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Paris: The year 2023 marks the 40th anniversary of songs that constituted pivotal stations in the career of a number of artists and bands, most notably “Holiday”, which launched Madonna, and “Sunday My Sunday”, which involved “U2” in the Irish conflict and its sensitivities, but achieved wide popularity for it.
U2 frontman Bono included his autobiography Surrender, a tribute to the band’s drummer Larry Mullen in relation to the song “Sunday My Sunday”.
With an army-style drum beat, the song opens and evokes “Bloody Sunday” on 30 January 1972, one of the worst days of the conflict in Northern Ireland, when British paratroopers fired on a peaceful protest by Catholic activists in favored Londonderry. The locals call it Derry, as they see the name Londonderry as synonymous with British rule. As a result of the shooting, 13 people were killed. An injured person who died later, for another reason, according to the official investigation, was considered the fourteenth killed in “Bloody Sunday.”
Because of this song, the Irish band was subjected to threats from “people on both sides of the sectarian divide,” according to Bono. But the most important thing is that this hit song, which appeared on the band’s third album, “War”, made “U2” able to attract an audience that filled the stadiums in which it performed its concerts.
In 1983, an album entitled “Madonna” was released by a little-known singer of the same name, with the first single entitled “Holiday”. “We saw the beginning of the star of this singer … which we did not expect to emerge,” presenter of the “Bonus Track” music program on French radio “RTL”, Eric Jean-Jean, told AFP. He remarked that “few people could have imagined what she would become.”
And this song marked the beginning of Madonna’s career.
“She had the ambition, she knew what she wanted,” said the co-author of “60 Years of Pop.”
Eric Jean-Jean noted that Madonna “didn’t know anything about production”.
In 1984, she tapped Niall Rogers, guitarist for Chic, to produce her second album, Like A Virgin, which brought her worldwide fame. Rogers, who was not chosen at random, had just produced David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”.
Rogers recounted in the book “David Bowie: Rainbowman” by Jerome Soligny the story of his meeting with Bowie in a New York bar, and he said, “He was counting on me to produce a sound that would satisfy the largest possible number of people.”
Eric Jean-Gan added that “Bowie, whose audience was narrow, found himself” through the album “Let’s Dance” and in the forefront of the song of the same title, “in the midst of huge success, while his main fans blamed him for becoming a fan.”
Rogers noted that “Let’s Dance” didn’t seem like a song that would hit him when Bowie first heard it “on acoustic guitar,” but the singer “was convinced it would.”
And unlike Bowie, New Order, which was formed from the members of the band Joy Division after the suicide of its leader Ian Curtis, was not planning to enter the best-selling lineup.
With its melancholic text and nearly eight minutes in length, “Blue Monday” became the best-selling 12-inch single in history.
“Bonus Track” presenter Eric Jean-Gann said it sounded “like a spacecraft. It’s an electronic pop rock band from the new wave.”
“Everything Counts” in 1983 marked a revolution in the career of the “Depeche Mode” band, as for the first time the band’s vocalist Dave Gahan contented himself with taking over the verses, while the song’s refrain was for the multi-instrumentalist Martin Gore.
“Martin Gore was writing the songs at that point while Dave Gahan was singing them,” Eric Jean-Gan explained.
He added, “In this song, Martin Gore discovered what is known as German industrial music, and with this piece, the new wave entered the field of politics against the background of Thatcherite England, and criticized the race for permanent profit.”
