Video Affects - Joan Jett: I Love Rock n Roll, 1982

At age eleven my music idols are still to really appear. I 'follow' the chart show Ready to Roll along with my older siblings and note the current top ten as it changes over the weeks and months. Over 1981 ex-Runaways singer Joan Jett records this, a cover of the Arrows' original from 1975 with her new band the Blackhearts. In 1982 it reaches New Zealand and it is h-u-g-e. Well, that's the way I remember it, and Wikipedia and the RIANZ website won't tell me any different. It's probably not important, because what this does signify to me is that in the short space of a year my music appreciation has shifted from casual TV chart show viewing and likely acquiescence with my siblings'/parents' tastes through to noticing the tastes of my peers and other adults of significance. My intermediate teacher Miss Watson brought along her new purchase to school and had us write a poem about her favourite track on it. Within a fortnight I had followed suit and bought my first grown-up record, Queen's Greatest Hits but to this day I still ponder the wisdom of setting such a lofty assignment to a class of eleven year olds, based around the themes and lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody (true story!)

I Love Rock n Roll is quite a different song, however. Despite it being roughly the same age as Rhapsody its impact, delivery and video (having made a similar impression on the new new MTV) mean the song will be sung in playgrounds, along with the radio, at school camp and, most crucially, at my school social that year. Which underlines my other discovery of that year, really - girls. The obstacle I have with Rock n Roll is ironic then, in that it's sung by a 'girl'. But no sort of girl I'd see at school, that Ms Jett; and I'd not use that title - the epithet 'Ms' being viewed by my parents as a little suspicious and feminist-sounding. Jett is quite the antithesis of a pop starlet in the song and the video, scowling and sneering her way through the verses, roaring the 'Yaaow!" bits that the all-male Arrows had left to their guitars. The Blackhearts' guitars, for what it's worth, are the stronger in this too - heavier at the bottom and with a great solo. It's not hard to see why the song took on a new lease of life with Jett and is largely regarded as her composition. It was revolutionary to me - the video (the version here starts with a snippet of Runaways hit Bad Reputation) was in black and white, though not originally, as seen in the first version (in colour!) and Jett's onscreen attitude is all balls - leather jacket, spiked hair, getting in the spaces and faces of the young dudes at the bar, on which she'll later dance in a very non-Coyote Ugly way. To the girls in my class this was probably enormously exciting too - a cool chick miles from the sweet and squeaky clean fare we'd had 'til then - the Tina Crosses, Nolan Sisters and Sheena Eastons. This song, its opening line a neat inversion of The Beatles' I Saw Her Standing There (the Arrows had written it intending to address The Stones' It's Only Rock and Roll) is a deliberate role reversal. In my innocence I hadn't concieved that a girl could sing, behave and look like that. But Jett did and she was inescapable, and I soon happily saw the error of my ways, singing it at the top of my still small voice with all my classmates later that year at my school social.

And nearly thirty years on it's still a great song. Jett and the Runaways are experiencing something of a revival at the moment with a forthcoming biopic in production (Jett to be played by Kristen Stewart). A couple of weeks ago she and the Blackhearts made an appearance, looking and sounding in fine form performing Bad Reputation live on Letterman.

Robin of Sherwood - Series One

It seems timely to be putting this up given that Ridley Scott's new version of Robin Hood complete with our/their Russell Crowe in not-quite Lincoln green has hit our multiplexes. It's a reminder that like Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur seemingly every generation brings to the table their own interpretation of the legend.
For my generation one of the most prominent would have to be Richard 'Kip' Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood, a highly stylised and considered take which, like those before it borrowed from the Sir Walter Scott template of the post-Crusade England mingled with residual Anglo Saxons versus Normans resentment. Uniquely, it also touched on older traditions, particularly a form of forest mysticism and mythology based around the 'Celtic' shamanistic figure of Herne, with his anointed 'son', Robin, an analogue of the very early linking of Robin-in-the-Hood with a nature deity himself. There are layers to Carpenter's version, giving it a resonance and a depth that I haven't noticed in subsequent versions. Carpenter's approach takes in two bites of the cherry in its versions of Robin the man - the yeomen Robin of Locksley and the nobleman Robin of Huntingdon, and through the inspired use of Herne was able to 'regenerate' one into the other, neatly (and by all accounts happily) replacing one lead actor with another when circumstances demanded.

