21 March 1981
So it got to number one after all!
When Keeley Hawes’ character wakes up to her big ‘I’m-in-the-80s-WTF?’ moment in time-travelling TV police drama Ashes To Ashes, the accompanying musical cue is not the titular David Bowie track but the chorus from Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’. How has this track, less popular in 1981 than ‘Shaddap You Face’, become such a go-to ’80s signifier? Well, its chorus is short and to the point while also big and memorable, but the clue is in the lyric: it means nothing, therefore it can be used to mean anything so long as it’s dramatic.
The track as a whole takes two key sounds of the ’70s—Kraftwerk’s nascent synths and ABBA’s icy piano chords—and slows them down to a ponderous pace. And ‘ponderous’ is certainly the operative word throughout, along with ‘pretentious’. God, it’s pretentious. If, like Midge in the video (below), you went around in your dad’s overcoat and a pre-pubescent moustache, it may have given you a brief fit of the deep and meaningfuls. Otherwise, you’d almost piss yourself laughing at it.
