Billy Joel’s brilliant, breathless ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ charts the major happenings of the 40 years from 1949 to 1989, with 118 non-stop namechecks in four-and-a-half minutes.
If you want a breakdown of all those people, places and happenings, then you’re spoiled for choice.
There’s the down-the-line Wikipedia entry, which links out to posts for each and every reference. There’s a Genius page that necessarily hyperlinks every single word of the near-chronological splurge.
Far Out has a go in its usual clunky fashion. Buzzfeed has a quiz. The old school get in on the act with Britannica doing an entry. There’s even a podcast fronted by Katie Puckrik and Tom Fordyce that devotes an episode to each historical phrase.
In 2009, Luke Haines released 21st Century Man, probably his best solo album by that point, and the stepping stone linking his earlier work with The Auteurs and the barmy, concept-heavy fun of his last two decades.
Its closer and title track owed an obvious debt to ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, which Haines himself often acknowledged in concert with a grin (“this is a song I co-wrote with Billy Joel…”).
Unlike Billy Joel’s classic, you couldn’t even find the lyrics to ‘ 21st Century Man’ online, let alone any examination of them. Well, now you can.
21st Century Man
A nod to T. Rex’s 1973 hit ‘ 20th Century Boy’? Or maybe The Kinks 1971’s Muswell Hillbillies opener ‘ 20th Century Man’. Or perhaps King Crimson’s ‘ 21st Century Schizoid Man’, which kicked off their 1969 debut In The Court Of The Crimson King? Less likely to be inspired by ELO’s own ‘ 21st Century Man’ from their 1981 album Time, but you never know.
Luke Haines formally launched his solo career in 2001 with The Oliver Twist Manifesto and the Christie Mary’s Own Double Entry soundtrack. Then came Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop in 2006, which absolutely had its moments but did feel a little like Luke Haines Doing Luke Haines at times.
It was 21st Century Man and especially its limited edition bonus disc Achtung Mutha that kicked open the door to the 21st Century Luke Haines: a man who would knock out a concept album a year on everything from modelling glue, ’70s NY punk and old nuclear bunkers to imagined tales of rock star animals and psychedelic British wrestlers.
“Is it an apologia for the baby boomers? No, it’s not,” Joel later said of his own hit. “It’s just a song that says the world’s a mess. It’s always been a mess, it’s always going to be a mess.”
‘ 21st Century Man’ is a much more personal song than ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’. Billy Joel rattles off the events of his 40 years on Planet Earth, but there’s no real emotional connection to anything that happens
Despite his claims to have battled the insanity of the 20th Century (“No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it”) it isn’t a song about Billy or even more broadly about his generation.
By contrast, while it covers much of the same era and even ticks off some of the same events – albeit starting nearly two decades later – ‘ 21st Century Man’ is seen through the eyes of Haines himself.
I was born in the ’60s / at the end of the Waterloo line
Luke Haines was born on October 7, 1967, just after the Summer of Love, in Walton-on-Thames.
The Tube definitely doesn’t run to Walton-on-Thames, and there isn’t a Waterloo Line anyway (the Waterloo and City Line only runs between two stations: Waterloo and Bank).
We’re guessing Luke means the South Western Railway line, which goes from Waterloo to Walton, out past Surbiton, Esher and Hersham.
Home Counties hit by a crossfire hurricane / wrong place, wrong time
The Home Counties that surround London, including some or all of: 1. Buckinghamshire 2. Hertfordshire 3. Essex 4. Berkshire 5. Middlesex 6. Surrey (where you’ll find Walton-on-Thames) 7. Kent and 8. Sussex.
“I was born in a crossfire hurricane” – the opening lyric of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ – a standalone single released in the UK in 1968. The line was apparently written by Keith Richards, referring to his own birth in Dartford during World War II in 1943.
Not technically a hurricane, but four months later in the middle of September 1968, the Home Counties were hit by intense thunderstorms and rain that ended up flooding over 14,000 homes.
Wrong place wrong time? On the face of it, Haines’s family being caught up in the weather, but it feels more like the toddler Luke missing out on the Stones (and Beatles and the rest), born a decade or so out of time.