We start with the best-known and regarded, Michael Praed - young, fine featured, dark-haired and with a dancer's build (Praed came to the role through stage work, notably The Pirates of Penzance), and surrounded by a stripped-down band of 'Merries' - the usual suspects of Little John (Clive Mantle), Maid Marion (Judi Trott - another dancer), Friar Tuck (Paul Rose) and Will Scarlet - Ray Winstone reinventing the once-dandyish role into a temperamental and aggressive fighter not too far removed from the roles that would permeate Winstone's wider career. Peter Llewellyn Jones plays Much the Miller's son (and Robin's half-brother) as a young simpleton, and crucially Sherwood introduces the Saracen Nasir, a late addition which was picked up by the Kevin Coster movie and recent BBC series. Mark Ryan's swordsmanship (coached by Doctor Who's chief stuntman Terry Walsh) made the character of Nasir THE boys' favourite while the girls happily got Praed, but it's the combined and considerable talents of Mantle and Winstone that drive the team through the entire series. Mantle's great, Winstone is a revelation. Praed's good though - quiet, measured, stagey in the right way. Another thing that escaped me at the time was the diversity of accents of the Merry Men - a deliberate detail, it appears, from the excellent 6-part DVD documentary that accompanies the Complete Series release. The idea being that these heroes would represent a unified England against the Norman-haired and named Sherriff and Guy of Gisbourne, ever drawing on his old mates from the Crusades to quell the Sherwood rebels. The latter two antagonists are of course played by Nickolas Grace (a spot of camp with a generous side order of ham, surely the model for Keith Allen's recent version) and Robert Addie (downtrodden, thuggish but strangely sympathetic) who died seemingly not long after the original documentary. Grace turns it on with all of his eye-bulging, vein-popping best while Addie skulks, sulks, and out-rides everybody else on screen. It's a credit to the writing that you can't despise either of them, though they (and the Sherriff's brother Abbot Hugo) are reliably despicable men.

Series One sets the myth anew but touches on the recognisable set pieces - the longstaff duel between Robin and John, the archery contest - this time for a silver arrow of Herne's which reappears as an important totem later in the second series, but is never seen thereafter. The enemies of the Merry Men are variously cast as Normans and their powerful allies (a corrupt and venal Church, Phil Davis' King John) and, as a counterpoint to Herne's influence, spiritual enemies pagan and diabolical. It's a strong opening, and the first year's stories are arguably the strongest, being brave enough to take their time introducing the regulars, dispensing with other contenders (Alan A Dale recast as a rather inept minstrel obsessed with a lass called Mildred), and in the absence of the Sherriff's physical prowess and cunning, giving the heroes a run for their money with other interlopers; Seven Poor Knights From Acre is a particular highlight. The performances are still fresh and in places naïve (Trott starts off a bit wobbly), but everyone is young, credible, absolutely looks the part and the whole design and direction making judicious use of camera filters and handy ruins and standing castles make for a really interesting looking and sounding production. Of course at this stage even the Clannad music isn't overused - an aspect that unfortunately does creep in as the series continues.

For the cost of a couple of tickets to see the Ridley and Russ Show I'd suggest getting The Complete Series instead - or even just the first series. I was happy in this case to discover that the memory mostly doesn't cheat - it really was that good.

Legends of Fantasy Art - Frank Frazetta

Frank Frazetta died this week, aged 82.

