Transitions to another place

It's my birthday today - and, as is my wont, I'm taking another trip down memory lane to the year I turned eighteen [and a year I have been featuring at irregular intervals throughout 2021], 1981!

Forty years ago, the media were still rammed full of Royal stories and features and souvenir pull-outs in the wake of the wedding of Charles and Diana at the end of July. In the headlines: IRA hunger strikes, the second escape from Broadmoor maximum security hospital in a matter of weeks, escalating tensions between the West and Gadaffi's Libya, the trial and conviction of John Lennon's murderer Mark Chapman, Moira Stewart became the UK's first black newsreader; and a small local cable station called MTV was launched in the US, prompting the massive rise of the music video [we had to wait a further six years before the station arrived in Britain, however]. In our cinemas: Raiders of the Lost Ark; Herbie Goes Bananas; Time Bandits. On telly: That Beryl Marston!; Three of a Kind; Miss Morrison's Ghosts.

My eighteenth birthday chart was not the greatest line-up of that year of faboo music, however... Shakin'-bloody-Stevens was at #1 with Green Door, holding off the equally dreadful Happy Birthday by Stevie Wonder, and there were not one, not two, but three of the then-ubiquitous "dance-medley" records clogging up the charts, in the form of Stars on 45, Tight Fit and the Royal Philhamonic Orchestra's Hooked on Classics. There was some redemption in the presence of Spandau Ballet and the Specials in the Top Ten, with Bad Manners, The Jacksons and Sheena Easton making up the numbers.

However, just outside the Top Ten a group of fresh-faced youngsters from Basildon in Essex were [like me] just embarking on their eventual world-conquering journey...

Depeche Mode - New Life

I stand still stepping on the shady street
And I watched that man to a stranger
You think you only know me when you turn on the light
Now the room is lit, red danger

Complicating, circulating
New life, new life
Operating, generating
New life, new life

Transitions to another place
So the time will pass more slowly
Your features fuse and your shadow's red
Like a film I see, now show me

Complicating, circulating
New life, new life
Operating, generating
New life, new life

Your face is hidden and we're out of sight
And the road just leads to nowhere
The stranger in the door is the same as before
So the question answers nowhere

I stand still stepping on the shady street
And I watched that man to a stranger
You think you only know me when you turn on the light
Now the room is lit, red danger

Complicating, circulating
New life, new life
Operating, generating
New life, new life

It seems like yesterday.

Where did all those years go?