I was a child in the 1970s / I was dancing at five years old
Luke Haines turned five on 7 October 1972, the week Gary Glitter’s ‘I Didn’t Know I Loved You (Till I Saw You Rock and Roll)’ entered the UK Top 10.
T.Rex had gone glam a year earlier with Electric Warrior, which featured ‘Cosmic Dancer’ (“I was dancing when I was twelve… I was dancing when I was eight / Is it strange to dance so late?”).
SOS to the Green Cross Code Man / I’m on the wrong side of the road
The Green Cross Man was a public information film superhero who taught kids the Green Cross Code (“Stop, Look, Listen, Think”) for road safety, in three adverts aired between 1975 and 1990. He was played by weightlifter-turned-actor David Prowse, though in the first two Green Cross ads his Bristolian tones were dubbed by another actor.
The same thing happened in 1977 when Prowse was the imposing figure under Darth Vader’s costume in Star Wars, while James Earl Jones gave him his suitably growly voice. Prowse was also the author of the 2011 memoir Straight From The Force’s Mouth).
Was Luke literally on the wrong side of the road, waiting for for Dave Prowse to help him over, or again, on the other side of the action, waiting for something to happen?
Yasser Arafat Black September
Born in Cairo in 1929, Yasser Arafat co-founded Fatah in 1959 and chaired the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from 1969 until his death in 2004.
Black September was the name given to the Jordanian Civil War between the Jordanian Armed Forces (JAF) and Arafat’s PLO in September 1970.
Founded in 1970, Black September was also the name of a terrorist organisation responsible for the kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes and officials at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, as well as other atrocities.
For all the feeling at the time that 9/11 had sparked a new wave of global unrest that ripped up the post-Cold War world order (The End of the End of History), this was arguably a return to the discord that had typified much of the second half of the 20th century.
The 1970s especially felt like the age of international terrorism, from Carlos, hijackings, continued skirmishes of various types across the Middle East and, closer to home, the IRA.
Coming of age during this this turbulent time, Haines touched on it all with controversy-courting 1996 album Baader Meinhof.
Ostensibly “about” international terrorism, it’s lyrics are more truthfully an entertaining mashup of factions and sloganeering than any sort of serious manifesto.
Black Power salutes going down in Esher
The raised fist salute probably goes back to the earliest days of man. More recently, it was adopted by trade unions and other leftists in the 1910s, before being picked up by the Black Power movement in the US in the 1960s, via a Frank Cieciorka woodcut.
The most famous Black Power Salute in history came on October 16, 1968, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos both raised a black-gloved fist during the playing of the US national anthem during their medal ceremony in the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City.
Haines would have only been one when that happened, but we bet the kids in the playgrounds of Esher in Surrey were still imitating it by the time he started school.
John Stonehouse ran away to Australia
Born in 1925, Labour MP John Stonehouse did a bad job at being a Czech spy and an even worse job at faking his own death when he left a pile of his clothes on Miami Beach on November 20, 1974.
Stonehouse had actually legged it to Australia with his mistress, but was discovered and – just over a month later – was arrested and later jailed. Stonehouse was released from prison in 1979 and died in 1988.
I ran away from home
We all did, at least once or twice, right? Even if we didn’t get past the end of our road, waiting for the Green Cross Man to help us over to the other side.
Getting over the 20th Century / Moving on I’m selling up
The 1990s hangover started early with Pulp’s This is Hardcore in 1998. Looking at the bigger picture. if history ended at Christmas 1991 (note: it hadn’t) it restarted with a vengeance by September 2001.
Coming out in 2009, 21st Century Man was released at just the right time for us to truly start getting over the 20th Century. Any earlier in what we cringingly dubbed the Naughties and Americans insisted on calling the ‘aughts, events in our rear-view were much too near to make out properly.
As we said earlier, despite its many highlights (the title track, ‘Leeds United’, ‘Bad Reputation’), its 2006 predecessor Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop had veered towards Haines by Numbers. 21st Century Man was a neater wrap-up of everything Luke Haines 1993-2009, putting a full-stop on that phase of his career.
It was the accompanying mini-album Achtung Mutha disc two that gave a clearer indication of where Haines was going next, namely delightfully off the reservation with the Outsider Music series, 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ’80s, concept albums and collaborations and everything that’s followed since. Moving on.
