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Here comes the rain again

I was made in the 1980s.

Of course, I am much older than that, really. I was born in the 1960s, survived the 1970s largely intact, and I've been through a few decades after that. I am really, really old. But many of the thoughts in my head, much of the way that I view the world, can be traced back to the 1980s.

The 1980s were a terrible, terrible time. I had acne, I didn't have a girlfriend, I was rubbish at sports. The government was dismantling the remains of the economy of large parts of the country, forming the basis of the social devastation that persists to this day. Satire was brilliant, largely as a result. And music was fantastic.

This was the birth of the video age, after all. Where split screen techniques were something new, something exciting, and not something that appears on every news bulletin. Where Frankie Goes to Hollywood videos were worth staying up for. And music meant Pop. The 80s brought us the effervescence of Kylie Minogue, back when she had two names, and also the cynical material girl. The 80s would never have dared to give us BritPop, but would have recognised the Bread and Circuses of the X Factor as its own bastard offspring.

There's nothing automatically cheap about Pop, that's the thing to remember. Yes, there are superficial Pop songs, but the same can be said of Love Songs, Protest Songs, and even the painfully earnest Punk.

In 1984, Eurythmics gave the world their oddest record ever. 1984: For The Love of Big Brother.

Almost excised from the history books, this is a sumptuous suite of tracks. They - mainly - work as songs in their own right, although one or two are more tone poems than songs. The arrangements are Electronic, the lyrics simple, the delivery haunting. Together, the songs form the soundtrack to a movie that was never made (well, the movie was made, but the songs weren't used on the soundtrack). The movie that would have been made around these songs is Apple Adverts. It's Brazil. It's immersive, grey, immense.

1984: For the Love of Big Brother is of its time. It sounds like 1984. I know where I was when I bought it, where I listened to it, how it made me feel. It's in my head at the moment. Complex, heart-wrenching pop, purely of its period.

And I feel like I'm seventeen again.