Paul Simon released his seventh solo album, Graceland, in 1986. Prior to the album’s release, Simon’s career had hit an all-time low. Following a reunion with former partner Art Garfunkel, which had been successful but contentious, Simon’s marriage to actress Carrie Fisher had fallen apart and his previous record, Hearts and Bones (1983), had been a commercial disaster. In 1984, following a period of depression, Simon became fascinated by a bootleg cassette of South African township music. He planned a trip to Johannesburg in the New Year with producer Roy Halee, where he spent two weeks recording with South African musicians, who most famously included Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
The album was recorded between 1985 and 1986 and featured an eclectic mix of styles ranging from pop and rock to a cappella, zydeco, isicathamiya and andmbaqanga. Simon faced much controversy for seemingly breaking the cultural boycott imposed by the rest of the world against the apartheid regime in South Africa at the time. Furthermore, some critics felt that Graceland was an exploitive appropriation of African cultures. Despite the controversy, Graceland was a major commercial hit, becoming Simon’s most successful solo album.
During the recording of the album, Simon would remain unsure of the album’s thematic connection. He kept dozens of yellow legal pads with random words and phrases which he would combine in an attempt to define the album. The album’s title was taken from a phrase written on one of the pads, “driving through wasteland”, which was changed to “going to Graceland”, a reference to the Memphis home of Elvis Presley. In doing so, Simon believed that it represented a spiritual direction. Just as he had taken his trip to Africa to collect ideas, he also took a trip to Graceland in order to revitalise his love for music.
The album’s title track tells of the singer’s thoughts during this journey following the failure of his second marriage. As the song opens, we find the lines, “The Mississippi Delta was shining, Like a national guitar” in which the singer romanticises the spiritual home of the blues and the birthplace of modern music as we know it. In the following lines, “I’m following the river down the highway, Through the cradle of the civil war”, the singer is driving through the area where many civil war battles were fought.
Following the chorus of the song, the second verse introduces us to Simon’s travel companion with the lines, “My travelling companion is nine years old, He is the child of my first marriage”. Simon’s first marriage was to Peggy Harper from 1969 to 1975. They had one son, Harper Simon. However, Harper Simon was born in 1972, which would make the year of Simon’s trip to Graceland, 1981. We know that the trip took place later, somewhere between 1983 and 1986. Therefore, the child that Simon is talking about is more likely to be a metaphor for the emotional baggage which he carries from his first marriage. With Simon’s marriage to Peggy Harper ending in 1975, we can date his journey to Graceland to 1984. The idea of the “child” being a metaphorical one is made more apparent by the later line, “And my travelling companions are ghosts and empty sockets”, with the “ghosts” and “empty sockets” being the reminders of Simon’s failed relationships. In several lines of the song, such as “But I’ve reason to believe, We both will be received in Graceland” Graceland is portrayed as a spiritual place, somewhere which the singer and other imperfect sinners can be unburdened of their troubles and regrets. This can also be seen in the line in the chorus, “Poor boys and pilgrims with families”.
In the third verse of the song, Simon speaks of Fisher, describing the way “she” had physically left him but had then returned to let him know that she was leaving: “She comes back to tell me she’s gone, As if I didn’t know that”. Simon also tells of how his sense of observation has been insulted by his wife telling him she has left him in the lines, “As if I didn’t know my own bed, As if I didn’t know that”. In the same verse, Simon drifts into daydreaming thinking about his estranged wife with lines such as “As if I’d never noticed the way she brushed her hair from her forehead”. Following this, Simon speaks of how vulnerable love makes people and the devastating effect his marriage break up has been on him with words spoken to him by Fisher: “and she said, “Losing love, Is like a window in your heart, Everybody sees you’re blown apart, Everybody sees the wind blow”.
Some of the most curious lines of the song are found in verse five: “There’s a girl in New York City, Who calls herself the human trampoline”. Simon explained the meaning of “human trampoline” to SongTalk magazine, saying:
“That line came to me when I was walking past the Museum of Natural History. For no reason I can think of. It’s not related to anybody. Or anything. It just struck me as funny. Although that’s an image that people remember, they talk about that line. But really, what interested me was the next line, because I was using the word “Graceland” but it wasn’t in the chorus. I was bringing “Graceland” back into the verse. Which is one of the things I learned from African music: the recapitulation of themes can come in different places”.
As the Simon’s travelogue draws to a close, he sings of how the beauty of Graceland is the way in which “pilgrims” are received without question and do not need to explain themselves: “And I may be obliged to defend, Every love, every ending, Or maybe there’s no obligations now”.