Tried to give us a collective memory / Everything’s turned to dust
Much has been said about how technological advances like the world wide web and streaming have “flattened” our culture, but things were already moving in that direction with the BBC’s I Love the Decades and Channel 4’s endless list shows (on which “Stuart Maconie can recall any aspect of human experience, for a fee”, as Stewart Lee once said).
It’s an inverse form of exceptionalism to think that your cultural era is especially bereft or unoriginal. There’s always been an element of nostalgia, idealisation of history and tendency to remake the relatively-recent past in the image of the present.
Quintessentially 1970s touchpoints like Grease (1971 on the stage, 1978 in cinemas) and Happy Days (1974-1984) are the most obvious examples, both being a rose-tinted revival of the 1950s with a ’70s sheen.
With all that said, even at the time the 1990s very much felt like a pop cultural snake eating its own tail. Punk might have essentially been rock ‘n’ roll with more phlegm (the Sid-fronted Sex Pistols covers of Eddie Cochran’s ‘C’mon Everybody’ and ‘Somethin’ Else’ are maybe the greatest argument), but at least it presented itself as Year Zero, aesthetically and ideologically.
Conversely, Britpop wore its 1960s references much more openly on its Union Flag sleeves and seemed to willingly embraced the idea that it was a modern retread of past glories rather than forward-thinking cultural force.
Sometimes fun, occasionally informative, often infuriating, those list shows and decade recaps packaged up a messy past into clips repeated so often that even those of us who weren’t born at the time can vividly remember the overflowing rubbish in Leicester Square in February 1979, which somehow inevitably led to the advent of punk two or three years earlier.
Our collective memories have been crafted by TV directors reaching for the nearest things in the clips library, while the actual events and those who remember it first hand are fading away.
I was a star in waiting / All through the ’80s
Luke Haines was aged 13-23 through the 1980s. He joined The Servants in December 1986 when he was 19, and stayed in the group till their split in 1991.
Haines played on The Servants debut Disinterest (1990) alongside future Auteurs bass player Alice Readman. Before then, Haines had provided guitar and piano on The Servants’ frontman David Westlake’s solo debut 1987 Westlake.
Thatcher tried to get rid of the coal
Geological changes and industrial shifts had meant a major decline in UK coal production by the 1980s regardless of the political landscape. Government and the unions had worked together to ease the transition, but on her election in 1979, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher accelerated this contraction of the industry as a matter of policy and union-crushing ideology.
Led by Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Miners (NUM), the miners’ strike of 1984-1985 was a defining moment in British industry, politics and society. The strike ended on March 3, 1985, the Conservative Party had “won” and Britain had changed forever.
What was left of the coal industry was privatised in 1994, and by the end of 2015 all coal pits in Britain had closed. Regions which were built around mining were plunged into poverty, with the economic and social effects from the increased pace of closures in the 1980s still felt today.
The whole country went on the dole
Unemployment in the UK peaked at a massive 11.9% in 1984 at over three million people. The great myth of Conservative government has always been its supposedly steady stewardship of the economy compared to the supposedly carefree tax-and-spend Labour Party.
Be it rooted in global waves (Suez), incompetence (Black Wednesday) or ideology (Brexit, Truss), time and again, Conservative governments have plunged the country into economic turmoil, with the poorest always the worst-hit.
Suzy Lamplugh disappeared
Estate agent Suzy Lamplugh disappeared on July 28, 1986 in Fulham, London. She was 25. According to her appointments diary, she was to have shown a house on Shorrolds Road to a “Mr Kipper”.
Her case remains unsolved, though she was officially declared dead and presumed murdered in 1993. The only significant suspect is John Cannan, who was later jailed for the abduction and murder of Shirley Banks, as well as other crimes.
David Bowie lost it for years / Died a death in his slap bass phase
After his remarkable 1970s, David Bowie had a mixed time of it in the ’80s. It’s not controversial to say that the man lost it. He said as much himself more than once.
As to when exactly he lost it (and when he got it back), that’s definitely a debate that still rumbles on.