For many his name will be synonymous with the pulp fantasy and SF of Robert E Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs - his Conan is simply definitive, and his approach to the human form of both genders made him the foremost and most logical artist of Burrough's Barsoom/Mars books. As I mentioned earlier in my Erol Otus piece the works of Frazetta and to a lesser extent Boris Vallejo were probably the leading examples of 1960s and 1970s fantasy art, and Frazetta went on to inspire a host of artists and cartoonists of the next generation including White Dwarf's Peter Jones, and Carl Critchlow (whose style he initially lampooned in his Thrud the Barbarian), and in 2000AD most crucially, Simon Bisley. Bisley was directly influenced by Frazetta's oils as well as his pen and ink washes, and his adoption of those styles, borrowing Frazetta's earthy palette and accentuated musculature both reinvented the look of two key series by Pat Mills. The previously angular and robotic ABC Warriors became heavy metal beefcake (though done in Bisley's earlier line drawing style) and Celtic hero Slaine in the acclaimed Slaine the King
remains a highlight for Bisley's studied and faithful homage to Frazetta (even down to the aforementioned palette) as much as Mills' own stripped-down narrative. Bisley's tribute marked something of a visual homecoming for a fictional hero whose legend-based roots owed as much to Howard's barbarian hero.

I wasn't always a fan of Frazetta, and didn't come to reassess his work until seeing Bisley's work which some at the time and since have called derivative (the irony remains however that for nearly ten years on from Slaine the King 2000AD's pages were cursed with the mud-coloured muscled monstrosities of lesser artists, each bearing the unmistakeable hallmarks of slavishly copying Bisley himself). He remains a colossus in his field, his heroes seemingly hewn from the same rocky terrain they inhabit naturally. Where other artists sometimes use terrain as a backdrop or pagefiller, Frazetta's appear to rise from that chalky earth, his heroines graced with the same watery luminosity of their dungeon environments, or as perpetually buoyant as the Martian gravity around them. It's work in caricature sometimes - the warriors sinewed, biceps and thighs bulging as they pose, crouch and fly in battle, their womenfolk equally underdressed to show off the curves, the flowing locks, the undulating concupiscence. Great fodder, as I mentioned earlier, for album covers, movie posters and panel vans, the pop culture canvases of the Seventies. Small wonder then that as ideal body shapes changed into the Eighties Frazetta's work was seen less, and for a good time the airbrush became the champion of fantasy artists. But Frazetta had flow, the style that oils and brushes demand, the medium being so very unforgiving. His subject matter is visceral and as utterly testosterone-led as the stories behind them, which probably explains more than it needed be said why my earliest brush with the master's work was some sneaky peaks at my older brother's borrowed volume of Frazetta art as a very young teen; each portrait a doorway into older, wilder, savage and erotically-charged worlds. And yet to this day I'd be more comfortable in public with that volume under my arm than the likes of say, Vallejo or Chris Achilleos whose work alongside is endlessly glossier, sleeker, more lurid and less elemental.

They really don't make them like Frank anymore.

Talkin' Eds - Piece of Mind (1983)

1981 in Heavy Metal

Albums
AC/DC - Flick of the Switch
Accept - Balls to the Wall
Alice Cooper - DaDa
Black Sabbath - Born Again
Blue Öyster Cult - The Revölution by Night
Def Leppard - Pyromania
Dio - Holy Diver
Dokken - Breaking the Chains
Europe - Europe
Girlschool - Play Dirty
Hanoi Rocks - Self-Destruction Blues / Back to Mystery City
KISS - Lick It Up
Krokus - Headhunter
Manowar - Into Glory Ride
Metallica - Kill 'Em All
Mötley Crüe - Shout at the Devil
Motörhead - Another Perfect Day
Ozzy Osbourne - Bark at the Moon
Pantera - Metal Magic
Queensrÿche - Queensrÿche (debut)
Quiet Riot - Metal Health
Ratt - Ratt (EP)
Saxon - Power & the Glory
Slayer - Show No Mercy
Suicidal Tendencies - Suicidal Tendencies
Thin Lizzy - Thunder and Lightning
Twisted Sister - You Can't Stop Rock 'N' Roll