Musically, Graceland is notable for featuring guest backing vocals from Simon’s childhood heroes, Don and Phil Everly of The Everly Brothers. Simon had previously paid tribute to the duo on Simon and Garfunkel’s album Bring Over Troubled Water (1970), which features a cover of the Everly Brothers’ Bye Bye Love (The Everly Brothers, 1958).
In The Story of Graceland as Told by Paul Simon, released by Legacy Recordings on the 25th Anniversary of Graceland, Simon stated, “I always heard that song as a perfect Everly Brothers song”.
The Police released their third studio album Zenyatta Mondatta in 1980, preceded by the single, Don’t Stand So Close to Me. The single gave the band their third number one single, following Message in A Bottle and Walking on the Moon from their previous album Regatta de Blanc in 1979. Additionally, the song won the band the 1982 Grammy Award for the Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. It was the biggest selling single in the UK in 1980.
Don’t Stand So Close to Me concerns a schoolgirl’s crush on her young teacher which leads to an affair, which is then discovered. Sting, who worked as a teacher before the band became successful, has denied that the song is autobiographical. He qualified as a teacher in 1974, after attending Northern Counties College of Education for three years, before working as a teacher at St. Paul’s First School in Cramlington for two years. Of Don’t Stand So Close to Me, Sting said in the 1981 biography L’Historia Bandido:
“I wanted to write a song about sexuality in the classroom. I’d done teaching practice at secondary schools and been through the business of having 15-year old girls fancying me – and me really fancying them! How I kept my hands off them I don’t know … Then there was my love for Lolita which I think is a brilliant novel. But I was looking for the key for eighteen months and suddenly there it was. That opened the gates and out it came: the teacher, the open page, the virgin, the rape in the car, getting the sack, Nabakov, all that”.
The lyrics and music of Don’t Stand So Close to Me were both written by Sting. Lyrically, the song deals with the lust, fear and guilt that a female student and a teacher have for one another. The female student’s feelings towards the teacher are found in lines such as “Young teacher, the subject, Of school girl fantasy, She wants him so badly, Knows what she wants to be”. Later in the song, we find the teacher’s feelings towards the student in lines such as “It’s no use, he sees her, He starts to shake and cough, Just like the old man in, That book by Nabokov”. The last line of the verse likens the affair between the song’s characters with the predicament of the characters in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita. In the novel, the male character, Humbert Humbert is obsessed with the 12 year old Delores Haze, whom he nicknames “Lolita” and becomes sexually involved with after becoming her stepfather. In Lolita, Humbert is described as “not quite an old man”.
Sting has often been criticised for rhyming “cough” with “Nabokov”. In an interview on sting.com, the singer said of the rhyme:
“I’ve used that terrible, terrible rhyme technique a few times. Technically, it’s called a feminine rhyme – where it’s so appalling, it’s almost humorous. You don’t normally get those types of rhymes in pop music and I’m glad”.
Don’t Stand So Close to Me features a guitar synthesiser in the middle of the song, played by Andy Summers. In an interview with sting.com, Summers said of the inclusion of the guitar synthesiser: “After Sting had put the vocals on Don’t Stand So Close to Me, we looked for something to lift the middle of the song. I came up with a guitar synthesiser. It was the first time we’d used it. I felt it worked really well”. The verses and choruses do not feature this effect. Don’t stand So Close to Me utilises a common effect in Police songs, that of the verses being quieter and more subdued whilst the chorus is bolder and bigger in sound.
A few years later, Sting was asked to perform on the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing (Brothers in Arms, 1985) due to being in Montserrat at the same time as the band were recording the song. Sting performs the “I want my MTV” line, which reuses the melody from Don’t Stand So Close to Me. After the likeness was mentioned to reporters during the promotions for Brothers in Arms, lawyers for Sting became involved and whilst early pressings of Brothers in Arms only credit Mark Knopfler with having written the song, later copies credit both Knopfler and Sting. It is one of only two shared songwriting credits on a Dire Straits album, the other being Tunnel of Love, from the 1980 album Making Movies, which includes an extract from The Carousel Waltz by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
In 1986, Don’t Stand So Close to Me was re-recorded with a new, more brooding sounding arrangement, a different chorus and more opulent production. The new version, titled Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86, appeared on the album Every Breath You Take: The Singles and was released as a single, reaching number 24 on the British singles chart. The song’s tempo was decreased for the new version and features a slight lyric change in order to compensate for it, with the line “Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov” becoming “Just like the old man in that famous book by Nabokov. The Police had already split by the time the single was released and aside from the then-unreleased De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da ’86, it is the most recent studio recording released by the band. A new music video was produced for the reworked song by Godley and Creme. The video is notable for its early use of computer graphics.