The smug “official” line accepts Let’s Dance (1983) as “a great Nile Rodgers record” almost incidentally fronted by Bowie, writes off Tonight (1984), Never Let Me Down (1987), and all of Tin Machine (1988-1992) before inching back to acceptability with Black Tie White Noise (1993). Bowie’s mid-’90s output splits even this group into those who think it ridiculous and/or sublime.
The most strict write off everything past Scary Monsters… and Super Creeps (1980). Some don’t really accept anything after that until ‘hours…’ (1999) and Glastonbury 2000, or maybe even The Next Day comeback in 2013.
The truth, as always in these matters, is more messy and interesting. Let’s Dance isn’t just a great record, it’s a Great David Bowie record, and it came right on the heels of 1982’s Baal EP. Tonight was a mess but still had ‘Loving The Alien’ and those interesting Iggy reworks. Even Never Let Me Down – the definite low point – had ‘Time Will Crawl’. Between those two came the delightful Labyrinth soundtrack (1986), and ‘Magic Dance’, ‘As The World Falls Down’, ‘Within You’ and ‘Underground’ are up there with anything he did that decade. The same year saw the ‘Absolute Beginners’ theme. A year earlier you had ‘This Is Not America’ from The Falcon and the Snowman.
Revisionism can only go so far, but while Tin Machine weren’t great, they were still occasionally good and have value way beyond the narrative of rebooting Bowie. ‘Heaven’s In Here’, ‘Tin Machine’, ‘I Can’t Read’, ‘Baby Universal’, ‘Goodbye Mr Ed’ were all at least solid or better. The most frustrating thing about Tin Machine wasn’t that they were awful, but that they were almost-but-not-quite brilliant.
Before Nile Rodgers reunion Black Tie White Noise came The Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack, Bowie’s most intriguing work since the 1970s. They attracted plenty of unthinking scorn at the time, but his mid-’90s albums 1. Outside and Earthling were genuinely successful experiments that fused recent musical trends like electronica and drum ‘n’ bass with an inescapable Bowie-ness. Post-Glastonbury there were the sleek and still underappreciated Heathen (2002) and Reality (2003). We all know what happened next.
As for what Haines thinks, you can probably say Bowie’s slap bass phase (if he really had one and it isn’t just a great way to lead into the next jawdropping rhyme), starts with ‘Ashes to Ashes’, which features the most slappin’ bass in his whole back catalogue, courtesy of long-time collaborator George Murray, who played on Station to Station, Low, “Heroes”, Stage and Lodger as well as Iggy’s The Idiot. Murray was replaced by Carmine Rojas for Tonight and Never Let Me Down, with Tony Fox Sales playing bass in Tin Machine, before Erdal Kızılçay and then Gail Ann Dorsey took over. Gail Ann Dorsey can play anything.
Everybody else died of AIDS
Probably not okay, but it’s sung in a matter-of-fact rather than mocking way. Still gets a bit of a gasped laugh when it’s played live.
As of 2021, over 40 million people have died of complications arising after contracting HIV/AIDS. While there’s still no cure, those infected can enjoy near-normal life expectancy if they have access to treatment with highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). That most definitely wasn’t the case in the 1980s and 1990s, when infection really was a death sentence.
It’s believed that the peak of global HIV infection was 1997 at 3.3 million a year. It’s now at about 1.5 million new infections a year. Global deaths peaked at 1.8 million in 2005, and are now at around 650,000 a year. As well as treatment with antiretrovirals, there’s also access to PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) and PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV) that can prevent you contracting the virus in the first place.
I’m getting over the 20th Century / I’m fading out I’m burning up
Quite the opposite, really.
Tried to give us a collective memory / Everything has turned to dust
What can you do when you made your masterpiece / That’s what I did in the ’90s
The albums Luke Haines made in the ’90s: New Wave (1993), Now I’m A Cowboy (1994), After Murder Park (1996), Baader Meinhof (1996), How I Learned To Love The Bootboys (1999), England Made Me (1999).
His masterpiece? Take your pick. I’m going for Bootboys.
I was all over the ’90s
In a sense. From the tail end of The Servants to an ill-fated Mercury Music Prize nomination, to being namechecked on the cover of the Yanks go home! issue of Select magazine, to ‘Lenny Valentino’ peaking at #41 in the charts to launching Black Box Recorder, Haines was always floating around the periphery, if not exactly front and centre in the culture.
