Not Fade Away 1985: Yesterday's Men, by Madness

In his recent book The Eighties: One Day, One Decade, an account of those ten years as seen through the prism of Live Aid, the writer (and editor of GQ) Dylan Jones argues that that day in July 1985 was a "pinch point" for the decade, a touchstone for how we should look back at that span of years.

Jones's point is that we might have expected Live Aid to have happened a decade before, when the utopian energies of the sixties were still in play, not during a decade "demonised" (his word) as a Thatcherite free-for-all, when Britain had become in thrall to market forces. And yet there we were, at Wembley or in front of our TV sets, explicitly or implicitly showing our willingness to help our fellow man. And listening to Status Quo while we were doing it.

Certainly the story of that decade is a little more complex than the media image of the decade allows (more on this next week, I suspect), but as Jones's book also acknowledges, Live Aid was something of a pinch point for British pop culture as well.

The shorthand sneer is that it represented the return of the repressed. The stars of the sixties and seventies - Queen, Elton John, Mick Jagger, Bowie even - who had been shoved aside by punk being reinstated as pop royalty through the auspices of a charity concert.

It is something of a myth of course. Queen and the Stones were still having hits in the early eighties (even if the former's jaunt to Sun City hadn't exactly helped their credibility) and Elton John, after a lean couple of years, had revitalised his career with I'm Still Standing in 1983 and has been an ever present ever since. David Bowie, meanwhile, was having the biggest decade of his career, commercially if not creatively. Pop royalty may have been slightly discomfited by punk, but it never lost its head.

But Live Aid - as well as being a hugely impressive philanthropic gesture (which was the point, after all), and an epic media spectacle (and yes, I watched from start to finish) - also signified a kind of pivot for pop music in the eighties. Not all of it can be put down to the day itself. The fact is all the energies that had been unleashed by punk and disco in the late seventies had begun to run down by 1985 (take a look at that list of Other Contenders; see how much shorter it suddenly is), and inevitably the vacuum was quickly filled by those acts who had never really gone away.

The mid-eighties are one of those little lacunae in pop history where the thrill just dies. It doesn't go completely. There are still acts who dazzle in those years (again see next week. And the week after), but there's a lot of filler around. The Live Aid line-up typifies that. Nik Kershaw, Howard Jones, Sting and Phil Collins all played that day.

And so when we come - yes, I can hear you say, finally - to this week's Not Fade Away contenders I'm not going to claim anything more than that they offer modest pleasures. There's one glorious new addition to the list; the first appearance of the Pet Shop Boys (they will reappear at regular intervals over the next few years). There's a last appearance from Grace Jones at her most imperious (and one last chance to revel in the overblown majesty of Trevor Horn's production skills). There's Into the Groove, Madonna's first proper killer single (though the voice remains a little too shrill to love yet), there's the Mary Chain revealing their true pop heart beneath the feedback on Just Like Honey. There's Gillian Gilbert's perfect lipstick on Jonathan Demme's New Order video The Perfect Kiss and of course there is Kate, a true English eccentric, a blazing talent and someone of impressive ambition. On Running Up That Hill she's even trying to strike a deal with God. There's also the carnal urgency of the middle eight in that song ("Come on angel/ come on darling") that almost made me pick it. Oh and there's also Barrington Levy's dancehall reggae number Here I Come, which is the most sheerly joyful track on the list.

But I've opted to celebrate the craft of the song and a band who are nearing the end of their time in the British charts in 1985. And a band who at their best were always more sad than mad.

The thing about Madness is that we seem to want to remember them as middle-aged Nutty Boys, the perfect excuse for a knees up at any vaguely national celebration (an Olympic closing celebration, a diamond jubilee, a Children in Need gig). That's a huge part of their DNA. House of Fun and Driving in My Car are Madness at their most brazenly crowd-pleasing.

But in truth I never much cared for their desperate jollity. And to concentrate on that side of the band is to reduce them to one dimension. Because almost from the beginning there was also a Play for Today social realist strand to Madness. It's just couched in sentiment and warm sounds. You can hear it in Embarrassment (about teenage pregnancy), Shut Up (petty criminality) and Grey Day (I'm guessing depression).

Yesterday's Men, one last glorious gasp of gritty beauty is their anti-Thatcher song. Part of the reason for choosing it is it doesn't get recycled too often even if it is simply one of the loveliest songs they ever wrote. To be fair the video is a bit of a mess, a very eighties mix of Madness gurning and heavy-handed symbolism; not one worthy of too many MTV replays perhaps. But the song ... The song is a mournful pleasure.

We've talked before in this space about the Brill Building aesthetic, the marriage of sixties pop sonics to the Great American Songbook. It went on to inform British writers down the years including Lennon and McCartney. In the eighties it's there in songs by Squeeze, Elvis Costello and, yes, Madness. Words and music fused to tell a story, in this case a story of young people being thrown on the scrapheap by a society that has no interest in losers. "Because when you're told to start/ How far can you go?/ When your race is run/ And you already know."

Madness's run was almost over by this point. There would be comebacks. They continue until today but as a force they finished in 1986. Their puppyish innocence had by then long given way to weary experience. But sometimes the songs of experience are worth hearing. Yesterday's Men is one of them.

Other Contenders

Slave to the Rhythm, Grace Jones

Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), Kate Bush

West End Girls, Pet Shop Boys

Into the Groove, Madonna

The Boy With the Thorn in His Side, The Smiths

Goodbye Lucille #, Prefab Sprout

In Between Days, The Cure

Pop Life, Prince

Here I Come (Broader Than Broadway), Barrington Levy

Just Like Honey, The Jesus and Mary Chain

Hangin' On A String (Contemplating), Loose Ends

Faron Young, Prefab Sprout

The Perfect Kiss, New Order

Hounds of Love, Kate Bush

Duel, Propaganda

Well I Wonder, The Smiths

Perfect Blue, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions

Can't Get There From Here, R.E.M.

I Can't Live Without My Radio, LL Cool J

NME Single of the Year: Never Understand, The Jesus and Mary Chain

John Peel's Festive 50 winner: Never Understand, The Jesus and Mary Chain

And the best-selling single of 1986: The Power of Love, Jennifer Rush