Newly-formed acts include: Bon Jovi Helloween Living Colour Lizzy Borden Mayhem Megadeth Metal Church Morbid Angel Poison and Queensrÿche

Some obvious picks from fellow NWOBHM-ers Def Leppard, Saxon and Motörhead. Elsewhere the old guard fumble along with the remnants of Sabbath in Dio and Ozzy, some European acts emerging (Accept, Dokken, Hanoi Rocks, Europe!), and the 'future' - glam metal (Poison, Mötley Crüe) and speed/thrash (Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, Slayer) making early overtures. Maiden's sun is still at its height, but change is assured. KISS have even taken off their makeup...

The Line-Up

Having Number of the Beast under their belts Iron Maiden toured the album, but lost drummer Clive Burr along the way, seeingly another casualty of the gruelling tour and demands of the band. His replacement Michael 'Nicko' McBrain once again changes the sound of the band - where Burr's drumming is precise and well in line with the rhythm section, McBrain's obvious skills (he's regarded as one of the greats of heavy metal drummers) and innovation lend a more exploratory attitude to his style. There's been much discussion of the opening drum roll to the album's first track - McBrain hits every drum in an extremely tight triple roll, suffice it to say it's an effective and memorable starting volley, and ushers in THE classic Maiden line-up. Technically the album is another masterpiece, although the version reviewed here is from the 1998 remasters themselves, which balances some of the additional sound effects (the machine guns of Where Eagles Dare, for example) further.

For me Piece of Mind was almost an unknown quantity. Prior to The Best of the Beast I’d not heard anything off it, but The Trooper made an immediate impression - the album's other single The Flight of Icarus less so initially, but I've come to enjoy its coda greatly, and its video is notable for actually being something out of the ordinary for Maiden - no live footage, but studio film and other imagery combined. Prior to this the album was a tee shirt worn by a school mate - I think I may have assumed it was based on an EP, as mine (Maiden Japan) had been. Having bought the album proper then I've come to it with some prejudices still intact. I don't think Tim's going to like some of what I'm about to say!

The Album

With Beast having been the greatest success for Maiden to date, Piece of Mind continues the pace of one album per annum, surely the work of young men with energy and drive, and to be sure Piece marks something of a continuation of Beast's sound, with some notable developments. The songs are developed more in places, sometimes incorporating other musical works (To Tame a Land) and attempting new tricks (actual backing vocals on Die With Your Boots On, and some songwriting input by Bruce Dickinson). Lyrically though, the steps forward are marked with a few staggers; for every solid work (Where Eagles Dare, The Flight of Icarus, The Trooper) there's a real clunker (Boots again, Quest for Fire, To Tame a Land). There's no theme to the album again, but the songs largely come from various narratives, whether historical (Sunlight on Steel, Trooper) or from popular literature (er, almost all the rest). Revelations takes chunks of C K Chesterton and Crowley, and Boots nods towards Nostradamus a few times, but this isn't an album you'll listen to for the lyrics, especially in the leaden Quest ("for Fii-yurr!"), a low point for the album and band with its screeching vocals, Neanderthal beat and an opening line ("In a time/when dinosaurs roamed the earth!") coming more from an Amicus movie than the actual novel and film. Quest to me has at least a kitsch quality which helps, but if I must appreciate the album on that level as the sort of thing I'd have been into at thirteen or fourteen with its sub-Dungeons and Dragons imagery in Revelations and Still Life, then I find it also interferes with the stronger, more mature tracks, those being the three mentioned earlier, and Sunlight on Steel which, while it re-uses the Trooper galloping bass a little too soon, fair moves at an enjoyable lick. It's good stuff.

