The Emigration Playlist: 64 years of songs. Part 8

The song came out in 1985, but first and foremost it takes me back to four years later. And another song that is part of my list but actually puts me in another country (something that's making me take stock a bit as it's going to happen again later).

It's July 1989, the French Bicentenary is happening, and I am with my first wife in Paris. A few days I'll never forget. We are with a friend in his Ford Escort Cabriolet (the chic😉!), obviously with the top down, cruising a packed city, electric with heat, excitement and increasingly pissed but good natured French people. Millions of them. I'm 27. 

All three of us work in a fancy London ad agency, and yes, it's all still a bit Mad Men there. The lunches are long, the money is good, the morals are mostly missing. I'm in Account Management - think of me as more Ken Cosgrove than Pete Campbell (I hope). I'm doing very well, getting promoted fast and on the agency's biggest and most lucrative account (the company which manufactured Ian's car). I don't actually like my job much - I was in account management, the people that schmooze clients and get yelled at by creatives - but I am still about 5 years away from realising that the whole ethical burden of the advertising industry is eating me from the inside. For now, the Moet (a client) is flowing and I can for the first time in my life afford nice things - a Paul Smith suit, a smart haircut in Covent Garden at Trevor Sorbie and, with my wife, a three bed maisonette near the river in Barnes. We're newly married, children have yet to arrive. 

Life felt good, and never more so than that weekend. The Grace Jones connection? We were playing the album of the same name a lot, and - this is what I most remember - the bicentenary parade along the Champs d'Elysees was being directed by Jean-Paul Goude, the guy who (in his own words) 'discovered' Grace, became her mentor, Svengali, lover and father of her child - in that order. It's his (somewhat contested) narrative that accompanies the Slave to the Rhythm album. Goude created Grace Jones' image. it was radical, it trashed gender norms and it was unforgettable. She was - is - amazing. Bonkers, a massive Diva, but amazing

   

The song itself is glorious - there are several versions out there. Somewhere between unalloyed, utter dancefloor joy - you just have to sway to this song - and a kind of brooding threat. The chorus builds up, questioning, waiting for a response, which Grace almost growls out. The chanting backing vocals, the relentless, skin-tight drums providing the rhythm that feels like it will never end, that fabulous little funk guitar and there's even an orchestra in there, strings and horns and all. Goosebumps on my goosebumps, every time, Trevor Horn produced it, as he did the Seal song I featured. Of course he did. Trevor Horn owned the 1980s. 

Slave to Rhythm has been on repeat for me for over 40 years. I couldn't do without it. 

Paris that July was a blast. As it turned out, the people we were staying with were, with classic Parisien shrugs and their loathing of les touristes, ambivalent about going to see the parade itself on the night. There were 2 million people in town that night they said and you'd get a better view of it on the tv (who knew the French could be so...British?!)

So on the night I couldn't persuade anyone to get out there and be part of it. We sat in their flat drinking too much wine, but being there nonetheless on the French Republic's 200th birthday. Our skipping the bedlam of the streets that night doesn't take anything from the whole weekend for me, as we cruised around the city, our friend Ian (who was fluent in French after university at Aix-en-Provence) causing French friends to double up when he spoke their language to using the powerful Yorkshire accent he'd grown up with.

Taking it all in, loving life, being young...

What else from 1985 could have made it? Another agonising choice when you realise that it wad the year that Tears for Fears released The Big Chair, and from it, Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Head Over Heels (the video for the former has a couple of super cool dancers doing a soft-shoe routine that my ex and I would drunkenly perform for friends at dinners). There was also Life's What You make it, by the legendary Talk Talk, and Level 42's best song, Something About You. Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen album was out and Appetite was playing on the radio, and The Cure also released their best song, A Night Like This. Bryan Ferry released Don't Stop the Dance - a song so cool it practically froze to my record deck. All of them came close. All of them I still listen to. But against Grace...no cigar. Not quite.

Readying myself for an emigration, I didn't chose, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent in England. It's part saying goodbye, part reconnecting with memories of 64 years spent here. You can read more about the background to this project here:

https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html