A horse is a horse, of course, of course

All the talk leading up to Ed Miliband's speech to the Labour conference was about how much the party ought to apologize for the mistakes of the last government.

Miliband did apologize. For Labour's policy in the 1980s. The party shouldn't have opposed the reforms of Margaret Thatcher in terms of council house sales, cuts in income tax and trade union legislation. This came after his opening words, which had invoked the memory of the 1985 Bournemouth conference, when the then leader, Neil Kinnock, had attacked the left-wing council in Liverpool.

It was all a bit odd, this harking back a quarter of a century to a time when Miliband himself was still looking at his A-level options. Apart from anything else, wasn't this what the whole of New Labour had been about? The very existence of Tony Blair was an apology for the 1980s Labour Party.

Presumably we're supposed to take from this that, although he accepts some elements of the Thatcherite legacy, he's rejecting the political morality of the era: the veneration of big business and the City.

It's not very convincing, though it may yet become so. Because there's so little to underpin it.

The policies that have emerged so far this week have been busily ceding ground to the Conservatives. Miliband says that Labour would have a maximum of £6,000 a year student tuition fees: so he accepts the idea of doubling fees from the level at which a Labour government left them, but not a tripling. And if the current government doesn't reduce the deficit, then the next Labour government will. Meanwhile Ed Balls calls for a 'temporary' cut in VAT, thereby accepting in principle the level of 20 per cent introduced by the Coalition.

The Labour Party is looking dangerously as though its policy pitch is that they're just like the Tories, only not quite as much. Ho hum.

And still Miliband doesn't look strong enough to deliver a line like 'I'm my own man' without sounding like a studious teenager, anxious to be taken seriously.

Must Read

I've never been in the Must Read column of the Sunday Times before. So I'm dead pleased with today's paper:

More Rejoicing

It pretty much goes without saying, of course, that Dominic Sandbrook is a very fine social historian (Never Had It So Good, White Heat &c.), so I'm hugely flattered by his review in the Sunday Times of my forthcoming book, Rejoice! Rejoice!

Here's just a few words:

'Turner’s book on the 1970s was for my money the most enjoyable of the recent crop on that turbulent decade, and he is on equally entertaining form here. The tone is that of a wildly enthusiastic guide ­leading us on a breakneck tour through politics, sport and culture, bursting with weird nuggets of knowledge gleaned everywhere from semi-forgotten John ­Mortimer novels to Wham! singles, football matches and episodes of Doctor Who.'

Rejoice! Rejoice!

My deep thanks to the very insightful Victoria Segal of the ever-wonderful Mojo magazine for reviewing my forthcoming book Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s. It's a 'dazzling overview of a demonised decade' apparently, and worth four stars of anyone's money.

The book is scheduled for publication by Aurum Press in April.

Recession - The Queen Speaks

I’ve been immersing myself recently in the 1980s for a book I’m working on. Which means that, while I’m a little out of touch with the details of the current recession, I am at least up to speed on the two Thatcherite recessions.

And in Gyles Brandreth’s excellent volume of diaries, Breaking the Code, there’s a fine passage where he’s trying to make small talk with the Queen in 1990. He mentions the recession, and she replies:

‘We do seem to get them every few years – and none of my governments seems to know what to do about them.’

Plus ça change...

The London Olympics

As the Olympics get under way in Beijing (or Pekin, as some of us still think of it), one’s mind naturally turns to the London Olympics.

Not the 2012 Games, obviously. The prospect of that nonsense is so horrible that all one do is avert one’s eyes and whistle loudly.

Nor even the Austerity Olympics of 1948.

No, I was thinking of the 1988 Games. Not that London actually staged the event. Nor indeed did we even bid for them. But we did think about it.

In 1979 the GLC, then under the control of the Conservative administration led by Horace Cutler, put out a consultative document in an attempt to spark a debate over whether it was worth going for the Games.

Two options were put forward. The first was the budget version, with a refurbishment of Wembley Stadium, the erection of a temporary athletes’ village and the utilization of existing venues for the minor sports. The second was a more ambitious scheme with a new stadium and permanent village to be built in Docklands.

The costs, including in both cases a major investment in the traffic infrastructure, were £545 million for the cheap option and £1.2 billion for the up-market version.

