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.
The album opened with an a cappella chant of the furious title track’s central conceit, “Infect me with your love”, and with AIDS now affecting 74 countries, this was a bold introduction. Furthermore, Johnson refused throughout to pull his punches, whether personally, politically, or linguistically, railing at his homeland – Heartland’s “51st state of the USA”, where “pensioners are raped/ And the hearts are being cut from the welfare state”– as well as its closest ally’s foreign policy. On the aggressive yet soulful Angels Of Deception, the US “stuck (their) missiles in your gardens”, while on Sweet Bird Of Truth, their fighter jets carried “the wind of change/ Heaven sent, and hell bent” into the Middle East.