1985…. I started school in ’85 and have some vague memories that break through the dust. Not many, mind. I know the year’s big film releases that would wind their way into heavy rotation in my VHS / DVD collections in years to come – Back to the Future, Fletch, The Goonies, Spies Like Us, Fletch and the amazing Subway – were fighting what was the year of Stallone at the Box Office as he flexed his way through Rocky IV and Rambo: First Blood Part II (doesn’t that make it Second Blood, or Still Bleeding?) just as Arnie’s biceps dominated Commando and Red Sonja and Bruce Springsteen’s guns were shown off across stadiums as Bossmania took hold and the tour promoting Born In The USA moved from arenas to stadiums as it went on to becoming the year’s biggest selling album.

Meanwhile as I was starting my reading journey with a book called ‘Look’ (I vividly remember this one; ‘look’ repeated throughout and with increasing frequency) I was no doubt singing along to whatever was playing on my Dad’s car radio – if my own son’s behaviour is a guide – which, in 1985 England meant Tears for Fears’ ‘Head Over Heals’, Paul Young’s ‘Every Time You Go Away’, maybe Madonna’s ‘Crazy for You’ and, undoubtedly, Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing’ or ‘Walk of Life’* as they dropped their game-changer Brothers In Arms in 1985. Aside from catapulting the band to a new level, it was the first album to sell more copies on CD than vinyl, its high sound quality suiting the format having been recording entirely digitally.

Pretty sure that Paul Hardcastle’s ’19’ must have featured heavily on the radio that year, or ‘Top of the Pops’ as it’s stuck in my head like a MAGA hat on a redneck and I’m confident I wouldn’t have looked it out for myself:

‘Diamond’ or, as I like to call him, ‘Dickhead’ David Lee Roth decided his vaudeville style twattery and ego were best suited to a solo career and quit Van Halen in April of `85. Another ego to decide he was better off without a phenomenal guitarist was Roger ‘don’t call me easy-going’ Waters, who announced that Pink Floyd was “a spent force creatively” and would, upon realising that when driven by Gilmour it was anything but, spend many a year in legal battles for control of the band’s name (turns out it wasn’t his after all) and whatever else he felt he could bitch about.

After 1984’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ single questioned meteorological facts, Band Aid expanded into the massive Live Aid concerts in July 1985 with concerts at Wembley – for which, somehow, U2 managed to sneak their way onto the performer list – and Philadelphia. Presumably because if one crowd had been forced to suffer, it was only fair for the Yanks to endure too,  Phil Collins decided he needed to be at both, carbon emissions and jet fuel be damned, and used Concorde to get across the pond to help Led Zeppelin play their first show since Bonham’s death in what Page would later call a  “pretty shambolic” performance marred by more than a slap-head drummer.

Zeppelin were sued in 1985 by American blues singer Willie Dixon – he believed their ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was a little too similar to his ‘You Need Love’. It was settled out of court and the credits for that song on my copy of Led Zeppelin II are for Page, Plant, Bonham, Jones, Dixon.

On one side of the Atlantic, a bloke called Axl Rose and his mate Izzy Stradlin formed a new band called Guns ‘n’ Roses and found a guy from Hampstead, London in a top hat shop and decided he should play too. On the other side of the Atlantic – at a school in Abingdon, Oxford to be precise – five friends formed a band called On A Friday. The band was named after the day they got together to rehearse each week in their school’s music room. A few years later, still together and now with label interest, they decided to take a new name from a song ‘Radio Head’ on a Talking Heads album. I think it’s clear which of 1985’s new bands would make the better contribution to music.

Aside from the aforementioned Brothers In Arms – and I can’t give Dire Straits a third feature, 1985 gave birth to a number of sterling albums that would sit right in this blog’s wheelhouse. Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs dropped toward the end of the year and threw about every style Tom Waits could muster at the listener, continuing the direction he’d moved to with Swordfishtrombones.

The tail end of 1985 saw Aerosmith release their first album since the previous  year’s return of Perry and Whitford and their first for Geffen, the much overlooked Done With Mirrors. In hindsight this one gets a bum deal. It’s real strong album, perhaps their best since Rocks and their first since then – and their last – written without any outside songwriters. It’s got the same wise-cracking lyrics and riff-heavy tuneage as Permanent Vacation but without the Bruce Fairbairn polish that buffed that album into a mega-seller. Instead, Aerosmith turned to Ted Templeman to produce Done With Mirrors as the Van Halen producer wanted to capture the band’s  “out of control freight train” sound. He didn’t quite succeed though and poor packaging, interest and commercial returns meant many thought the writing was on the wall for the band…  rehab and a massive comeback lay head instead but there’s still a lot of good on Done With Mirrors.

Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut Psychocandy also appeared in November, with the absolute classic ‘Just Like Honey’ destined to be a heavy player on future playlists. Hüsker Dü managed to pop out two gems in 1985 which meant New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig gave us 29 cracking tunes like ‘New Day Rising’, ‘Celebrated Summer’ and ‘Makes No Sense at All’ – of the two I still spin New Day Rising more.

Another rising album from ’85 that could easily sit as the featured album for the year -Sonic Youth released their second album Bad Moon Rising in 1985. Still more noise than tune oriented, it’s a huge leap forward from Confusion Is Sex and it’s hear you can find, in the segues between songs and in the structures, the sound and style that would be (de)tuned to perfection across their next three albums onward. The Replacements Tim could so easily sit at the top of this list too. It’s a HUGE leap for the band and a fucking great album, easily a 4 1/2 out of 5 for me. The only duff moments for me are ‘Lay It Down Clown’ and I really don’t like ‘Dose Of Thunder’ but these are but fleeting, easily skipped down points on an album otherwise choking with gold like ‘Bastards of Young’ ‘Kiss Me On The Bus’ and ‘Left of the Dial’ to name but a few.

So where do we go from here for my ‘featured’ album of 1985, the one I’ve listened to most and associate so strongly with that mid-point of the decade? It might be a surprise, a bit of a curve ball from left field (is that the right phrase?) given the above but it’s…

Hounds of Love – Kate Bush

Kate Bush’s fifth album is, to me, the album of the year. It’s the one I’ve listened to most over the years and one I continually revisit.

I also get a kick out of the fact that, as it had been a good three years since her last album The Dreaming, which itself had failed to produce anything resembling a ‘hit’ single, Ms Bush had found herself subject to a ‘where are they now?’ style column just a week or two before she debuted the amazing ‘Running Up That Hill’:

Hounds of Love is an album of two halves. Side One is ‘Hounds of Love’ – a near-perfect ‘pop’ record (I use the ” because in ’85 pop veered from the sounds captured on Side One of this album to utter tosh, perhaps ‘grown up pop’ would b more accurate) while Side Two is ‘The Ninth Wave’ – a concept-piece  Ms Bush described as being about ” a person who is alone in the water for the night. It’s about their past, present and future coming to keep them awake, to stop them drowning, to stop them going to sleep until the morning comes.”

Now take a moment to consider just how perfect a collection of soon-to-be hits Side One is: ‘Cloudbusting’, ‘Hounds of Love’, ‘Big Sky’ and ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’ would all be released as singles, all charting in the Top 40, three of them Top 20 and ‘Running…’ becoming her highest-charting single of the decade.

These were big, unabashed songs of drama and heart with the most sublime sound and production that, while very much of its time still sounds as evocative as it did 34 years ago. This is the wide-open panoramic sound that would be so wonderfully applied during this decade; pop sensibilities and sheen tied to songs of substance.

As for the second side… Just put the needle down and get absorbed. “The Ninth Wave was a film, that’s how I thought of it,” Kate would later tell BBC Radio 1 in 1992. Seven great tunes tied together by this concept that both work as a piece and individually:

The sound of Kate Bush loomed large in the 80’s. I know my Dad had a copy of The Whole Story – the compilation released in ’86 – which featured three songs from The Hounds of Love and it would get a lot of play, so these are sounds I absorbed and have stayed with me.

I got my copy of The Hounds of Love some years later. It’s an original pressing bought for less than a tenner somewhere before both the recent reissues and jump in record prices and I’ve spun the arse off it.

The now defunct Sounds magazine ran a review that summed it up: “dramatic, moving and wildly, unashamedly, beautifully romantic… If I were allowed to swear, I’d say that Hounds of Love is f***ing brilliant, but me mum won’t let me.”

It’s my blog and I can so I’ll say Hounds of Love is fucking brilliant – just pure bliss to listen to from start to finish. Yes, she may well have been (and could still well be) off her nut but that touch of crazy, wild abandon adds greatness to an album lush in sound and layers that just begs to have the needle dropped on it at each opportunity.