3 March 1984
I think most of us would agree that a nuclear war would be a bad thing. However, I must admit that the threat of ballistic armageddon wasn’t a major concern for me in my 1980s Irish childhood. We weren’t being taught at school to duck and cover, or build fallout shelters; perhaps the official line of thought was that nobody would be nuking little old neutral Ireland, where World War II was known as the Emergency because we couldn’t get tea or bananas.
Nuclear war and destruction is a pretty consistent point of reference in pop music lyrics and videos throughout the ’80s, especially in these middle years. A lot of the time this was rhetorical, for instance as reason to party like it’s 1999. But 1984 gives us a string of number one singles that deal literally with the prospect of nuclear war, and the first of these is ’99 Red Balloons’.
No one would claim ’99 Red Balloons’ is any sort of considered political argument or stirring indictment of nuclear armament. In fact, the balloons in the song are mistaken for enemy aircraft and trigger that apocalyptic world war three: oops! I hope the powers that be learned the clear lesson of this and banned the stockpiling of red balloons.
As a song, ’99 Red Balloons’ feels as simplistic and child-like as its vision, all bounce and swirl with the occasional break for some clapping-along. Nena’s slightly awkward delivery of the English lyrics veers between twee and charming, and adds to the overall air of clumsy gaucheness. Still, there isn’t anything you could dislike about it, and the wistful downbeat coda ultimately swings the pendulum back to ‘charming’.