I was all over in the ’90s
Even in 2009, this was patently untrue. It was already deep into the year 2000 when Haines finally went top 40 with ‘The Facts Of Life’, and Black Box Recorder even ended up on Top of the Pops, playing right after Jessica Simpson.
The following year saw the glorious double header of The Oliver Twist Manifesto and Christy Malry’s Own Double Entry soundtrack, while BBR reconvened in 2003 for Passionoia. No top 20 singles this time around, but anything but a spent force.
The mid-00s did feel like wilderness years, with occasional flashes of brilliance, but the short-lived Black Box Recorder reunion and release of the Bad Vibes memoir at the end of the decade felt like both an exorcism and catalyst for rebirth, capped by 21st Century Man.
Getting over the 20th Century / I’m crawling out I’m covered in rust
Metaphorically as he shrugged off the highs and lows of the ’90s and ’00s. Maybe an unconscious allusion to video images of the survivors of the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 – an event that not-so-neatly ended the 20th Century and kicked off the 21st Century the way Altamont is said to have ended the 1960s. Probably not.
Tried to give us a collective memory / Everything’s turned to dust / Everything has turned to dust
Yeah I was born in the ’60s / But there was stuff that happened before
Everything that happens in our lifetimes, even before we’re old enough to experience it, is imbued with weight and meaning. Everything that happened before we were born – no matter how significant – is nothing more than stuff.
My parents were born in the ’30s / Then they started a war
“Not them personally”, Haines would sometimes interject in concert. Britain entered World War II on September 3, 1939.
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the nation of the decision with the following words:
This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 O’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.
World War II officially ended on September 2, 1945, when Japan signed documents of surrender.
Since the end of World War II, Britain has been both at peace and involved in a conflict somewhere in the world every year up to this day, everywhere from Ireland and Albania to Egypt, Argentina, Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
When it was all over / There was nothing left / A new age of austerity / Yeah, we were totally spent
Before the rock ‘n’ roll ’50s and birth of the teenager came the crushing aftermath of six years of global war. The US started to call in its lend-lease loans, government debt was about 270% of GDP, the new Labour government introduced necessary but expensive social programmes including the creation of the NHS in 1948.
Rather than an immediate explosion of consumption rationing continued well into the 1950s (meat was rationed up to 1954) in a period dubbed the Age of Austerity.
It’s an Alma Cogan escape route
The Girl with a Giggle in Her Voice, Alma Cogan was born Alma Angela Cohen Cogan in Whitechapel, London, on May 19, 1932 to haberdasher dad Mark and mum Fay Cogan.
She had a run of hit singles in the 1950s with her take on songs like like ‘Bell Bottom Blues’, ‘Little Things Mean a Lot’, ‘I Can’t Tell a Waltz from a Tango’, ‘The Banjo’s Back in Town’, ‘Willie Can’, ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love’, ‘In the Middle of the House’, ‘You, Me and Us’ and ‘Whatever Lola Wants (Lola Gets)’, eventually topping the charts with 1955’s ‘Dreamboat’.
Alma won NME’s Best British Female Singer award three years in a row in 1956, 1957 and 1958, but her last top 40 single came in 1961 with ‘Cowboy Jimmy Joe’.
The narrative goes that she, like many pre-Beatles stars, was swept away by the Fab Four and the wave of ’60s pop they precipitated – this despite her friendship with the band and her covering some of their songs.
She wasn’t quite on the verge of a comeback, but she never really got the chance. Alma was diagnosed with stomach cancer in autumn of 1966 and admitted to Middlesex Hospital. She died of ovarian cancer just three weeks later on October 26. She was only 34.
Via Top of the Pops
The BBC’s chart TV show, which was broadcast most weeks between January 1, 1964 and July 30, 2006.
The show featured a number of live (or for much of its run, “live”) performances from bands in the Top 40, usually focusing on new entries or songs on the way up, as well as including a countdown to the biggest-selling single of the week.
From 2006 to 2022, the show survived with one or two seasonal specials, while spinoff archive show TOPT2 ran from 1994 to 2017. Repeats of the original Top of the Pops (at least those that don’t feature hosts or guests later convicted of serious offences, of which there are a startlingly high number) to air on BBC Four.
Everybody likes football
Watching football in England has always been widely popular. The first FA Cup Final to be held at Wembley Stadium in 1923 between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United had an official attendance of over 126,047 and estimated attendance of 300,000.
The first televised final was in 1938, but with only 10,000 tellies in the country there were more people (93,000) watching in the stadium than at home. England won the World Cup in 1966 with a reported global audience of 400 million people. The 1968 FA Cup Final was the first broadcast in colour, but even that didn’t put a dent in the 100,000 attendance at Wembley.
While roughs have always caused trouble at the football, it was the emergence of organised hooligan gangs in the 1970s and ’80s that put the first real dent in football’s national popularity. For good and for ill, it recovered after the very distinct horrors of Heysel and Hillsborough with the publication of the Taylor report, the introduction of all-seater stadiums and wave of cash brought by Sky Sports the introduction of the Premier League in 1992.
My parents don’t like rock
Today you get mums and dads (and grandmas and grandpas) at rock gigs and festivals. Actually, you get plenty of mums and dads (and grandmas and grandpas) on the stage. Grandude Paul McCartney is recording some of his most acclaimed albums of the last half-century. The Rolling Stones have been touring almost non-stop for 60 years.
It wasn’t always so. While The Beatles earned grudging respect in some quarters, for the most part, pop and rock music was seen as a headache only good for the young.
“My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done, such as drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit,” said the 34 year old Sean Connery’s James Bond in 1964’s Goldfinger. “That’s just as bad as listening to The Beatles without earmuffs!”
Getting over the 20th Century / Crawling out of the rubble and rust
Tried to give us a collective memory / Now everything’s turned to dust
Millions of black and white TVs / Showed a man on the moon
An estimated 650 million people across the world watched the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle land on the Moon at 3.45am BST on July 21, 1969, with 16 million of them in the UK.
Colour television was first demonstrated publicly by John Logie Baird on July, 3, 1928 in his laboratory at London’s 133 Long Acre, but despite experimental broadcasts in the 1950s neither BBC One nor ITV would be able to transmit colour pictures until four months after the Moon landings (BBC Two actually had the jump on them, with a colour Wimbledon broadcast on July 1, 1967).
Not that it mattered. There were only around 100,000 colour TVs in the UK in March 1969 (that number had doubled by the end of the year), and colour tellies didn’t outnumber black and white until 1972. More to the point, the pictures being recorded by Apollo 11 were in black and white anyway.
The conspiracy theorists / Said it just can’t be true
Along with flat earth-ism, “the moon landings were a hoax” is one of the ultimate and most enduring conspiracy theories, having been mooted as early as the mid-1970s, buoyed by an entirely justified post-Watergate mistrust of authority. NASA itself issued a fact sheet rebuttal in June 1977.
The crux of the theory is: having lost out to Cold War rival the USSR in the race to get a person into space (Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin made an orbit of the Earth in the Vostok 1 capsule on April 12, 1961), the US faked some or all elements of the Apollo space programme, specifically the six supposed manned landings between 1969 and 1972.
There’s plenty of “evidence” for the theory, from the lack of stars in the background of photos to the US flag “waving” in an inappropriate manner for the Moon’s thin atmosphere. All such “evidence” has been debunked, with there also being plenty of third party proof of the landings.
Nixon pulled the troops out of ‘Nam
Richard Nixon was inaugurated as the 37th President of the United States of America on January 20, 1969. By that point the war in Vietnam had been raging for nearly 15 years, with US support for South Vietnam first being ramped up under John F Kennedy and then his successor Lyndon B Johnson. Half a million US troops were fighting in Vietnam by 1967, with over 40% being drafted.
Nixon’s victory in the 1968 election came months after the Tet Offensive launched by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam changed the complexion of the war, or certainly the conception of it to many back home in the US. After the campaign, LBJ attempted to sue for peace, but Nixon made a secret agreement with South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu to derail those efforts.
In the end it was Nixon – a hawkish voice who had urged US involvement when he was Vice President to Dwight Eisenhower back in the mid-1950s – who ended the US involvement in the war.