Obviously those figures don’t mean much nearly thirty years on. So I went to the Bank of England inflation calculator, and it turns out that the more expensive scheme would cost a shade under £4.5 billion at today’s prices.

That’s less than half the current estimate for the 2012 Games. Maybe I’m being naïve, or maybe they were being naïve in 1979, but what the hell’s happened to the Olympics that it’s so bloated?

Mind you, the one thing they were at least honest about back then: they admitted that the Games would make a loss, estimated at being around £220 million. We’ll be lucky to get away with that in 2012.

Neue Deutsche Welle

Back in 1980 I was living in Herford, West Germany. Our local rock venue was a former cinema named the Scala, which in the 1960s had put on gigs by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, the Who and the Cream.

The tradition continued, and I saw some great performances, mostly by visiting acts like UB40, Basement Five, Dillinger &c. The Cure were particularly fine – Robert Smith gave me some dexys before the show, and so many encores were demanded that they had to repeat songs they’d already played, since they’d run out of material.

But the gig I remember best was a mini-festival of six Neue Deutsche Welle bands.

For those who missed out on it, the NDW was a fabulous moment in rock history (starting around 1980), when German musicians embraced the spirit of punk and transformed it into something really quite special.

Part of the joy of the movement was that it covered such a phenomenal range of music. Unlike the earlier British incarnation of punk, there was no set of rules to which the bands were expected to adhere, no new orthodoxy. The result was a wide diversity of attitude and sounds, embracing not only new wave, but also electronica, scratchy funk, cabaret, ska and dub.

Very little of this travelled overseas. In Britain X-Mal Deutschland were accepted as part of goth, while the music press celebrated the austere industrialists in Einsturzende Neubauten, die Krupps and DAF. Curiously, though, the most authentic representative of NDW was Trio’s hit Da Da Da, which reached #2 in 1982. Not a record that was ever taken very seriously, of course (despite being covered by the mighty Elastica), but then, that was the point.

You see, it wasn’t all Teutonic grimness round these parts. What Britain missed was the humour and the playfulness.

To put it in context…

There was a charged political atmosphere at the time. The Red Army Faction had been defeated, and the election of Ronald Reagan as American president – which led to the rebirth of CND in Britain – was felt even more keenly in a country that was largely occupied by the US Army and that was touted as the frontline of World War III. When politicians blithely talked about battlefield nuclear weapons, Germany was the battlefield they had in mind.

Consequently NDW included a strong vein of left-wing sloganeering (Alternativ by the Front, Heil Reagan by Blitz), but it also saw a kind of rebirth of Dada, perhaps with the Residents as midwife. Groups like Reifenstahl, der Plan and Wirtschaftswunder gleefully mixed up nursery rhymes, out-of-tune horns and exaggerated vocal mannerisms, mocking the absurdity of the modern world. The very lack of overt politics felt like a political statement in itself.

It didn’t last, of course. Record companies, confronted with an upsurge of new talent, co-opted and compromised in time-honoured fashion and by 1984 were giving us the likes of Nena and Peter Schilling. All very well in their own right, but a bit like getting Toyah as a substitute for Johnny Rotten.

The band who really should have made it were Ideal, fronted by the movement’s sex symbol, the unfortunately named Annette Humpe. Essentially a straightforward new wave group, they had great tunes and even greater charm. They were briefly signed to Virgin in the UK, and were brought over for a showcase gig at the Venue in Victoria, London to promote their English-language single ‘Sex in the Desert’. It didn’t work. My brother and I were down the front, dancing with perhaps two dozen German tourists, but we were separated by acres of empty space from the handful of Virgin executives at the bar. I don’t think the press bothered to come.

Anyway, to return to that 1980 NDW gig in Herford. There were two stand-out bands. Toto Lotto shouted a lot and had an atonal sax honking away as they dismembered the Ramones’ Oh Oh, I Love Her So. And P1/E offered slightly disturbing little electronic love songs that were steeped in the history of pop music – like a cross between Kraftwerk and Suicide.

I bought singles by both bands that night, and got my copy of 49 Second Romance by P1/E signed by Alexander Hacke. Here he is revisiting the song many years later and adding in quotes from some other stuff that’s probably a bit more familiar: