I had a lot more on my mind in 1986 than the usual teenage angst, and realising that it is now 40 years since that fateful year started comes with a bit of a shock, given that I am now on the upper edge of 56 rather than 16, with my 57th birthday less than 11 weeks away.
Not only was I about to endure my final year of high school, which was still then called the Higher School Certificate, but my father manifested the first signs of cancer in late January, was given a terminal prognosis in mid February and died mid July.
So I don’t really think that I was in a very good headspace back then. There are probably a lot of things which went on around then which I did not notice. Not enough bandwidth to cope with too much outside my own precarious world.
Despite being in late middle age now, and much closer to my own mortality (although hopefully not THAT close), I think that I am far more relaxed and content than I was as a teenager. But being a teenager sucks at the best of times. That was not the best of times, to borrow from Dickens.
Moving on, but trying to stay on track: I’m a relative newcomer to Facebook – I only signed up to it in August 2023, not long after starting my extended pre-retirement leave. It is addictive and probably quite a negative influence on the balance, as I have an unfortunate tendency to doom scroll AI generated toxic stories which have all the morbid fascination of rubber necking a car accident.
One thing that has been a rare positive in my social media journey is discovering music from that era which was totally unknown to me. One song, which gets used a lot on Facebook ads promoting t-shirts for Gen Xers, is Your Love, by a band completely unheard of by me before the past year or so, The Outfield.
The song is, despite now being 40 years old, very fresh and new to me.
Here’s a link to that song on YouTube (perhaps maybe):
If it doesn’t work, google will find it for you. You won’t regret listening to it.
There is a lot that is surprising to me about that band and their music.
The first thing is that despite their very typically American name (why would anyone but an American name a band after a baseball term), they were actually English.
The other is their sound. They do not sound English at all. They sound distinctively American. The lyrics sound American, as does the melody, and the voices.
It also does not sound like 1986. It sounds like, well… 1989 to about 1993 perhaps.
Everything about The Outfield screams anomaly at me. There is no way that I would have ascertained on my own that this was an English band doing a song in 1986 rather than an American band in perhaps 1992. That they were able to create a sound which sits totally outside their home environment is both remarkable and rare.
They, like many other more famous acts, continued to record for several decades. But the two main creative forces of the band have now been dead for several years, and indeed died in early old age. Seeing them in the video clip for Your Love looking so young and full of life feels very poignant.
Memento Mori.
Lost For Words! 