The initial plan was a slow withdrawal of troops to allow South Vietnamise forces to keep fighting. Withdrawals started in 1970, with US numbers down to 265,000 that year, dropping to 196,700 the following year.
While Democrat George McGovern campaigned on a policy of immediate withdrawal, it was Nixon who won the 1972 election, and on January 15, 1973, all US combat activities were suspended. General Lê Đức Thọ, Henry Kissinger, PRG Foreign Minister Nguyễn Thị Bình President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu signed the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973, ending direct US involvement in the war.
The war itself ended with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, with the last Americans airlifted out of the country by helicopter under the Presidency of Gerald Ford.
Bobby Fischer went mad
Born on March 9, 1943, Bobby Fischer was a child prodigy who won his first of a record eight US Championships when he was 14. After coming back from semi-retirement in the mid-1960s, in 1972 he defeated Boris Spassky to become the 11th World Chess Champion.
A cantankerous presence in the sport even before his world championship run, Fischer refused to defend his title in 1975 after a dispute with governing body FIDE over the conditions for his match with Soviet challenger Anatoly Karpov. Karpov was named World Champion by default, a title he held for the next decade until a 22-year-old Garry Kasparov became the youngest ever undisputed World Chess Champion.
Kasparov’s own dispute with FIDE led to a split in the sport in 1993, with the world title eventually being reunified by Vladimir Kramnik in 2006.
Despite his mother being Jewish, Fischer absolutely rejected the label, demanding in 1984 he be removed from the Encyclopaedia Judaica. He associated with the Worldwide Church of God and welcomed the coming Rapture, but quit the church in 1977, eventually moving toward Catholicism.
He was known to have made antisemitic comments as far back as the 1960s, later engaging in Holocaust denial, calling the US “a farce controlled by dirty, hook-nosed, circumcised Jew bastards” and blaming his woes on “an international Jewish conspiracy”. Fischer was never formally diagnosed with mental illness, but many close to him described him as troubled, to say the least.
Meanwhile, in the wake of his 1972 forfeit, Bobby Fischer effectively disappeared from not just chess but also public life. He didn’t play a competitive game in public for nearly 20 years. After a training match victory against Svetozar Gligorić, he returned for an unofficial “World Chess Championship” rematch with Spassky in 1992. He won by 10 wins to 5, in what was his last ever competitive match.
The Fischer-Spassky rematch took place in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, then under UN sports sanctions, leading to the US government issuing a warrant for his arrest and Fischer to live in Budapest and then the Philippines and Japan.
In his later years, Fischer’s troubled behaviour went up a notch. He not only blamed the US for the September 11th attacks (“The horrible behaviour that the US is committing all over the world … This just shows you, that what goes around, comes around, even for the United States”) but actively cheered them on (“I applaud the act. Look, nobody gets … that the US and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians … for years.”).
And our mums and dads cried / When Bernadette Whelan died
On May 30, 1974, 14-year-old schoolgirl Bernadette Whelan died of traumatic asphyxiation at Hammersmith Hospital, West London. She had been placed on life support there four days earlier after becoming what they coroner called “a victim of contrived hysteria” at a David Cassidy concert at the White City Stadium in London, which had left 800 people injured in a crush at the front of the stage, with 40 being hospitalised.
Dirty old men in flasher macs
I was thankfully never directly confronted by a flasher, but it was nevertheless a fear that was deeply instilled to every child in the 1970s and 1980s along with chip pan fires and being electrocuted on the train tracks
And whether or not they were grimly naked under their overcoat, we were all well aware of utterly filthy (in every sense) men in grubby trenchcoats stalking the streets. Do you still get flashers now, or has it been replaced by unsolicited/airdropped dick pics? I’m sure even IRL flashers don’t sport the same classic outerwear anymore, not that it makes it any better, of course.
I was frightened of Wearside Jack
Between 1975 and 1980, Peter Sutcliffe murdered 13 women and attempted to murder seven others. The newspapers called him the Yorkshire Ripper, as a tacky nod to Jack the Ripper. Despite massive failings by the West Yorkshire Police, Sutcliffe was arrested in January 1981, found guilty and imprisoned. He died in prison in 2020 at the age of 74.