I want to like Piece of Mind though, and in fact a good many people do, regarding it as one of Maiden's finest albums, for some the best. I just find it disjointed - in places a victory lap after the triumph of Beast, but perhaps a little self-indulgent as well. To Tame a Land and Quest simply re-tell the stories of Dune and 'Rosny's original novel (more likely the movie) and indicate the list-making aspects of a few later compositions; Revelations being one man's mash-up of some ropey metaphysics is almost impenetrable and again works for me best as phantasmagoria rather than an attempt to actually say anything deep. Perhaps that's an unfair accusation, some HAVE found depth in the song, but they've clearly had to work at it and I need to remind myself that This. Is. Heavy. Metal. and not really anything more. I don't think that's what we're supposed to be doing with this.

Cover Art

It's a full-bodied Eddie for the first time, and the first of many torments our hero is put through, this being a lobotomy and straitjacket (now get out of that one, my lad!) Derek Riggs provides another iconic cover with more sickly yellow as its highlight hue - he's well on a roll at this point, and his album covers seem to improve exponentially with each release. There's still some continuity with previous covers - that distinctive sky appears on the back cover seen from inside Eddie's ubiquitous padded call although the shape of the opening and the buttoned wall lining make it look a little more luxurious than yer average psych unit - I used to wonder whether he was in some form of aircraft, hence the sky and no land being visible. Perhaps it's a flying panel van?

Album tracks

Where Eagles Dare (album track)
Revelations (Live in Dortmund)
Flight of Icarus (Live in Dortmund)
Die With Your Boots On (Live in Hammersmith)
The Trooper (official video)
Still Life (Live in Ipswitch)
Quest for Fire (album track)
Sun and Steel (album track)
To Tame a Land (Live in Hammersmith - with back story by Bruce)

Legends of RPG Art: Russ Nicholson

Chances are if you played a UK variant of a roleplaying game in the 1980s you would have come across the work of Russ Nicholson. Nicholson's distinctive line art graced the pages of the Fighting Fantasy game books, White Dwarf, and its contribution to the world of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the infamous Fiend Folio, among other publications. It's in the Folio that his work shows the greatest range and alongside occasional contributions by Erol Otus and some notable UK contemporaries, Nicholson's linear, pointillistic style is the most prominent. Like Otus his concept for a monster, the Folio's Githyanki (originally for WD) survives and remains the definitive visualisation, imitated by successive artists to be one of the few success stories from the book.

Unlike some others of his time Nicholson's approach brought with it the artist's intimate knowledge of historical war gear, which isn't to say his pictures were faithful to history, rather that they were used sympathetically - armour was often rendered a mismatch combination rather than a full-suit (or worse, the deaded chainmail bikini and its variants). He seems to have eschewed the likes of plate mail for the more visually intricate and interesting ring, chain or scale mail. For small work Nicholson's work is sufficiently detailed that you can get lost in them easily, and it remains the main reason I still admire his style, indeed, he's the first fantasy artist I tried to mimic as a teenager. His approach is rarely static in a form (usually bookplate illustrations or monster portraits) that doesn't always invite dynamic poses or movement - but there's movement of line and of shading evident in his work, and a great sense of weight in his characters - he renders flowing robes beautifully, tongues of smoke curl from his dragons' snouts, the rotted clothing of a zombie barely held together, seemingly shredded with decay. His figures are for the most part contrived to be thin or drawn, his goblins especially having pointed features and long noses and limbs, but Nicholson's work isn't strictly speaking all grotesques, as this rendering of a Houri for WD shows, exotic but unfussy, betraying his confessed admiration for the works of Aubrey Beardsley. Of all his work it remains one of my favourites, a great composition with clever use of line weight.


