Reaching For The Stars, Vol. 130

Chart Week: September 24, 1983

Song: “It Must Be Love” - Madness

Chart Position: #37, sixth week on the chart. Peaked at #33 for two weeks in October.

As I was listening to this countdown, I had a revelation: 1983 was the year I learned about disappointment.

That may seem like a strange thing to say when I had experienced the double-barreled whammy of my favorite baseball team losing the World Series and my parents divorcing within about eight weeks of each other in 1980.

OK, so I learned about disappointment in 1980. But for the sake of this post, let’s pretend I was too young to fully comprehend what was happening to me at the time. And ignore that I cried for a good hour after Willie Wilson struck out to end the fall classic.1

So here I was in the spring of 1983 as my sixth-grade year was winding down and I COULD NOT WAIT for Return of the Jedi to hit theaters. Like most young geeks, I had been anticipating the final chapter of the (original) Star Wars trilogy since Luke Skywalker’s hand got lopped off and Han Solo was frozen in carbonite three years earlier.2 Would the Rebellion bring the dastardly Empire to its knees? Or would evil prevail and the new hope we had clung to since 1977 get stomped upon?3

I did not see Jedi the first weekend it came out. Maybe not even the first full week. I think my mom was too busy and tired to take me. I do not recall whether I had picked up any spoilers in the finals days of school or the first week of YMCA day camp. But when my older cousin checked me out of camp early one day and took me to the theater, I know I was about as eager to see a movie as a young lad could be.

Two hours later I left in a stupor. It was a very different daze than I had left the theater with in 1977, after the same cousin took me to see Star Wars.4

It was great that Han got saved. Those speeder bikes that jetted through the forests of Endor were super cool. But the movie came down to destroying another Death Star, just like in the first movie? And there were Ewoks everywhere? I was no great critic of movies at the time, but it sure felt both recycled and incomplete.

The next day I returned to camp and nervously joined in on the conversations about the movie between games of kickball and pool time. The more sophisticated members of our group thought “it sucked,” and was made for babies that bought stuffed animals. Yes, we all admitted, the special effects were cool. And - hey! - how about Princess Leia in a bikini top! But, otherwise, I think we were all a little confused by our reactions. Eventually it was time to pick teams for the next game and we dropped it.

Deep down I think we all knew a little part of our childhood had died when the final credits rolled, and were as nervous about what was to come as about what we had lost.

Oh something like that.

That’s why I will argue that 1983 was the summer I discovered disappointment. About how getting your hopes up too high can lead to those expectations being crushed. About how commerce will always outweigh art. And so on.

What the hell does all of that have to do with listening to old American Top 40 broadcasts?

Well, it may have also been the year I learned that just because a band has one awesome song, it doesn’t mean their next song will be awesome, too.

A perfect example is the band Madness, who I, like most Americans, first learned about in the summer of 1983 through their brilliant track “Our House.” That is an utterly delightful song, featuring wonderful story telling and filled with warmth a clear sense of place. An unquestioned classic of its era, a song that I’m not sure anyone has ever gotten sick of.

It’s follow-up, though? Meh. Or whatever the 1983 equivalent of “meh” was.

“It Must Be Love” was actually a recycled song for us in America. Madness had released it in the UK in 1981, and it climbed to #4 there.5

There’s nothing really wrong with the track. It is professionally done, everything in the proper place. The problem is, it was a cover of a fairly tame song not suited for Madness’ strengths. While they did a nice job, to me it sounds more like a Monkees song than Madness. It lacks the charm and joy of “Our House.” And compared to the sometimes manic energy in the group’s earlier hits, it sounds sleepy.

These two 1983 singles were the only Madness releases to crack the US Top 40. Over in the UK, they were one of the biggest acts of their generation: thirty Top 40 singles, 17 of those working their way into the top 10.

Eventually a lot of Americans my age discovered their back catalog, and the band achieved a weird, later-day measure of fame with music hipsters. “One Step Beyond” is a stone-cold classic. They never gained any traction with future releases, though.

Perhaps that was the natural arc of their career, and “Our House” was a brief moment of brilliance for a band that had already reached its prime. I think they were also so British that they would never have fully connected with the American audience. Plus they were about a dozen years ahead of when Ska bands started having pop hit records here.6 They might have stood with No Doubt, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Reel Big Fish had they shown up in 1996.

All that said, I like to think it was the disappointment with “It Must Be Love” felt by a nation that had been captivated by “Our House” that truly torpedoed the band’s career here. And taught me a valuable life lesson in the process. 6/10

  1. I did not cry at all when my parents divorced. The events that did and did not make me cry probably explains a lot about me. ↩︎

  2. Oh damn, that was in 1980, too! We are really going to have to mess with my personal history for this post to work. ↩︎

  3. I was too young to understand that there was no way a trilogy would conclude with the good guys losing. ↩︎

  4. I just realized she was responsible for me seeing all three Star Wars movies for the first time. Kind of weird. ↩︎

  5. It was their cover of a 1971 single by Labi Siffre that reached #14 in the UK. ↩︎

  6. Although, to be fair, both “Our House” and “It Must Be Love” have the ska dialed way back and are more straight-forward pop tracks. ↩︎