25 May 1985
I can vouch for Paul Hardcastle’s ’19’ being huge in 1985. As to why it was huge, my small child brain didn’t get it at the time and my slightly bigger adult brain still doesn’t get it now. Its title facticle was certainly impactful and emotive. Musically, perhaps the mainstream chart punter wanted synth riffs and electronic beats but something simpler and less brainy than New Order. Another live possibility is ‘novelty record’.
I wonder if this also mostly appealed to fans of war paraphernalia and documentaries. You couldn’t call ’19’ an explicitly anti-war record; it presents the facts of US military intervention in Vietnam and its effects on GIs. No mention of its effects on the people of Vietnam, of course. While not in the Rambo league of brainless cheerleading for gung-ho military action, the video (below) certainly shows combat footage with relish. Taking the record alone, its mash-up of blunt docu-narrative and pseudo-soulful wailing about “destruction” sits oddly on top of what sounds like incidental music from Airwolf.
The second half of the ’80s saw a wave of US pop-cultural content on the Vietnam war. Movies like Platoon and Born On The Fourth of July, plus Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born In The USA’, revisited it as an American tragedy, but Rambo and many US action TV shows featured veterans returning to ‘Nam or Cambodia for a late, redemptive victory for themselves and for militarism. This interest spreads to rubbernecking UK music acts like Hardcastle and the unlikely figures of Status Quo, and ’19’ is the first of a few chart-topping singles on these themes in the space of two years.
Whatever it was that took it to number one, ’19’ just bores me. I can’t imagine it was fun for anyone in 1985 who had a stammer either.
