Albums I Forgot I Owned, Part 2

The The - Infected

As I've mentioned before, I grew up in the far North of Scotland. Throughout the 80s, my Mum, Dad, brother and I lived in an isolated farmhouse in the middle of a flat expanse of barley fields. For me as a teenager, it seemed to be as miserably far away from civilisation as it was possible to get*.

But even though the nearest Top Shop was 80 miles away in Aberdeen, we did in fact live at the centre of something: the global geo-political situation. Inasmuch as there ever was one, we lived right on the front line of the Cold War.

Our house sat at the end of the runway of the local RAF base, from which Nimrod aircraft would take off at 30-minute intervals to go scouting the North Sea for Soviet nuclear submarines**. Most days we would pass the main gate of the base, where there would always be a sign indicating the level of general military alert. Usually it was green, but occasionally it would escalate to orange or red.

I never paid much attention to this (after all, I had Nik Kershaw to think about), but looking back I like the fact that the expression of complex events on the global stage could be reduced to a choice of three colours on a rickety metal sign outside a military base in the middle of nowhere.

That's not to say I wasn't conscious of the Cold War. The nuclear threat terrified me most of the way through the 80s. We were well aware of the legendary four-minute warning, and I don't think there's been anything before or since that's frightened me so much. I was vaguely comforted by the fact that living next to an air force base meant there was a greater likelihood of our being killed outright in the event of a nuclear attack. I'd seen Threads, and the prospect of surviving into the nuclear winter was unimaginably terrible.

The The's "Infected" album is one of several from the 80s that deal with Cold War politics, and my brother and I used to listen to it a lot when it came out. I've owned it on and off ever since, but my current copy of it had been sitting around untouched in my CD collection for a few years. I got it out again recently because some of Barry Adamson's songs reminded me of it, and wow, it's still pretty great.

Matt Johnson was at his top lyrical best when singing about politics, and at his absolute lyrical worst when singing about relationships, so it's the political songs that stand out. "Heartland" is a fabulously bleak picture of Thatcher's Britain***, while my favourite, "Angels of Deception", has Johnson as a poor helpless individual crushed by the mighty forces of the US "occupation" of Britain (think Greenham Common), War and Religion.

The thing that strikes me about it now is that while everyone else (from Frankie Goes To Hollywood to, er, Sting) was singing about the Soviet Union, and Red Army chic**** was at an all-time high, Matt Johnson chose to write portentous agit-pop songs about the tensions between the US, Britain and the Middle East. Which is why, even though this album is 20 years old this year, it still sounds spookily relevant.

Also, they're currently selling it for a fiver in Fopp. Go to it, I say.

Sorry, that was all a bit long, wasn't it?


* Although the crushing loneliness never reduced me to eating flowers, cardboard or cleaning agents, unlike some.

** And lost climbers in the Cairngorms, but that doesn't really fit with the story.

*** Although let's not forget that for every miners' strike, Falklands Conflict, three million-plus unemployment, Chernobyl disaster and collapsed car industry, there was a member of Duran Duran. So the 80s weren't all bad.

**** As recently modelled by LC here...