The Emigration Playlist: 64 years of songs. Part 7

I have spent a couple of days mulling over which year to cover next. Today the answer came as I heard the news that Gary Dwyer, drummer from The Teardrop Explodes has died. That immediately made the answer 1981, and the song, Reward.

It's hard to overstate just how damned exciting The Teardrop Explodes were. Liverpool was on fire with music around then - bands like Echo and The Bunnymen and OMD clustered around a club opposite the old Cavern. Holly Johnson cut his teeth there before forming Frankie, with Big In Japan, along with the guy who formed KLF, Ian Broudie who founded The Lightning Seeds, and Budgie who later became the drummer in Siouxsie and the Banshees. Plus the The Teardrop Explodes, led by the gorgeous Julian Cope, a man with so much musical charisma you wanted to lick it off his naked body.

There really hadn't been anything like this song or this band before and it was a massive crowd-puller - even the video had loads of them in it, careering around a burning dockside wasteland all piled onto an army-surplus jeep. The key thing was the brass section though. Plenty of bands had used horns before (most recently Dexy's were reprising Motown/Stax vibes), but the Teardrop's deployment of them - integrated into the heart of the song, at the very core, relentlessly pushing the pace forward with that repeated five note phrase, exuberant and loud, was really something. And the song opens with them - no build up, no settling in, just instant impact - the energy was immense. The repeating, blatant fanfare of Reward, played to the heavens, and Cope's big, declaiming vocal, is just what a 19 year old wants to hear, and I was 19. And underneath it all Reward is held together by that relentless driving beat from Gary Dwyer.

Cope was sex on legs and he knew it (and by all accounts a nightmare within a band that only lasted 2 1/2 albums before splitting, after many firings and much bad feeling). But for a kid like me just arrived at Leeds University, and meeting Scousers (for some reason many of them crossed the Pennines and ended up there) for the first time, The Teardrop Explodes felt wild, overjoyed with life, and rock-solid optimistic. Much like my new Liverpudlian mates who seemed to have have learned to style life out from an early age and who were just so funny. Years later, when I became a market researcher doing focus groups and interviews around the country, I'd often be briefed to conduct some of the project in 'the north' (a place that most Southern/London based clients seemed to believe was an entirely homogenuous set of chimney and smoke filled ex-pit towns starting 30 minutes up the M1 from Derby). South Manchester, or sometimes the swankier bits of Leeds were often the go-to locations for the work. But whenever I could persuade the company who'd hired me, I'd try and land Liverpool. Purely selfishly. The locals there had an opinion about everything, which they could usually express with candour and depth, and they always made me laugh.

Julian Cope wasn't from Liverpool, but the sound definitely was and when I think of this song - which I saw the band play live at Leeds in 1982 (a fabulous gig, Cope strutted like a God) - I think of the city. I think of my friends Carl and Dave. For some reason, I think of a night coming back from the pub, when Carl stole one of Dave's trainers by wrestling him to the ground for no reason at all and taking it off his foot. He threw it over a garden wall, again for reasons never made clear, and when challenged by Dave ("Whaddya do that fir?!"), he just flatly denied he'd done it ("You what?! I never!"). There then followed a surreal argument in a darkened Headingley street, almost profound, as Carl launched a drunken denial strategy that was in obvious conflict with the facts but had a kind of pissed ontological beauty to it. It was a prototype Harry Enfield sketch.

How did I get to that memory? A load of lads driving dangerously around on a jeep with trumpets who learned their trade in Liverpool I guess.

Great days. Great song.

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What else from 1981 might have made it? It was a fantastic year. If there was a runner's up prize, it would have gone to (We don't need no) Fascist Groove Thang by Human League-offshoot, Sheffield's Heaven 17. Scritti Politti were coming through, and The Sweetest Girl off their first album Asylums in Jerusalem is beautiful, mysterious and unique (featuring another lead singer heartthrob, Green Gartside). The aforementioned Human League had Don't You Want Me? out and the legend was born. Meanwhile The Police released Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic. All great songs, but in each case, no Julian Cope...

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