O Superman (Laurie Anderson, 1981)

When we were young, we would from time to time (if we were lucky) hear a song which was (we were convinced) The Future Of Music^TM. I was raised, musically, on The Beatles via my mother’s copy of the Oldies But Goldies LP. I remember turning to her during Top of the Pops (the BBC’s long-running TV chart rundown) and telling her flatly, aged 14, “Now THAT’S music!” It was School’s Out by Alice Cooper and I was adolescently bewitched by the fury and the theatricality of the performance.

 I felt the same thing when Chic first emerged. That coincided with my first three years as a DJ and Nile Rodger’s instinctive feel for an inescapable hook made a profound impression on me. I believed that Chic could make the telephone directory catchy. And then, in my final year at college, O Superman blindsided me.

 By 1981 we were all used to hits where the rhythm was everything. Soul music had become disco music and in the early years of the Thatcher reign we were all dancing ourselves into numbness. Anything with a bass drum beat would do. But Laurie Anderson arrived with a vocal rhythm track, and more than that a rhythm track that was laughing bitterly with us at the state of the world. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. It was music stripped bare, it was punk, it was ambient pop, a catchy version of Brian Eno’s pioneering abstract 1970s albums Discreet Music and Music for Airports. It was eight and a half minutes long!

 The lyrics were equally bleak, tantalisingly obscure: something about American planes (made in America) and about authority figures – O Superman, O judge, O mom and dad. That phrase, we learned later, was based on an aria – Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père – from Massenet’s 1885 opera Le Cid. The voice that spoke them (“Who is this really?”) was futuristic, electronic.

 The sparseness of the music made every word ominous and memorable. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” the optimistic unofficial motto of the US postal service, becomes a certainty that snow, rain, heat and gloom will try to stay those couriers. The decline of all things, overturning a phrase from the Tao Te Ching, suggests that Mom may be the least hopeful refuge of all: “when love is gone, there's always justice; and when justice is gone, there's always force; and when force is gone, there's always Mom.” The song always leaves me feeling unbearably sad.

 Championed by the original influencer, DJ John Peel, O Superman rose to #2 in the UK chart. But the song polarised opinion. It appeared in the Top Tens of Best and Least Favourite UK Hits of 1981.

 Eagerly anticipating the revolution which O Superman surely heralded, I waited for more of the same. There were green shoots. In the same year Rupert Hine released Immunity, the first of three albums of darkly complex electropop. Those LPs seemed to fulfil the musical promise of Quantum Jump, his quirky 1970s band which had an unexpected hit with their song The Lone Ranger. Hine wrote not of love but of solitary confinement, snipers and dystopias.

 Hine had his greatest successes as a producer of others: he made Tina Turner’s comeback album Private Dancer and (more significantly for me) the debut album of electropop artist Howard Jones, Human’s Lib. Jones was very much the idealist, and his optimistic songs chimed with my early 1970s musical roots – hippy ideals for the electropop age. I thought Jones was part of Laurie Anderson’s, Rupert Hine’s and my own Future Of Music^TM.

 If one thing is certain it is that nothing lasts forever. Everything is a fad, a phase. There has never been another O Superman; and Howard Jones now plays his greatest hits for the elderly on the 1980s retro circuit.

 But I did get to see Anderson perform O Superman live, in the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, in the early 1980s. My seat was next to the lighting operator in the gallery and in a pre-digital age he manipulated slides and shadows with a set of strings like a dexterous puppet master. Laurie Anderson was everything I hoped for: imaginative, innovative, amusing, amused. She played a violin fitted with a pick-up, across which she dragged a bow “strung” with magnetic tape. As she toyed with the tempo the word recorded onto the tape gradually came into focus. Bowed in one direction it said “Say”; bowed in the other it said “Yes”. Sayes. Say. Yes. Say yes. I was mesmerised.