Before Sutcliffe was arrested, the police were distracted by a series of hoax letters and audio recording in a Wearside accent by John Samuel Humble, who claimed to be responsible for the murders.
“I’m Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me,” said Humble on the tape sent to Assistant Chief Constable Oldfield.
“I have the greatest respect for you George, but Lord! You are no nearer catching me now than four years ago when I started. I reckon your boys are letting you down, George. They can’t be much good, can they?”
Despite the FBI and other experts’ strong suspicions that the tape and prior letters were a hoax, the West Yorkshire Police shifted their focus to the Castletown area of Sunderland, investigating 40,000 men.
Meanwhile, Sutcliffe himself was interviewed and released nine times over five years, with him being dismissed as a suspect because he did not have a Wearside accent.
Humble was only uncovered as the Wearside Jack hoaxer in 2005 as a result of DNA evidence sourced from one of the envelopes. He was convicted the following year and sentenced to eight years in prison for perverting the course of justice, serving half of that. Humble died in 2019 from heart failure at the age of 63
H-Blocks and Bobby Sands
H-Blocks was the name colloquially given to HM Prison Maze, also known as The Maze, as well as the H-shaped prison blocks inside that prison purpose built for those convicted of so-called “schedule offences” – dealt with at the juryless Special Criminal Court in Ireland which tries terrorism and serious organised crime cases.
Born on March 9, 1954, Bobby Sands was a member of the Provisional IRA and its leader in the Maze prison, having been imprisoned on firearms possession after helping to plan the Balmoral Furniture Company bombing in Dunmurry in 1976 (four civilians were killed in the paramilitary attack, two of them babies) and taking part in a subsequent gunfight with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
He refused to wear a prison uniform (going “on the blanket”) and was kept naked, following it up with the “dirty protest” in the face of prison guard brutality. He initiated the Irish hunger strike when he refused food on March 1, 1981.
The strike called for five demands: the right not to wear a prison uniform; the right not to do prison work; the right of free association with other prisoners, and to organise educational and recreational pursuits; the right to one visit, one letter, and one parcel per week; and full restoration of remission lost through the protest.
Sands was incredibly elected as the MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone in the April 1981 by-election there, standing under the Anti H-Block/Armagh Political Prisoner label, directly leading to that years Representation of the People Act, which barred anyone who had served a jail term of a year or longer from being nominated as a British election candidate.
After 66 days on hunger strike, Bobby sands died on May 5, 1981 in the Maze’s Prison Hospital. He was 27.
Come on and give me a guiding hand
I think he’s asking us, or the fates, rather than the late Bobby Sands.
Now it’s starting to all make sense / Now I’m gonna lay it to rest
I’m just an exile in a foreign land / I’m a 21st Century Man
As we’ve said, it’s only when you get a bit of distance that you can really start to unpick a year, decade or century that’s gone. Ten years into the new millennium as true 21st Man Century, Haines could finally get a proper vantage point on what had come before.
An exile in a foreign land (or, stranger in a strange land) is a biblical nod, referenced several times over, most notably in Exodus Chapters 2 and 18 (“I have been a stranger in a strange land”) and Psalm 137 (“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”).
“The past is a foreign country,” is how LP Hartley opened his 1953 novel The Go-Between. “They do things differently there.”
I’m a 21st Century Man / I’m a 21st Century Man / I’m a 21st Century Man
21st Century Man / 21st Century Man / 21st Century Man / 21st Century Man
21st Century Man (I’m an outcast) / 21st Century Man (and I like it) / 21st Century
A man who always seemed happier on the fringes, even as he cursed his lack of mainstream success, Luke Haines fully embraced his outsider status in the second decade of the 21st Century.
21st Century Man and Achtung Mutha set the scene, but Outsider Music and the concept albums that followed showed how much he meant it.
I’m gonna die in the 21st Century / I’m a 21st Century Man / I’m gonna die in the 21st Century
Luke Haines, and I, and anyone reading this are going to die in the 21st Century. I’ve already had more years in this century (23 and counting) than I had in the last (18, with the memories fading more every day). In a decade, that’ll be true of Haines too.
Whether or not you think Haines did his best, most defining work in the 1990s or more recently, he’s certainly done enough in the last two and a bit decades to earn his place as a 21st Century Man.
pifl 
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