NOW Yearbook ‘84: Ian Wade and Jude Rogers

“What we’re gonna do right here is go back, way back!”

If you were really down with the cool kids in 1984, you would have most definitely have been passing around the school prized C90 cassettes featuring much copied Streetsounds compilations. And somewhere in there was Kurtis Blow’s AJ Scratch track with those immortal sampled words from the Jimmy Castor Bunch in 1972. Straight out onto The BMXs and down to throw some funky worm shapes on that strip of lino!

Or, in this writer’s case, 1984 was mainly spent in a bedroom hovering over the play and pause button to catch a clean edit (without Simon Bates) of Two Tribes, still at number one after 5 weeks! But which mix would we get this week? Now, THIS was anticipation, pop kids!

1984. A pop year of decadence, contradictions, conflict, controversy and coming of age. A year that authors (and the BBC) told us would feature impending, inevitable Armageddon. Annihilation, it turned out, came in the shape of a plethora of 12” mixes, plastic smiles, snoods, 808 drum machines, hairspray, neon and (red) balloons. How was it for you?

In the third decade of the 21st century, a time surely we wouldn’t (a) remember 1984 or (b) still be around to remember 1984, the team at NOW Music HQ presented the second in a (now) glorious series of curated Yearbooks. And what an album (and accompanying extra volume!) we have to rediscover. The sun is most definitely shining brighter than Doris Day!

So for this special episode we’re joined by two poptastic friends of the show to take a deep dive into 1984. Journalist, DJ and author Ian Wade and journalist, author and broadcaster Jude Rogers.

Jude can be found contributing musings and writing about music, culture and much more in The Guardian, Observer and The Quietus amongst many others. Her first (best selling!) book, The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives is available through White Rabbit books.

Ian has written for Classic Pop, Record Collector, The Quietus, Official Charts, Sunday Times Culture as well as doing time at such titles as Smash Hits and The Face many years ago. He has worked as a PR on BBC’s Later… with Jools Holland and occasionally DJs at Spiritland and Duckie. And his debut book 1984: The Year Pop went Queer is published by NineEight Books in July 2024.

And whilst we don’t take a forensic look at every one of the 80 tracks on the 1984 Yearbook (and the further 60 on the extra volume) we instead provide you with an opportunity to explore the sights, sounds, culture, music, genres, tribes and (school!) fashion that makes this year so thoroughly iconic for so many reasons.

Join us then, as we turn up the neon and dance through mutually agreed destruction in celebration of 1984! 

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