I made it a tradition
to bring up VJ day on August 15th, but decided to let it go by and return to it today by including it to a Past The Bridge posting here. The song I had in mind, ‘Going Underground’ from The Jam, (after all) has themes that slightly intersect with nuclear destruction and war.
The usual 30 second sample lifts out the chorus of the song. If you’re interested in videos that describe the mood of those nuclear 80s, the video clip of ‘Going Underground’ can be found on YouTube. You can’t miss the references to nuclear war. Personally (besides awkward TV shows about ‘Russians invading Georgia’ [haha] and others), this song perfectly illustrates that peculiar ‘nuclear war is right around the corner’-feeling of the Eighties.
The Jam (despite their great hits that established them as ‘Angry Young Men’) had an ambiguous political background though (as this fine article at Wikipedia explains) which has dogged the band’s lead vocalist, Paul Weller, for years to come. In 1979, he had announced that the band was going to vote conservative in that year’s General Election, which (as you know) was the year that Thatcher took the oath of office. What followed were years of unrests, strikes, IRA attacks and a couple more millions of unemployed British people. Four years after their announcement, the band expressed their frustration with Britain’s political state in their song ‘Town called Malice’.