Music

This is What Cool Looked Like in the Middle of the 1980s

Gather ‘round, kids, it’s time for a bit of history

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“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

I had long attributed this quote to Margaret Atwood for some reason, great Canadian that she is. However, it belongs to L.P Hartley, from his novel The Go-Between, first published in 1953.

Either way, it’s a useful sentence when you are teaching history to kids as I do, but also and especially when we are listening to music from another era and watching the visuals that go with it.

The senses of sight and hearing guide us to a different time and place with this music, almost like they do when we enter a foreign country. Even if we remember living there, in the middle of that decade, it all seems a bit strange; sometimes laughable, maybe quaint, or maybe just nostalgic to us now. We know that we’ve left it behind, never to return, but taking a four minute trip back means something.

The quote often comes to mind when I see a video or a live performance of a song from the 1980s. I was there, I mean I was alive then, and I remember that music like it was yesterday. The lyrics are in my brain’s muscle memory. But it’s all so different from our world today. Music doesn’t sound like this anymore and the people who make it don’t look like this either.

I know this song, you probably know it too. You’ve probably heard it as often as I have and could no doubt sing along with the lyrics intact, nodding your head from the instantly recognizable opening staccato guitar intro.

[embed]Voices Carry (live in New York City, 1986) / Til Tuesday / Voices Carry (1985) / Epic Records)

But it wasn’t until I saw this live performance video, in someone else’s article a few weeks ago about Songs for a Deserted Island, that I realised just how good it is. Nevermind good. Rather, just how cool Aimee Mann looks when she is playing it.

For the uninitiated, this is ’Til Tuesday playing a song called Voices Carry, from their first album of the same name in 1985. In the lyrics, the singer is describing the horrors of being in a controlling, abusive relationship. The band had a moment and made two more albums before, well, disbanding in 1988. It wouldn’t cause too much argument to say that this is their biggest hit. It’s probably not stretching it either to say that it’s their only hit.

The lead singer and bass player, Aimee Mann, went on to a long solo career spanning ten albums and is still touring today. And lest we forget her cameo on *Portlandia and her vocals on [Time Stand Still* ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMSFqXGZ5TQ)by Rush. She is an incredible talent and worth seeing live if and when she comes to your town.

But back to the middle of the 80s, when she was the 26 year old protagonist in this song. Things begin with a heartfelt thank you to the assembled crowd at the Ritz Theatre in New York City. She seems so genuine in her gratitude to be standing in front of them, able to perform the culmination of her life’s work up to that point.

It’s at :25 that the familiar opening strains of the song kick in, Mann is on bass and from the get go, is owning it like someone who has performed this song a thousand times. Her on stage assuredness shows as she approaches the microphone and begins singing at :41.

“In the dark, I like to read his mind

But I’m frightened of the things I might find”

She gives us a post punk spiky haired snarl at 1:09 as she heads into the familiar chorus for the first time.

“Oooh, shush…keep it down now

Voices carry”

It’s clear in the chorus that this is not only an 80s synth-pop standard as it might have come across in the album version. Live, it is a rock song. Strong guitar chords, emphatic drums and bass. The synthesisers are merely background colour in this version.

Finishing the second verse and heading into the second chorus at 2:00, Mann hits the high notes for the first time and truly sends it to the back row. From here, it’s clear that while the camera is not going to move from Mann because she is the star of the show, there is great energy between her and her bandmates, especially the guitar player.

The song reaches its apex from around 3:00 on, into the third chorus and Mann increasingly in command of the stage and, one imagines, the crowd in front of her. For me, the most clear and beautiful moment of the performance comes at 3:39.

Whether in the “another country” of the past or at the gigs we are still going to today, this performance of this song is the way that every live show should end. The band leaves it all on the stage and looks nothing but cool doing it. The crowd wants more, though it knows it’s not going to get it because there is nothing else, yet leaves happy all the same.

What more do we want from music than to make us feel….everything, like this song has always done for me.

Watch the video / album version of the song and see if they did it more than justice.

[embed]Voices Carry / Til Tuesday / Voices Carry (1985) / Epic Records