In their earlier incarnation, with John Foxx, ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ took its title from a 1959 French new wave film, directed by Alain Resnais, in which two lovers disagree over their memories of the nuclear attack on Japan.
‘Dancing With Tears In My Eyes’ was not Ultravox’s first attempt to wed romantic allusions to the nuclear apocalypse. Ultravox – ‘Dancing With Tears In My Eyes’ The tension between the determiner ‘every’ and singular noun form of ‘lung” implies that the apparatus of breathing is not an individual but a collective experience, referring to all the individual members of a set, without exception. However, the imagery of the line “Chips of Plutonium are twinkling in every lung” resonates most. There is also a recurring keyboard figure over a limited if unusual chord progression. Repetitive musical devices are used to reflect the cyclical breathing process, mirroring the ‘in-out’ of the vocal line. With spoken news reportage of a mushroom cloud, Bush rivals Harry in the casual invocation of Apocalyptic visions.
Written from the perspective of a baby in the womb, the song anticipates birth in the aftermath of the apocalypse with lines like “Last night in the sky, ooh, such a bright light / My radar sends me danger, but my instincts tell me to keep breathing”. While Kate Bush featured on backing vocals for Peter Gabriel’s ‘Games Without Frontiers’, ‘Breathing’ was the lead single from her third album, Never For Ever. In part, this can be attributed to an incident at a US nuclear plant in March 1979, known as The Three Mile Accident, which is alluded to in the line “A nuclear era, but I have no fear”. While the second crescendo of Cold War anxiety is synonymous with the 1980s and the Reagan-era Star Wars plan, The Clash were among several artists who saw this coming. The 10 best Cold War pop songs: The Clash – ‘London Calling’ Here we take a look at ten massive hit records that capture the energy of the atom-splitting and continue to resonate to this day. Oblivious though much of the general population was to this brush with nuclear destruction, the music of the synth-pop, new-wave era captures the sublime terror. The crisis was deescalated thanks to Director of Defense Intelligence Leonard Harry Perrot, who advised leaders not to respond to the Soviet activities in contravention of the Warsaw Pact, based on intelligence sources gleaned from a UK double-agent. Reputedly, it was the closest the two superpowers had come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, with the Soviets loading warheads onto combat aircraft at bases in East Germany. The drill was so convincing that, according to papers from 1990, declassified in 2015, the USSR was on the verge of launching a preemptive strike. With its signature “4,3,2,1” countdown, the song captures the anxiety of the latter half of the Cold War, specifically the NATO operation Able Archer, an exercise simulating DefCon 1, and the preparations for a nuclear attack.