FORGET MENOTS
THE THE -INFECTED
IN A YEAR’S TIME, WALL STREET’S GORDON GEKKO WOULD DECLARE “GREED IS GOOD,” BUT IN 1986 MATT JOHNSON WASN’T SO SURE. ACCOMPANIED BY A ‘VISUAL COMPANION’ 30 YEARS BEFORE BEYONCÉ’S LEMONADE, THE THE’S MASTERPIECE’S SCATHING STATE-OF-WESTERN-CIVILISATION ADDRESS IS STILL FRIGHTENINGLY RELEVANT TODAY.
WYNDHAM WALLACE
It was the year of Chris De Burgh’s Lady In Red, Nick Berry’s Every Loser Wins, and Sinitta’s So Macho. Hair was big, make-up heavy, and shoulder pads were all the rage. For many, these were halcyon days, with Margaret Thatcher heaving Britain out of a recession and Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics in full swing. But not everyone could say yes to another excess. 1986 began inauspiciously with the Washington Post reporting, “more people were stricken with AIDS in 1985 than in all of the earlier six years”. Days afterwards, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. Three months later, the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Sure, Tom Cruise was radiant in Ray-Bans in Top Gun, but what did that mean to Britain’s three million unemployed, watching it in a “cinema that lies crumbling to the ground” by a “piss-stinking shopping centre”? These were Matt Johnson’s words, taken from Heartland, the lead single from The The’s Infected, which crash-landed into turbulent times on 17 November. It was far from the only provocative tune. Johnson had undertaken, he told Jon Wilde in 1993, “to dissect the symptoms and causes of the decline of the Western empire”. Indeed, his first choice for single was the ominous, saxy Sweet Bird Of Truth – on which, alongside Anna Domino, he styled himself as “your captain calling with an urgent warning” – until, following the United States’ bombing of Libya, its April release was all but pulled because it was too close to the bone.