the experience itself. When we arrived, I made my way through the youth club lobby, pushing the swing doors to reveal an underwhelming Locomotion. Michelle Stevens and Laura Palmer had nailed their double bounce and Emily joined them in the circle, wearing a mini-skirt over a pair of cycling shorts, a la Neneh Cherry. I bided my time. Even if I resolved the question of whether to sway, bounce, or double bounce, there was still geography to contend with. The disco-goers revolved around each other with care, each mindful of the stopping distance between their gyrations. Soon after the hot dogs, the DJ put on something called The Time Warp and everyone except me seemed to know that we were meant to line up as if for PE.  I went to the loo. 

On the way back, David Clark’s friend asked me if I wanted to kiss David in the car park. (Getting off with people at these kind of discos usually operated by the Cyrano de Bergerac method). I paused. I hadn’t imagined my first kiss would happen in a car park. I didn’t really know David. I missed my dad. I looked down at my shirt and shook my head. In Biology the next day, Michelle Stevens said it was highly possible I was frigid. 

***

Much of the rest of the year was spend in my bedroom, brooding on this possibility. Over this time a different kind of love affair also unfolded: my ongoing crush on a particular form of disco. My private auditory universe was full of the reassuring sounds of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman hit factory and similar: Bananarama. Kylie. Sonia. Rick Astley – you know the kind of thing. This was a musical world away from what had come before, and what was to follow. If the 1970s and early 80s had seen the complexity and rage of Post-Punk-New-Wave and the 90s saw the resonant dissatisfactions of Indie, grunge and Britpop, then it’s fair to say that things, by the mid-80s, as the writer Jason Cowley puts it, had become musically “becalmed”: “The fiercest political battles had been fought and won. The miners were defeated. Free-market fundamentalism was the new orthodoxy. People began to feel richer”. And “the pop music”, he adds, “was dismal”. 

My favourites could be seen as the most dismal of all. Predictable, unchallenging, complacent even, the SAW hits were package holiday songs, where all you needed was youth, money and a wrap-around mini-skirt. They were predictable to a fault – working to a famously stable timbral palette, and what musicologist Joe Bennett locates as consistently re-used production devices: “short-envelope bass sounds”, four-to-the-bar bass drums, bright gated-reverb snare drums, “vocal locs”. Each song, somehow, reached back to the last. But the tracks of SAW and the like were anything but dismal to me. In fact, this kind of sonic bubble-gum was the only music I really tolerated. It gave me a dizzying sort of high, a painful out of body happiness. Liking this stuff – or, in fact, finding it gloriously transcendent – felt like a kind of shameful secret back then. Not least because the cool girls were busy swooning over the translucent Goss brothers, all black leather and cheekbones – or practising dance routines to NKOTB. I was, in my tastes, out on a limb. Thirty years on, I feel much the same — in a way which puzzles and intrigues.

***

Music, wrote Schopenhauer in 1818, “reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality, and remote from pain”. How this emotional mirroring occurs is hard to figure out, but speed has something to do with it. We know intuitively that a track like Philip Oakley’s, Together in Electric Dreams acts upon us physiologically in a way that’s different to Elgar. Scientists have shown that by hooking people to machines, to monitor their brain activity while listening to different types of music. Even if you take Jason Donovan in stonewashed denim out of the equation, studies show that galvanic skin responses (the arousal rate of our bodies, measured by our sweat gland activity), heart rate, respiration rate and blood pressure all rocket in line with beats per minute. A faster tempo and a pronounced emphasis on percussion – defining characteristics of the music that filled my bedroom – increase a subject’s level of arousal, as well as their overall sense of pleasure and “emotional valance”. But, though we may find that watching Top of the Pops gives us a rush of dopamine, no amount of lab testing can tell us precisely why. Hard-wired responses to tempo have to be weighed against the moment we are in, and the lives we have lived. Even so-called light music carries its own kind of historical gravity. 