While Beardsley's fantasy work took in the creations of Poe and Wilde and classical mythology Nicholson's artwork features heavily in the 1980s RPG revival of that literature, including a stint illustration Puffin Books' two licensed Robin of Sherwood game books. Coming from his later work it's a little less interesting and a little more realistic - I definitely prefer his early Eighties work, particularly that of his Fighting Fantasy contributions, and namely The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and The Citadel of Chaos. In fact thinking of those books and their shared world of Allansia, it's Nicholson's artwork that draws it all together for me as the definitive version, an alluring combination of the high, exotic fantasy of, say, the Arabian Nights, and the grimier low fantasy of Lieber and the shabbier corners of Middle Earth. And speaking of which, what could only be a Balrog, the only Tolkien-derived image I could find from the artist, and in colour too.

Edited to add: My sincere thanks to Russ for his comments and clarification below. The above isn't one of his works after all, alas. Thanks for visiting, sir!

Video Affects - Billy Idol: Hot In The City, 1982

In 1981 William 'Billy Idol' Broad of defunct latterday UK punk act Generation X crossed the Atlantic to carve out a new career as a solo artist. He took with him a version of the band's earlier song Dancing With Myself and an image carefully combining the sneer of Presley, the patois of Iggy, the hair of Sid Vicious and the bleach of Sting. The music was as carefully pruned - Dancing, with its 4/4 beat and "whoah-oh" rejoinders could have been a longer, more commercially-lucrative Ramones track, the guitar work of Steve Stevens was an essential element in hardening an instrumental approach that owed as much to synthesisers, and yet with Hot In The City there's a look back in its pretence of earlier rhythmic trappings, and the inclusion of female backing singers (not an obvious punk ingredient) adds to this. The song's beat isn't dissimilar to Springsteen's Hungry Heart, two years older and also checking the rear vision mirror with its influences. Where Hot differs is the then ultra modern 80s punk look of its singer and the video tailored for the song.



This is the earlier version of two - the second, with a mock crucifixion (Idol being as willing to adopt the cross and rosary that the likes of Prince and Madonna would make emblematic) fell foul of MTV and was censored, but no matter - it's this version that made the impact on me. A girl walks into a record store, sees Idol's single sleeve which (with the aid of a not that convincing vis-mix) morphs into the man himself, and the song begins, Idol's face burned and overexposed with some rudimentary post-production, and some appropriate explosive images key in the background to denote - y'know, hotness and all that. If you've seen the video and on the evidence of my previous post you can probably guess the rest - some of said images are of atom bomb tests with the required infernal mushroom clouds, disintegrating model towns and burning living trees. Striking stuff; arresting images, and though I’d have had to recognise them for what they were I'm convinced that this is the first time I saw those now-ubiquitous film sequences. They freaked the hell out of me given that I was twelve and starting to notice the wider world around me.

The images after twenty years plus perhaps another thirty to forty don't carry the weight they must have back in their day or mine. The regularity with which they've been used counts towards that, as well as their replacement by other, more recent images - I can probably name videos which have include Kennedy's assassination and the destruction of the World Trade Center, for example, but those examples as much as this have affected me in the idle (sorry) way that documented historical footage and images can be adopted in the name of popular entertainment - in the case of Hot the images are in the background, 'filler' rather than focus, simply there to neatly underline a suggestive lyric. But it never left me that on seeing them at the time and some time afterwards their appropriation seemed somehow wrong - this was weapons testing, a show of strength and power and utter annihilation backing a song about feeling a bit 'restless'? Very punk and confrontational, I suppose, though not quite swastika armbands on Bill Grundy's Today show. But then even to twelve year old me Billy Idol wasn't punk, he was pop, and the visual collision of those two worlds shook me and scared me.

Mind you, for what it was worth, Idol's first couple of albums aren't bad, but that third one was a stinker.

The Little Black Book of Atomic War

I am fourteen and my brother has just bought a new book which we'll both read - he because he bought it of course and me because I am his little brother and still not quite out of copy-cat mode. Plus it has a bewitching cover, all black save for white blade-serifed text and some orange line art. It is The Little Black Book of Atomic War, and even if the cover hadn't been so fetchingly set out I'd have probably sought the book out as soon as I'd heard of it on the strength of the title alone.

