I dreamed that I was living back in the mid-nineteen-eighties: The Specials, ‘Ghost Town’

Just a quick link, in keeping with the prevailing socio-economic mood, of possibly the best song of the past three decades. There’s a lot to be said about a(nother) disenfranchised generation left with no choice but to disengage, but you get it all here: the backbeat’s plodding fatalism, the wind howling through streets of boarded-up shopfronts, the creeping undirected menace.

I remember, back in the day, a godawful cover of this by Back To The Planet. Fucken hippies, but you could see what they were getting at: 1994 and all that was another top-down assault on youth culture, the Criminal Justice Bill suddenly getting the apathetic to sit up, shake off the comedown and take notice of the systematic erosion of civil liberties. A bit. But there’s no call-to-arms here, just mournful observation, the anatomy of market failure and government misconduct.

And oh well, here we are again, looking for something to get us in the mood (unlimited respect or something like it to anyone who gets that reference without googling). Enjoy.

One comment

  1. Pingback: Sunday Service: ‘Twas the Riot Before Christmas « Velvet Coalmine

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s