Ridicule is Nothing to be Scared of

Although they're more than seven years gone, the 80s in Britain still lack a coherent cartography. It may well be that this map has been impossible to construct while Britain has remained under the Conservative yoke and that, indeed, it will only become possible if Labour win the forthcoming election: the decade was, after all, the acknowledged zenith of Thatcher and her works, and her influence - although rejected by a significant proportion of the population - is still far from dead. For this reason, the 80s remain an ideological battleground, but simply to conflate the entire decade with Thatcherism is to elide those years before the 1985 miners' defeat when it was far from definite that the Conservatives would be able to rejoice in their new world order.

Many different points could be taken to sum up the 80s. In pop, for instance, you might think of the late decade's three 'Summers of Love' (87-89); the material girls of mid-decade, all dressed in hair rags, sweat bands and ra-ra skirts; the weird synthetic chants of early Hip Hop and Electro; even the CD marketing of Live Aid. The most interesting point is, however, the very early part of the decade, to be specific, the year 1981: that pop moment between the death of Ian Curtis and the Human League's US success with 'Don't You Want Me', and the very beginning of what the Americans for a while called the 'Second British Invasion'.

Take a hit from spring 1981, the Human League's 'Sound of the Crowd': their second record since half the group (the musicians) left, to be replaced by two young women, Joanne Catherall and Suzanne Sulley, whom Phil Oakey found dancing in Sheffield's Crazy Daisy night club. 'Sound of the Crowd' is a slice of synthetic hysteria, its obtuse lyrics - 'Put your hand in a party wave' - suggesting the transcendence of isolation through communal dancing and/or posing. The song's Moroder throb made you want to sign up immediately. Best of all was the League's first Top of the Pops: Phil Oakey androgynous in leather jacket and lippy, Ian Burden sweeping in from the back to play just one repeated note, but it was Suzanne and Joanne who stole the show with their easy gyrations, as the crowd became stars.

It was a liberating moment, that time when white post-punk rigour melted into black American post-disco. No record embodied it better than New Order's 'Everything's Gone Green', where Bernard Sumner's marked-by-death gloom gleefully dissolved in a cosmic, shimmering Moroder pulse. It felt like Spring: contrary to the perceived bland surface of the period, the early 80s were full of records and performances that tested the bounds of what was thought possible: whether it be the Human League or New Order, Kraftwerk's 'Numbers' and Afrika Bambaataa's 'Planet Rock', Orange Juice's 'Poor Old Soul' and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's extraordinary 'The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel'. This was the future.

On planet pop, 1981 was a successful year for Aneka and Joe Dolce, the Police and Shakin' Stevens, and the rivetingly dreadful sequence of Starsound's 'Stars on 45', an early sampling soundalike. Adam and the Ants still ruled after their big splash in 1980: four top tens, two number ones including their last great record, 'Prince Charming', whose hookline - 'ridicule is nothing to be scared of' - could stand as this period's epitaph. The New Romantics, as everyone had finally agreed to call them, were still calling the shots: Spandau Ballet had a very big hit with 'Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On)' and Blue Rondo à la Turk were waiting in the wings - at least as far as London was concerned.

1981's most enduring moments occurred away from a capital already feeling the impact of the 80s media boom. The severe social reorganisation that the country was undergoing found its first flashpoint in the high summer riots of Toxteth, Moss Side and Brixton - zones that still retain the scars of those events. Just play the Specials' July number one 'Ghost Town', with its horror movie/tribal vocals and muttered threats, and the cinder-swept mood of that summer comes back. Seen at the time as the continuation of a good Two Tone run, 'Ghost Town' now reveals itself as a late flowering of social realism as a pop impulse ('Chips on my shoulder', mocked Soft Cell): from now on jouissance would dominate.

Yet pleasure is never free in Puritan countries. Soft Cell's version of Gloria Jones' Northern Soul classic 'Tainted Love' - the best-selling record of 1981 - recast Motown melodrama into a definitive statement of attraction, repulsion and guilt: 'You think love is to pray/But I'm sorry I don't pray that way'. Faced with the sight of Marc Almond mincing around in Nancy Cunard wrist bands for the first of many Top of the Pops appearances, you could be forgiven for thinking that the song had a gay über-text, underlined by the cover of that hymn to bittersweet surrender, 'Where Did Our Love Go?' on the 12-inch mix.

You couldn't escape 'Tainted Love' that late summer: a positive irruption of the private (forbidden sexuality, male gender-fuck) into the public arena. It was still falling in the charts when Soft Cell released the follow-up. 'Bedsitter' winds the mesh of the big hit into something even tighter, asking what happens when you join the Human League's Crowd and you find that you're still alone: the verses - 'Watch the mirror/ Count the lines/ The battle scars/ Of all the good times' - working against an ecstatic round of 'dancing, laughing, drinking, loving'. On the 12-inch, a deliciously camp Almond rap segues into a defiant, ambiguous mantra: 'I'm waiting for someone/I'm only passing time/And now I'm all alone/And I don't care/And I don't care/ AND I DON'T CARE!'

Gaining energy from their contradictions, gender-driven groups like Soft Cell, Orange Juice and the Associates used an idea of pop music to make records that still resonate. Part of this lies in their often clumsy attempts to mix the privacy of post-Punk rock with the sociability embodied by disco rhythms and Euro-synth textures. It was clear that a group like the Associates, who released six terrific singles within an 18 month period, were moving out of obscurity into some kind of success, yet what was the transaction to involve? Impossibly intense songs like 'Message Oblique Speech', 'Kitchen Person' and 'Q Quarters' matched extravagant vocalese with snapping syn-drums and bleak, Germanic melodies. If there's ever a shadow soundtrack to London's 80s redevelopment, it's 'A Girl Named Property', with its admonitions and curses: 'No more property girl/No more property world/No more office blocks'.

1981 ended with the Human League's 'Don't You Want Me' at number one, and the Northern/ Synth tendency prevailed. All the elements present during that year - its insistence on pleasure and the bringing of the private into the public - were unravelled to even greater commercial effect during the three years that followed, albeit with diminishing aesthetic and political returns, to the point where pop was ripe for Live Aid's dadrock takeover in 1985. By that time, it had become clear who was allowed to stay at the party, and it wasn't people like Marc Almond or the Associates' Billy MacKenzie, who might smash things and remind you of those parts of yourselves that you'd like to forget.

The great records of 1981 simultaneously celebrate and comment upon the form. If pop is about feelings and sexuality, then it should include as much as is possible - an idea very pertinent to today's restrictive, post-boom white rock climate. That's why I half enjoyed last year's New Romantic revival Romo, that most derided of music press concepts. Although the execution was terrible, the attempted sourcing of the early 80s was an inspired polemic: it is already working its way through an increased concentration on synthetics (like White Town's recent number one, 'Your Woman'), gender and shiny perversity (like Placebo's great Top of the Pops appearance with 'Nancy Boy'). Shunned and half-forgotten, the plastic, contradictory extravagance of 1981 remains a beacon for anyone who would refuse 1997's dadrocked diktats.

1981 is to us what 1965 was to 1981: a sobering thought. If 60s history is overdetermined, then the 80s are up for grabs. Almost all the books dealing with the early pop decade - like Paul Morley's Ask and Dave Rimmer's Like Punk Never Happened - are out of print and hard to find. There have been few, if any, general cultural histories. Why does nobody want to approach this decade? Why be afraid of it? Is it that to deal with this time, you have to unpick a complicated skein of Faustian contracts, reneged promises, creeping collusion illumined by unexpected moments of heroism? Of course - that's why the 80s are so fascinating.