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Historians have not tended to look well upon the Welsh 1980s. It was, after all, a decade of mass redundancies, pit closures, social unrest and yuppyism, all overseen by a prime minister with little personal interest in Wales and who never won a majority here.

But it was also a decade of rising disposable incomes for those who were in work, of growing consumer spending, higher home ownership and improving home technologies. For the majority, the 1980s was a time when life got better.

As it always does, popular music reflected these wider cultural and political trends.

The 1980s produced songs that were self-indulgent celebrations of life and consumption and others that expressed anger and alienation.

The 1980s began with punk still dominating artistic headlines

The music emerging from Wales in this decade fell into both camps. 1980s pop and rock is not one of Wales’ most obvious contributions to the world but it does deserve recognition and consideration.

The 1980s began with punk still dominating artistic headlines, even if its sales and popularity never actually matched its media profile. Like everywhere in the UK, Wales had its share of both punks and punk bands, although none of them made a significant impact on the wider genre.

One such band was Rhyl’s The Toilets. Their name encapsulated the irreverence of the genre but they did not last. Their lead singer, however, went on to form a new band in north Wales. The music was more rock than punk and by 1981 they were known as The Alarm.

The Alarm went on to sell 5 million records but they were never cool. Even in the early 1980s, when they were singing rebellion songs like ’68 Guns’, the band never won the critical acclaim of the music press.

Instead, they were derided as pretentious and inferior imitators of U2. Even their big hair was mocked. Perhaps it was just easier to be cool if you came from Dublin rather than Rhyl.

Nonetheless, the band’s early albums captured the anger and frustrations felt by so many young people across the UK in a period of mass unemployment.

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Most young people were not rioting or even particularly politicised but there was a certainly a resentment that affluence and opportunity were not being equally shared out.

As The Alarm sang in “Father to Son” (1985) “How many years must I waste? Today I can’t find nothing nowhere. Tomorrow I might find something somewhere. Give me a future now. I need it so badly now.”

For those frustrated with their lives, the power of such music should not be underestimated

Much of the associated blame and anger was directed towards Mrs Thatcher, who became despised in a way that no previous Prime Minister had.

The Alarm’s “Marching On” (1984) did not name her but its angry accusations seemed to be aimed at the Prime Minister and it demanded “You’d better look at what you have created and think of all the people who hate you”.

RELATED: Mike Peters and The Alarm brought the fans together as one

For those frustrated with their lives, the power of such music should not be underestimated. It helped them understand that they were not alone in feeling that way; it offered an outlet to anger that might otherwise have been bottled up or inflicted on friends and family.

Whether it was through passing on compilation cassettes, listening together in a bedroom or bouncing up and down on a sweaty dance floor, music like The Alarm gave people hope, inspiration and companionship.

Yet such rock bands were a minority taste. Far more popular in the 1980s were catchy pop songs that were an antidote to rather than comment on hard times. One purveyor of such tunes was Shakin’ Stevens, one of Wales’ most successful modern musicians. Although he came from a deprived Cardiff council estate, his most popular songs were ditties about love, a green door, and Christmas. In this, he was more in tune with popular sentiment than The Alarm and others whose emotions were politicized.

Indeed, the residual faith in the political system was fading and being replaced by growing cynicism. As the Band Aid movement showed, young people could still be moved en masse by political campaigns but most were consumed by far more personal matters. When written down, Stevens’ crooning lyrics about love might now sound vapid but the simplest sentiments can be the most powerful. “Whoa, whoa Julie, if you love me truly” was more than just empty words.

As pop stars go, success came late to Shaky. He began recording and performing in the late 1960s and eventually found mainstream fame in 1977 playing Elvis in a West End musical. It was on the back of this success, that he launched a solo career, achieving his first UK number one in 1981 with ‘The Ole House’, a song nearly thirty years old.

Shaky spent more time in the UK charts in the 1980s than any other artist

Shaky’s popularity was evident in his sales. He enjoyed four UK number ones, 15 top tens and 32 top forties. He spent more time in the UK charts in the 1980s than any other artist and also made five top-ten albums. In 2012, an official calculation of UK sales showed that he was the 25th highest-selling singles artist of all time. No other Welsh artist was in the top 60.