Perhaps the feelings that drive my own particular musical highs are a kind of ghost story. If you peel back the sheen of the SAW hit factory, with its synths and suits, there are many spectres. Among the most successful song writing teams of all time, Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman were famous both for the rate at which they worked, and for their production process. Artists moved in and out of their Southwark Vineyard studio with speed, mixed to within an inch of their lives. The process earned them more than a hundred UK top 40 hits under their label PWL, a whole load of cash, and plenty of sneers. The trio countered criticism of their ‘hit factory’ by pointing to the precedent for assembly-line music. SAW, Pete Waterman claimed, worked in much the same way as Berry Gordon and his Motown powerhouse. Both Motown and SAW were famous for their velocity. They both developed a house ‘style’, with different elements of the song laid down separately. And in both cases, it was the the vocals which were laid down last. 

The comparison between Motown and SAW is strained at best – and problematic in many ways. But the sound I love, with all of its up-tempo arppegiated beats, its dirty analogue percussives, has other ghosts too. The music of SAW is – of course – rooted in the countercultural world of gay disco. None of the Hit Factory’s commercial vibe would have happened, as Michael Hann writes, “without the gay clubs”. Here, disco encompassed everything from funk to Latin, big band to carnival. With producers like Girogio Moroder and  Nile Rodgers, bands like the Village People and the Bee Gees, and a whole load of polyester stretch – this was a world of possibility and permission. Disco, writes Jon Pareles, “represented an unspoken detente between straight and gay styles: don't ask, don't tell, just dance”. And those who danced to, and those who created, the beats – and who were soon to be under a completely different kind of pressure. The number of cases of HIV rocketed through the 1980s, from the first recorded case in 1981 to estimates of between 5 and 10 million people living with HIV worldwide by 1987. For those in the midst of the AIDS crisis, disco really was a matter of life and death. It was survival, resistance, lament and escape. When Stock, Aitken and Waterman took this sound and packaged it into the palatable glittery disco of their first big hit star, Hazell Dean, much, for sure, was lost. Cannibalised even. But it’s not impossible that something about the original Hi-NRG vibe, with all its intangible defiant precision, resonated with my child-shaped grief.  

Yet if I did sense a sort of congruence between my own loss and the deeply painful shade of those club rhythms, I certainly didn’t realise it at the time. What I did experience was probably some kind of biochemical rush. The releasing of emotions in a context-free context, acting deep within brain – provoked by the organised sound and shapeliness of the music. Put another way, music gave me something for my emotions to play with. It is a truism to say that we have, in many ways, lost the knowledge of how to mourn. For many cultures today, and certainly in my secular 1980s suburban household, there was no prescribed period of retreat. No set pattern of words or behaviours with which one could meet the experience of death. The adults around me had tasks to fulfil: even the bleakness of probate and clothes clearing, and all those other grim details that make up the world of Death Admin, have a function. They fill the space. For a teenage mourner like me, there was, it seemed, nothing to do – but everything to feel. With nothing to pass the time, music was a way of measuring moments. Many teenagers, in many bedrooms around the world, are doubtless doing much the same as they negotiate the almost inevitably rocky period of adolescence. In this sense, the repetitive replaying of repetitive music is perhaps a response to and working out of something traumatic – a smoothing, reinventing and replaying of an event to find a meaning. 

Repetitive they certainly were. Deathless pop. These were songs that offered very little in the way of surprise. SAW were the Kings of the rehash – and if their hooks and basslines recur from song to song, then this was, perhaps, the point. These tunes were based on offering listeners precisely what they had learned to expect. (The tracks are so similar that it has been suggested that Kylie Minogue didn’t so much have 17 consecutive Top 20 hit singles as the same hit 17 times.) 

