Australia in the 1980s

Quote: ‘I’ve always wanted to do a collection of my acoustic numbers with the London Philharmonic.’ (David St Hubbins, This Is Spinal Tap, 1983)

When we think of 1980s music, acoustic and folk are not styles that immediately come to mind. We tend to think more of pop music performed by attractive, well-groomed performers accompanied by synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers. Acoustic music was unfashionable. This, for me, made it appealing. I’d like to talk about some of my favourite 80s acoustic music, albums that managed to penetrate the synth pop jungle. Up-to-date production values were not what made these albums good. It was the songs.

In 1982 Bruce Springsteen released Nebraska. He had recorded the songs at home as demos for his band but decided to release them as they were. Pared back to the basics of acoustic guitar and harmonica, his songs held up as haunting narratives of working class desperation.

I remember my friend Tim Toni telling me around 1985 about new British music from Tracey Thorn, Ben Watt and Billy Bragg. Thorn and Watt released acoustic-ish solo albums before joining forces to form Everything But the Girl.

The folk revival of the 1950s accommodated a set of ideological presuppositions from the political left and included minority voices. Billy Bragg conveyed this kind of folk protest sensibility with a solo electric guitar. It wasn’t acoustic, but he was an angry young man standing alone on stage railing against the establishment. I saw him at Selina’s. I think it was in 1988.

Elvis Costello went acoustic in 1986 with his gem of an album King of America (his best work in my book). Then he toured Australia, playing acoustically with T-Bone Burnett at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. I seem to recall that the album flopped, and Elvis went back to recording with the Attractions, quickly releasing the mediocre Blood and Chocolate, which was well received. Go figure.

Meanwhile stateside, Michelle Shocked appeared with a punk-folk attitude on her roughly recorded debut album The Texas Campfire Tapes. Suzanne Vega emerged from the New York folk scene to sing smart, poetic songs in a gentle voice. Overseas she is remembered for ‘Luka’, her 1987 song about domestic violence, but here in Australia we had already latched on to her first album, the one with ’Marlene on the Wall’.

Tracy Chapman bobbed up with a cracker of a first album. She was one of the few Americans in the Reagan era who were ‘talking about a revolution’.

The Indigo Girls had a radio hit in 1989 with ‘Closer to Fine’, from their self-titled album. There were other acoustic acts too, like the Roches and Bruce Cockburn. Can you think of more examples? Is it drawing a long bow to call this 80s phenomenon ‘the second folk revival’?

The Violent Femmes used acoustic instruments to play a kind of punk folk. ‘Blister in the Sun’ is one of those 80s songs whose appreciation has grown over the years. Another is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, which he wrote in the 80s. It appeared on his 1984 album Various Positions. Bob Dylan helped to popularize it by performing it in concert in 1988. Speaking of Dylan, for whom this is regarded by many as a low period, he wrote some of his best songs in the 80s — ‘Every Grain of Sand’, ‘Jokerman’, ‘Blind Willie McTell’, ‘Dark Eyes’, ‘Brownsville Girl’ and the entire Oh Mercy album. When he was persuaded in 1985 to go for a 1980s approach to production, Arthur Baker was recruited to mix the recordings. The result was Empire Burlesque, which, with its gated snare drums and synths, now sounds horribly dated, despite the good songs.

And what of folk music in the 80s? Of course there were artists who had stuck to playing folk styles for decades. But in terms of new music, the label had lost its meaning. Unsupportable notions of authenticity had been exposed long ago. Ethnic or folkloric musical styles from Latin America, Africa and elsewhere were re-branded as world music, enabling record shops to group them in a category. In 1986 Paul Simon introduced world music to the masses with the huge-selling Graceland.

At the end of the decade (November 1989 in fact), MTV Unplugged first went to air in the US. And so began the 90s phenomenon of rock stars who usually use electric instruments reinterpreting their hits with acoustic guitars.