Somewhere behind the YEAR SELECTOR a relay clicked, the Melochronometer let out a long electronic sigh, and the red readout came to rest on 1989: the last year of the eighties, and a busy one. In March, a young scientist at CERN in Switzerland handed his boss a proposal for linking documents together across computers. The boss wrote “vague but exciting” on the cover and let him carry on, and that proposal became the World Wide Web. Later that month the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska, and in June Batman opened in American cinemas. Down here, it was a year of reshuffles. David Lange resigned as Prime Minister in August and Geoffrey Palmer took over. Air New Zealand was sold in October. And on the 1st of November, the biggest shake-up of local government in more than a century replaced a patchwork of boroughs, counties and boards with a new set of district and regional councils, many of which are still with us.
The records, as ever, are the reason to come back. This ten-song trip has a band who hadn’t toured since 1982, flown halfway round the world to make an album with a producer on his first big job. There’s a song written on a porch on a family holiday, with a visiting Irish band joining in, and a hit built on a keyboard where every key plays its own strip of tape. One of the world’s most famous musicians gets talked into digging out an old instrument he hadn’t touched in years. There’s a film theme turned down for giving away too much of the plot, an album that cost more than a million pounds, a short instrumental that closes an album, and a Canadian song that came back years later as a dancefloor track. There’s an album its own record company refused to release because it couldn’t hear a hit, and a fifteen-minute jam about a rusty roof. And more than one of these records has a Beatle somewhere within arm’s reach, but that’s what the show is for. Ten songs, one year, and a reminder that in 1989 the best records came from people who refused to stop.
Tracklist
- XTC — Mayor Of Simpleton — Oranges & Lemons
- Indigo Girls — Closer to Fine — Indigo Girls (Expanded Edition)
- Michael Penn — No Myth — March
- Paul McCartney — My Brave Face — Flowers In The Dirt
- The Smithereens — A Girl Like You — Smithereens 11
- Tears For Fears — Year Of The Knife — The Seeds Of Love
- Pat Metheny — Letter From Home — Letter from Home
- Jane Siberry — The Life Is the Red Wagon — Bound By The Beauty
- Tom Petty — Yer So Bad — Full Moon Fever
- The B-52's — Love Shack — Cosmic Thing