Come Dancing, from The Kinks’ 1982 album State of Confusion, takes its name from the TV series, Come Dancing, a BBC British ballroom dancing competition show which ran from 1949 to 1998, making it one of television’s longest running shows. Come Dancing is also the forerunner of Strictly Come Dancing, which has ran on the BBC since 2004.
In addition to its title inspiration, the song was also inspired by memories of Ray Davies’ sisters, who loved to dance, going on dates to the local Palais and in particular, his sister, Rene. Rene, who lived in Canada with her reportedly abusive husband but visited her parental home in Fortis Green occasionally, is notable for having bought Davies his first guitar for his thirteenth birthday (21st June 1957) after his attempts to get his parents to buy him one had failed. On the evening of the same day, Rene, who had a weak heart as a result of a childhood bout of rheumatic fever, died of a heart attack whilst dancing at the Lyceum ballroom. In an interview with NPR Music in 2014, Davies said of the day:
“[Rene] had died dancing in a ballroom in London in the arms of a stranger … Coming back from Canada where she’d emigrated to die, really, and again, being a source of inspiration … She gave me my first guitar, which was a great parting gift”.
Davies and his older brother and band-mate, Dave Davies, had six sisters. Another sister, Rose was the inspiration behind the song Rosie, Won’t You Please Come Home, from the album Face to Face, 1966.
Later, on the album Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1969), Rose inspired the song Australia. Rose had moved to Australia in 1964, with her husband Arthur Anning, who gave the Arthur… album its name.
Lyrically, Come Dancing is a nostalgic look back at the songwriter’s childhood, with memories of Rene and his other sisters going on dates at the local Palais dance hall where big bands would play. The lyrics also tell of how the Palais has now been demolished and of the changes that have taken place in Davies’ native London: “They put up a parking lot on a piece of land, Where the supermarket used to stand, Before that they put up a bowling alley, On the site that used to be the local Pally, That’s where the big bands used to come and play, My sister went there on a Saturday”.
The lyrics go on to reminisce his sisters’ dates: “She would be ready but she always made them wait, In the hallway, in anticipation, He didn’t know the night would end up in frustration, He’d end up blowing all his wages for the week, All for a cuddle and a peck on the cheek”. Davies also remembers his sister coming home from the dates in the lines “My sister should have come in at midnight, And my Mum would always sit up and wait, It always ended up in a big row, When my sister used to get in later, Out of my window, I can see them in the moonlight, Two silhouettes saying goodbye by the garden gate”. Later in the song, Davies tells of how his sisters’ daughters are now going on dates: “My sister’s married and she lives on an estate, Her daughters go out, now it’s her turn to wait, She knows they get away with things she never could, But if I asked her, I wonder if she would, Come dancing …”
In an interview with Uncut magazine in 2014, Davies stated that the song was sung from the perspective of a spiv: “It was about an East End spiv, sung in a London voice. If anybody had lost faith in us being real people, that record would restore it”. However, in a 2010 interview with Clash magazine, Davies also stated the song was sung from the point of view of an East End barrow boy: “[Come Dancing] is sung by an East End barrow boy – I think there’s cockney rhyming slang in it”.
Musically, Davies has stated that Come Dancing was an attempt to get back to the “warmer” style which had informed their songs before their transformation into an arena rock act. In his 2014 interview with Uncut magazine, Davies said: “I wanted to regain some of the warmth I thought we’d lost, doing those stadium tours. Come Dancing was an attempt to get back to our roots, about my sisters’ memories of dancing in the ‘50s”. The music of Come Dancing takes the idea of the big bands mentioned in the song and uses it to great effect, creating an upbeat pop single which rightfully reached number 12 in the UK charts, the band’s highest charting single since Apeman, from the album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, in 1970.
The single also fared successfully in the US, reaching number 6 and becoming the band’s biggest hit since Tired of Waiting for You, from the album Kinda Kinks, in 1965.
The promotional video for the single, filmed at Ilford Palace in November 1982, was directed by Julien Temple, also famous for his work on promotional videos for the Sex Pistols, Culture Club and Dexys Midnight Runners. The lyrics of the song are used in the storyline for the video, with Ray Davies starring as a spiv character who takes the sister out on a date. The rest of the band appear as the band playing at the Palais after the events from Davies’ childhood, with the spiv character solemnly watching.
Davies would also play the spiv character in the video for Don’t Forget to Dance, also directed by Julien Temple. Don’t Forget to Dance was the follow up single to Come Dancing and also taken from the State of Confusion album.
The Spiv character was also reprised for the video for the Do It Again single, from Word of Mouth (1984), once again directed by Julien Temple.
Additionally, according to Davies, The Kinks’ 1986 album Think Visual was originally conceived as a concept album centering around taking the character and putting him in the environment of a video shop.