Shaky’s music was catchy but distinctly unmodern. Like his dress sense and dance moves, it was rooted in the sounds of the late 1950s.

Some thought him nothing more than an Eddie Cochrane impersonator. In 1981 The Times said he was the kind of pop star who was ‘a teddy-bear for the pre-teens, a sex symbol for young mums and a kitsch joke to those in between’. It even thought his flirtations with the girls throwing him kisses at a concert was “depressingly parodistic”.

The Welsh magazine Agenda said in 1981 that “This Ole House” sounded “fresh and energetic” but was still almost a novelty song. Shaky’s kitsch was confirmed by his final number one, a cheery festive tune that proclaimed “Merry Christmas Everyone”.

It is perhaps no wonder, then, that his success has been widely forgotten and Shaky is completely overshadowed by Tom Jones in the pantheon of Welsh pop’s elder statesmen.

Yet that is deeply unfair. His songs and voice were part of the soundtrack of the early 1980s for millions of people. His image hung on teenage girls’ bedroom walls across Europe. He is not a traditional historical icon but all those sales mattered to the economy and his tunes brightened up many people’s lives, whether they bought them or not. His legacy may have been rooted in a specific time, but, at that time, his cultural impact was as significant as that made by any Welsh man or woman.

RELATED: Shakin' Stevens voted best living Welsh voice by BBC Radio Wales listeners

Shaky was not the only Welsh artist in the 1980s to enjoy significant chart success. Bonnie Tyler was another and a Welsh star whose sound and look encapsulated 1980s pop. Born in Skewen, her trademark was a powerful operatic voice that conformed to all the clichés that the Welsh could sing. She had enjoyed some commercial success in the 1970s in both Europe and the USA, particularly with “It’s a Heartache”, a song that eventually sold six million copies.

Her profile then slipped until her haunting and melodramatic 1983 power ballad ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. It was written specifically for Tyler by Jim Steinman, the musical genius behind Meatloaf, and sold over six million copies worldwide. It remains the only ever American number one by a Welsh artist.

Its appeal crossed generations, while the song’s video summed up, not just how important the visual had become to the marketing of music, but also how the 1980s sometimes seemed to about doing everything to excess. In just a few minutes, it fitted in female fantasy, ninjas, supernatural choirboys, angels, and rebellious teenagers, all in a windblown, gothic setting.

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The sexual tension it showed between a teacher and pupil would not be used today, but, in the 1980s, the whole thing worked and perhaps captured a decade that was overblown and even a little confused. The official version on Youtube has been watched more than 82.2 million times.

Steve Strange helped define and popularise the new romantic movement

Neither The Alarm, Shakey or Tyler were ever particularly cool but one of their 1980s pop compatriots undoubtedly was. Steve Strange, a former punk from Newbridge, formed a band in London called Visage and worked as a nightclub host in some of the city’s most fashionable places. He helped define and popularise the new romantic movement, which merged electronic pop with garish and androgynous bright clothes and make up.

He may have been better known for nightclubs than his music but the hit “Fade to Grey” (1980) was a genuine cultural marker of how electronic music could sound like and what its makers could look like. His influence was clear in the music and fashion of Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran.

RELATED: Steve Strange tribute concert featuring Boy George to be staged in Cardiff

Strange left Wales for London in his late teens. In this, he was hardly unique and The Alarm also sang about the allure of the bright lights of Liverpool. Young people up and down the UK were attracted to the glamour of big cities and, for anyone wanting a serious music career, there were distinct advantages to being in London. Even The Smiths, a band rooted, culturally and emotionally, in Manchester, made the move. Thus the fact that Wales’ biggest artists left Wales should not be seen as a rejection of their nation.

Nor was their Welshness overlooked by others. Indeed, their accents often made it impossible for interviewers to do so. The Daily Mirror thus referred to Tyler’s ‘sing-song voice’, while Smash Hits called Shaky’s accent a fusion of Welsh with ‘a John Wayne-styled drawl’. When the two of them paired up for a single in 1983, one tabloid declared that it should be immediately adopted as an anthem by the Welsh rugby team.

Such comments may have been meant to be humorous but they did at least remind people of the diversity of the UK and Wales’ place within it. For a nation without its own real political infrastructure, such cultural “flaggings” of its existence mattered.

They also helped modernize the image of Wales. This was important because so many Welsh images on 1980s television centred on industrial decline, while Anglesey schoolboy Aled Jones reinforced all the old clichés of Wales by selling 6 million copies of his choral renditions. Indeed, the stars sometimes did their best to fight the prevailing images of Wales. In 1983, Bonnie Tyler told the Daily Mirror about the sea view from her Swansea home. “So, you see,” she said, “Wales isn’t all coal tips and mountains.”

'Where I come from you could take or leave the Welsh thing'

Shakin’ Stevens, born in Cardiff in 1948, recalled of his youth: ‘Where I come from you could take or leave the Welsh thing.’ The wider truth of that was evident when Wales voted against devolution in 1979 but the 1980s did see a gradual wider politicisation of what it meant to be Welsh.

This did not affect everyone but at least some of the urban working class began to think that Wales was getting shortchanged by governance from London. The changing attitudes were evident in the Welsh iconography of banners at the 1984-5 miners’ strike and contributed to the Yes vote in the 1997 devolution referendum. One social scientist claimed that Welshness was stepping into a void left by a fragmenting sense of class consciousness.

These shifting attitudes to Wales were evident in the output of The Alarm. In 1989 they moved away from their class-based lyrics and released Change, an album inspired by the lead singer’s new found sense of national identity.

He had learnt Welsh and a version of the record was also released in that language, making it probably the first fully bilingual album. Change brimmed with a sense of anger and frustration at the state of 1980s Wales: ‘I saw a land standing at a crossroads, I saw her wrath in a burned out home, saw her tears, in rivers running cold, her tragedy waiting to explode’ and ‘I see the proud black mountain, beneath an angry sun, under drowning valleys, our disappearing tongue, how many battles must we fight, before we start a war? How many wounds will open before the first blood falls?’

It is important not to exaggerate the 1980s shift towards a political Welshness

This open sense of Welshness did not help the band’s image outside Wales and their use of a male voice choir on the track ‘New South Wales’ drew some mirth. Even within Wales, it left the band vulnerable to accusations of clichés. But, for fans elsewhere, it was another lesson in the diversity of the UK, while it made those in Wales think about what it meant to be Welsh.

It is important not to exaggerate the 1980s shift towards a political Welshness. Blackwood’s Manic Street Preachers formed in 1986 and their early years showed none of the emotional commitment to Wales that they would display a decade later. Indeed, in 1992, Richey Edwards told a journalist: “I always think people should just be prepared to accept reality. At the end of the day, the Welsh language is basically dead. It doesn’t matter to the majority of people, so let it die a natural death.”

Contrary to what Edwards thought, the 1980s was actually something of a golden age for Welsh-language pop. Anhrefn, Datblygu and Llwybr Llaethog, in particular, all showed that innovative things, both musically and lyrically, could be done in Welsh. Even some people outside Wales noticed and Radio 1 sessions for John Peel gave these three bands a British audience.

In contrast, even when they were singing about Wales, those artists whose lyrics were in English sounded indistinguishable from so much of Western pop and rock music. Yet this is no reason to dismiss any of them as part of Welsh culture. Understanding those facets of our culture that are shared with other nations is just as important as appreciating what marks us out as different.

Moreover, few Welsh men or women have touched so many lives and so directly as its pop stars. Of course, sometimes, pop music is just something in the background, songs barely heard or noticed. But it can also be a powerful social force. It can entertain, inspire and anger. It can make people feel happy and perhaps there is nothing more important anyone can do than that.

SO, WHO ARE YOU MARTIN JOHNES?

I teach history at Swansea University and am the author of a book called Wales since 1939. I’ve also written books about Welsh sport, Aberfan, and the history of Christmas.

If I had the ability to time travel, I’d love to see a medieval town and castle but visiting neither would be safe for someone with 21st century language and dress so I’ll go for early 19th century Wales. That’s probably as far back as you can go without being killed for witchcraft or devilry.

Aside from its coal, iron and steel, Wales’ greatest contribution to the world is surely Swansea City FC.

Welsh History Month is in association with The National Trust, Cadw, the National Museum of Wales and the National Library of Wales