I am fourteen and it is 1984, which means that I am a child of the Eighties. Here follows a brief digression:

There's a lot of stuff about these days concerning being a Child Of The Eighties, much of it rather silly and pointless about the silly and pointless - shoulder pads, leg warmers, After School with Olly Ohlsen, Ghostbusters… I'll stop now, my point being that for the most part this sort of nostalgia plays into the reader's warm and fuzzies, or at worst the harmless cringes of looking back - they make great 'blog' topics for newspaper websites because all you need to do is blurt out a few key phrases Mork and Mindy Back to the Future Duran Duran and your target audience will torpedo themselves out of the woodwork for an extended round of "me too!", adding extra do-you-remembers like a Greek chorus with the predicted effect of making said decade look cheesy and ridiculous and hopelessly naïve. We used to do this sort of thing with the Seventies too, and the decades before that, and although it's only ever for entertainment purposes and easy copy for a salaried blogger, I fear the chance of this form of pop culture reflux overwhelming the 'other' side of the Eighties. There were a lot of really scary, bad and depressing things that happened over the course of those ten years, but for fourteen year old me, the scariest was the imminent threat of Nuclear Armageddon. It is 1984 and the Doomsday Clock has been adjusted to three minutes to midnight, the closest setting then (and since) to 1952's two minutes.

Ironically (I think) for the pooh-poohing I make of pop culture burps described above, it’s from that arena that the barometer of the times can be read. The early 80s saw the launch of the Mad Max and Terminator movies, plus Wargames (freaked.me.out) and Red Dawn (never saw it, sounded cool). My comic of choice, 2000AD used Nuclear War as the starting point for two of its most celebrated series (Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog) and the theme ran in other stories as well (Meltdown Man, Rogue Trooper, ABC Warriors). TV mini series were made and celebrated as grim cautionary tales (Threads, The Day After - both pointedly concerned with the aftermath of a war, another sign of the times) and as a whole the mood of these pieces, though sometimes fantastic, bore testament to the prevailing mood - at least, say, from 1981 to 1985.

Marc Barasch's Little Black Book is a curious tome, its title is dead-on, being a sarcastic look back at the hopelessly naïve concerns and enthusiasm for all things atomic in the 1940s and 1950s as equally new wonder product and energy source (Atomic steam shovels! Atomic airplanes!) and device of war ("In Baltimore people will be expected to evacuate the city in sequence according to their zip codes"), and the bleaker realities apparent in 1983. It's a piecemeal, lightweight read - I would dip into it and put it away gingerly when I'd read enough, but its total effect was pessimistic, humour of the blackest kind, as its tagline promised "the last word - and the last laugh - on the war to end them all". Inside are tidbits ranging from the birth of the bomb, eyewitness accounts of the Trinity tests and Hiroshima detonation, infamous near-misses in diplomacy and sabre-rattling, the best 'bland reassurances' of modern nuclear history, and, for 1983 at least, some sobering statistics. Big brother and I got a lot out of it as far as the pencilled-in underlines and asterisks tell - I think he used it in school debating, and I got a pretty decent mark in Biology essentially cribbing a comparison chart between cockroaches and humans in the post-war survival stakes. Re-reading it now the staistics are out, the anecdotes uncited and in general the coverage itself is a piece of history as much as its archived novelty content - quotes on communal survival strategies attributed to FEMA, for example, take on an interesting aspect post-Hurricane Katrina.

I'm glad we still have the book, but in all I don't respect it as much as I did, or fear it. And I'm grateful that to some degree the paranoia of the later Cold War has subsided, even if it's been replaced by something a little more local, a little more global. I was interested to read on Wikipedia that the Doomsday Clock hasn't measured risk according to nuclear conflict for some time, and global terrorism and environmental collapse are among the new parameters. A sign of the times then, just perhaps not that much more comforting.