Just like the Palais mentioned in Come Dancing, Ilford Palace, the setting of the single’s video was demolished in 2007 in order to make way for luxury flats. Come Dancing later served as the title track for The Kinks’ 1986 compilation album, Come Dancing with The Kinks: The Best of the Kinks 1977 – 1986 and the title track for Ray Davies’ 2008 stage musical of the same name, set in a 1950’s music hall.
Satpal Ram is a British man of South Asian descent who was charged and convicted of killing another man, Clarke Pearce, during a fight in 1986. The case of Satpal Ram has drawn much controversy due to his alleged mistreatment in the hands of the courts and the British Prison System due to his racial background.
According to Satpal Ram’s version of events, in November 1986, he and two friends visited the Sky Blue Indian restaurant in the Lozells area of Birmingham. Whilst there, an altercation broke out between Ram and his two friends and another group of six people who were also dining in the restaurant. The argument started over Asian music being played on the restaurant’s radio system and quickly developed into a physical fight. Ram said that he had stabbed one of the party of six, Clarke Pearce, with a short-bladed penknife in self-defence after Pearce had attacked him with a broken bottle. Pearce was taken to hospital with knife wounds and later died. As a result, Satpal Ram was arrested for murder and convicted in 1987.
Later, much debate and controversy arose in the British media when it was alleged that his barrister did not meet with him and only saw him for about forty minutes before the trial. It was also claimed that the jury missed vital evidence because no interpreter was provided to translate for a Bengali-speaking waiter who had been a witness to the events. It was also alleged that the judge was to have said he would interpret but that he couldn’t speak the Bengali language.
Accusations of severe mistreatment were also lodged against the prison system, with reports of Ram being beaten, starved, repeatedly strip-searched and made to spend large periods of time in solitary confinement. This resulted in accusations of racism within the criminal justice system. Some of the injuries inflicted on Ram by prison officers can be seen on the photo above.
Satpal Ram was finally released from Blantyre House Prison on parole in June 2002. His initial release as recommended by the parole board in 2000 was overturned by the Home Secretary at the time, Jack Straw. His release in 2002 resulted from a European Court of Human Rights ruling which stated that government executives such as the Home Secretary had no right to overrule a decision of a parole board.
Many music acts championed Satpal Ram’s cause, including Asian Dub Foundation. The band were formed in 1993 via Community Music, a London-based educational organisation which focuses on collective music making. Community Music allows people from every socioeconomic and ethnic background to come together, experiment and create music that criss-crosses styles and genres. Asian Dub Foundation consists of bassist and tutor Aniruddha Das, aka Dr. Das; DJ and youth worker John Pandit, aka Pandit G; guitarist Steve Chandra Savale, aka Chandrasonic; rapper Deeder Zaman and DJ Sun-J. The British act’s unique use of dub bass, electronica, punk guitar and Indian Classical music is often used to convey political messages, to encourage racial harmony and to challenge long-standing Asian stereotypes and preconceptions.
In particular, the group’s second album, Rafi’s Revenge (1998) had tremendous international impact. Rafi’s Revenge is the group’s most successful album to date and includes such politically inspired anthems as Naxalite, about the late 1960s uprising of landless peasants in the West Bengal region of India.
The album also features the cry for racial unity Black White …
… and Operation Eagle Lie, which alleges racist policing to be commonplace, with lyrics such as “A black man on a double yellow, yea’, he’s a criminal, A racial attack, investigation minimal”.
However, the greatest impact of any of the songs on Rafi’s Revenge came from the song Free Satpal Ram, based on the plight of Satpal Ram. Free Satpal Ram became a key part in raising awareness of Ram’s plight amongst the general public and helping to eventually free him a few years later. As with all politically-motivated Asian Dub Foundation tracks, Free Satpal Ram uses the group’s strength of simply told rap narrative to retell the events leading up to his arrest (“Satpal Ram had been in prison for ten years now, Unjustly convicted of murder, He was attacked in a restaurant, In Birmingham by racists, Having been glassed in the face, He had no choice but to defend himself”) and the inadequacies of his trial (“The all-white jury missed vital evidence, Because no interpreter was provided, The judge said he would interpret, But couldn’t speak a word of Bengali”).
The song also references other wrongly convicted people in order to highlight the major inadequacies of the criminal justice system that sentenced Satpal Ram: “Birmingham Six, Bridgewater Four, Crown prosecution totting up the score, Kings Cross Two, Guildford Four, Winston Silcott – Man, how many more?”
Of the incident, Satpal Ram told The Guardian in January 2000:
“I’ve never refuted that a man died as a result of my actions, but the circumstances have never been taken into consideration. I accept that loss of life is wrong, but if I hadn’t done what I did I would be dead now”.
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