As Peter Coviello writes in Long Players, his brilliant memoir about the emotional power of pop music, there’s something eminently reassuring about the compacted emotional journey of an “unlaboured” pop song. It is, he says, a “three minute rehearsal” for the “discipline” of being alive. And maybe a kind of “unlaboured discipline” is a good way of thinking about it. Perhaps The seeming superficiality of this music was part of its attraction for me. It gave me a way of hearing the world in simplified form. A reassuring formula of intro-chorus-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-truck-driver-modulation-fade-out. It was, the SAW managing director David Howells claims, a good way of “selling happiness”, and for a 13-year old trying to ward off the messiness of life, this mechanised and managed emotion felt safe. Even the act of collecting this stuff was helpful to me – as it is, I imagine, to others, whatever stuff one happens to hold onto. Music may be seen as immaterial, but recent work by anthropologists has pointed out that many of our audiophilic memories are distinctly tactile – as the recent vinyl revival and “cassette renaissance” prove. I remember all too well those solitary acts of musical self-harm; messing with the brown tape ribbon, shiny as a conker. Pulling it out as far as I dared, then using a pencil to wind it back in. Pressing my fingers into the sharp corners of the tape boxes, pristine cubes of time, piling them up on my desk. There was a small power in this act of curation. It composed me. 

Composure was a watchword. In the months that followed the summer of my father’s death, I barely spoke to anyone about it. I preserved a cheerful upbeat persona for all concerned. By day I was a school prefect. The teacher’s favourite, the bereaved child who never stopped smiling. I was the girl who was chosen to read religious poems in assembly, who was placed next to the guest speakers, who looked after the juniors, the girl who knew the textbooks inside and out. Occasionally I spoke some words of automated grief. There was a passing discussion with a teacher. A brief discussion with a friend. A single visit to the school counsellor, who held court in the sports-equipment cupboard that smelt of plimsolls. The reality of My Dead Dad was for the most part converted into a transactional counter. I proffered it at parties when pressed for conversation, much like any other fact in one’s social CV, not quite on a par with having been to a Wembley to see George Michael or once having appeared in the audience of Going Live! – but something to say, all the same. 

         By the early 90s, everything felt different in the world.  Poll Tax Riots. Britpop. A Levels. Rick Astley and Sonia were firmly stowed away under my bed, along with my teenage diaries. I wore an oversize M&S V-neck jumper from the men’s department, or a lumberjack shirt and black velvet mini skirt. Most Saturday nights I fake-ID’d my way into the Whirligig club on Old Street, or the Forum in Kentish Town, where I skipped around to the Levellers and drank Newcastle Brown. I liked neither very much, but that was hardly relevant. Standing near the back of a Primal Scream concert at Brixton Academy, I knew that I was listening to something good – but I felt strangely lost and apart from the wave of emotion in the room. I missed the security of the music from my hidden stack of PWL, with their neat chord shifts, their safely settled electric pulse.

***

All grown up, and trying to understand more about the way such particular kinds of music works upon us, I read my way through some of the writings of cultural critic Greil Marcus. Marcus would probably give the contents of my beloved Now That’s What I Call Music 10 short shrift. He draws a distinction between “the sheen of perfection” and that of “production”. When you listen to certain seemingly perfect pop songs, he argues, you realise after a while that they are nothing but shine. All surface and no depth. “The fade”, he writes, is “inexorable”. I get what he says. And I’m not going in to bat for Samantha Fox at the expense of Bob Dylan and Kate Bush. (The Reynolds Girls did that with I’d Rather Jack, and look what happened there). No matter how I feel about the music of my teenage years, I can see – rationally – that there may well be nothing particular that I can claim for this kind of pop music. My compounding of pop and grief is just an accident of timing in my life. It is simply, as psychologists might say, “a potent retrieval cue”. Its effects on my mood and physiology are simply caused by the fact that it was the soundtrack for my teenage bereavement, whacked up by some compositional trickery and aching suspensions. Many of us have our own versions of these. I like Pepsi & Shirlie. You like Mahler. It’s autobiography + technique, pure and simple. But pure-and-simple rationality, and musically induced nostalgia don’t mix. Whatever one thinks, the music that shapes our teenage years, the time when our brains are most synaptically alive, isn’t about thinking. It’s about feeling. It will embed itself in ways that are profound – ways that, in turn, may reflect an aura of profundity onto the most surprising of grooves. 

***

Maybe there’s a kind of bad faith about all this misty-eyed reminiscence. It’s pretty easy to brood fondly on your teenage epiphanies, even if there’s not much in them to write home about. What’s more, in technical terms, the 1980s pop that I look back on is a particularly backward looking kind of music. Many SAW songs even rock the same chord sequence as stirring patriotic classics. And if, harmonically, these songs are what Matt Aitken refers to as “old fashioned”, perhaps their values are too. The SAW hit factory kicked off with a Drag Queen called Divine, and worked with Diana Ross and Princess, but their stars were predominantly chosen to appeal to the imagined tastes of a white, straight, teen market. ‘We were’, as Mike Stock remembers in a 2017 Guardian interview, ‘writing songs … that suited [the teen magazine] Smash Hits’:

They realised that if they put Kylie on the cover they could sell another 200,000 copies, whereas if they put some big black American diva on it you might not.

“That might sound like a racist comment”, Stock adds, “but it’s just what I heard at the time”. My fave, as they say, is problematic. Fun though it might be to muse on the 80s as the age of legwarmers and poptarts, it was also a period of idle racism, taken-for-granted sexism and overt homophobia. 

Nostalgia, for sure, is very powerful emotion – emotionally and politically – and it has a way of eclipsing and blurring all kinds of darker truths. It can be the emotional posture of choice for the politics of conservatism, for reactionary values, a warm blanket hiding and justifying kneejerk intolerance and a wistful longing to return to the good old days. This is the nostalgia that drives the global far-right of Le Pen and Trump, and which paralyses the left’s once-radical potential. Nostalgia can be the desire to restore and reconstruct a past world, imagined as so much better than the present. And while a kitsched up version of the 1950s might be seen as the go-to era for nostalgic Brexiteers, it’s easy enough to see how the 1980s could be warped too. It only takes a few feelgood movies to get the picture. Melanie Griffiths’s triumph in Working Girl makes life under global capitalism look like a breeze. All you need to get ahead is a work-ethic, shoulder-pads and a sense of humour about being objectifed. A few scenes from The Full Monty or Billy Elliot and the realities of working class austerity are smoothed into a plangent but wholesome narrative arc.  

But, as the joke goes, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. There’s a species of backward looking, termed, variously, by theorists as ‘reflective’ or ‘deconstructive’ nostalgia, which can be interpreted less as a celebratios of the past, than as a kind of critically productive longing. In this case, we are still yearning for something, but the feeling is more ironic and unsettled. It’s a longing for something to long for as it were.  

This rings true. My sentimental musical journey is not an escapist desire to return to the time or the place in which I grew up, but a knowing return to a culture which already felt lost and empty. While I might not have been able to put it into words, I was aware, at thirteen, that much in the world was changing. Much wasn’t right. As I watched the fall of the Berlin wall or the charge at Tiananmen, it felt as if the world stood on a precipice. The nine o clock news unfurled with riots on the screen. The Miner’s Strike, the Falklands War, the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh, and then-strange adverts about not-dying-of-ignorance.

 Pop culture did feel like an escape – but not an uncomplicated one. I was drawn to the SAW women, the Kylies and the Sonias, with their clockwork smiles and automatic songs, because they were peculiarly lacking in autonomy in a way that I understood. Such mechanical performances summed up the painful reality of being a 1980s teen: stoical, smiling – perfecting the art of the managed heart. Being a thirteen year old girl in 1988 was complicated. These songs captured how little power women had to pull their own strings – but the singers did so powerfully. These artists gave me, as a listener, as sense of solidarity. 

If my nostalgia is what Boyn would call ‘restorative’ in any way, then, it’s not in its longing to restore a past time or past place, to restore quality of my own identity. Here, I may not be alone. Video essayist Lindsay Ellis notes that pop and film culture nostalgia trips typically work on a thirty-year cycles. Each generation creates works of art which take both creator and listener back to their own adolescence. Listening to the music of our teens, then, brings us closer to the emotions of our adolescence, emotions which, for all their confusion and pain, also have the power of vivid emotional defiance and energy. 

For in dismissing or deriding our teenage likes with an ironically raised eyebrow we should be wary of what else we might dismiss or deride along the way. Pop music targeted at the young, female market can – and has – been critiqued for many reasons. But entwined with sincere concerns about the way these tracks shape expected ideas about gender performance, or the way they are driven by the demands of post-Fordist commodity culture, there’s an implicit risk of misogyny. Put it another way – the stuff that young women like often gets condemned as trash. Journalists may no longer refer to the ‘teenybopper’, but the negative connotations surrounding young women and mindless consumption continue. “It doesn’t matter”, as the academic Norma Coates argues, whether the female fan is seven or seventeen. “What unites them is their bad taste, as perceived by the critics and scholars who ‘know better’”.  It’s all too easy, then, for music “fans” to be breezily seen as self-indulgent “philistines” when they belong to a demographic that has been repeatedly trivialised, mocked or perceived as being just a bit dim. (It is no surprise that Jordan Peterson’s go-to insult is to compare an opponent to a “naïve thirteen year old girl”.)

And so, I hold on to my Stock Aitken and Waterman years as more than retromaniac kitsch. Dead dad aside, the music of one’s teenage years allows me to remember what I have lost. It reminds me of a time when I was possessed of the power and possibility of teenage self-belief. A time when it there was still the possibility of making a change, and when questions of equality and autonomy and justice felt fierce. Perhaps we all caught a glimpse of it again, this year and last, in the School Strikes 4 Climate Action, or when we watched a group of pupils perform an impromptu Haka on a New Zealand pavement. It is this aspect of nostalgia, the recognition of our personal force-field, that is both backward looking and progressive. It’s something we should hold on to. 

Such a vision of childhood selves – my own and others – may seem impossibly romantic, sentimental, clichéd even – as clichéd as the tunes I listen to again today. But the position of dry-eyed scepticism is an equally well-rehearsed position. We live in such an ironic age, a time where everything is emotionally hedged, where satire and sarcasm pervades every tweet, gram and meme. At such a time there are, perhaps, good reasons for not always raising an eyebrow. Things that can seem sentimental, things like “well-worn clichéd language”, as the poet John Ashbery writes, are worth defending. They can be a way of being together through time, a useful and important shorthand for emotional expression. Cliché is the language people need, Ashbery adds, when “they are trying to express something that is really important to them”. Queering the usual mandate that art should make it new, what Ashbery suggests is that there’s nothing new under the sun. Clichés have a certain kind of beauty about them. They’re “hallowed somehow by so much use” – and should be “respected”. Cliché is respectable. (Take that, Mel and Kim.) It can also be the language of community. If there is no language adequate to the circumstance we face – then sometimes an explicitly inadequate, communal language feels like a better fit. And with cliché, much like a pop sock, one size fits all. At certain times, 119bpm of Bananarama is the only thing that cuts it. Better the devil you know. 

***

Out of the kitchen window, my husband and children are playing. My daughter is performing some kind of dance routine on the grass. Her version, I think, of Little Mix’s Black Magic. She has my hair and my eyes. The scene plays out, a cine movie unfolding. The same, but different. Loss never goes away, of course – and sometimes, at a distance, pain comes into sharper focus. The frame freezes as my eyes fill, and I press play on my laptop. Kylie Minogue tumbles into the kitchen with unstoppable force, the spectral glide of her voice like an ambulance circling a bouncy castle, panic held at bay by the regular pumping bass. The happy ever after message of these melodies is, at heart, unbelievable. Incredible, even. But the lightness is a kind of protest against the greyness of things, and the siren of loss. It gives us a world, just for a moment, where things can be otherwise.