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But it was proof enough for me that music saves lives. Breakfast in America wasn’t a life-changer, or an issue-solver – I was still some years off Pixies, Suede, Blur and the other records that would make a human being of me, and The Wedding Present’s Seamonsters would soon supersede it as my dark-hour lifeline. It sent me diving into my father’s record collection on bi-weekly visits looking for more nuggets of buried youth: I unearthed Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill”, Bat Out of Hell, Wish You Were Here. Being lightweight, hyper-polished and sentimental were its most redeeming features for a kid mired in concrete.įundamentally, though, Breakfast in America was a time capsule, a thread of connection to brighter days, 46 minutes of my childhood back with every spin. Even by 1986, punk hadn’t reached many back bedrooms of Enfield.
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The fact that this record was practically a cackle in the face of punk and new wave – a bunch of British hippy longhairs who’d developed the melodic side of prog music into platinum-selling soft rock over a decade, selling millions of copies in a year that gave rock history awards to Costello, Blondie, Joy Division and The Clash – was irrelevant. I’d popped my gig-going cherry that year watching Level 42 from a distant corner of Wembley Arena, so I had no counter-culture credibility to worry about. The cultural implications – the stench of the cheese, you might say – didn’t bother me. With the band’s shift to recording in LA, it all came drenched in the glare from the Sunset Boulevard tarmac, a world away from my drab corner of suburbia. Even at a time when the songwriting pair were becoming increasingly dislocated personally, Davies’s melodies began to rival Hodgson’s for catchiness and Hodgson’s impish, quasi-spiritual tunes felt utterly weightless. But it was on 1979’s Breakfast in America where they truly gelled, their opposing sensibilities mingling into moments of pure euphoria on opener “Gone Hollywood” and closer “Child Of Vision”.