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There are three reasons to go to summer school, and by July 1985 I had already experienced two: to make up for failing a class, or to move from a lower to an upper level class. Now, the final reason: to get one last course credit, so I could really, finally graduate.

Summer school: hot mornings and afternoons, being bussed back and forth. My course was Economics, the dismal science, and as I didn't want to fail I studied as hard as my math & logic-challenged mind would let me. Temporary walls, real walls. A non-descript high school on the edge of town, by the refinery. I could only assume everyone was there for the same reason - one more class and then, escape, into the numbing suspense of August...

...I only remember one discussion of music, and it wasn't a discussion so much as a bald statement of fact: there were Springsteen guys like Keith who weren't preppies exactly but he worked at a golf course so, whatever; and Owen, who was a preppy and had spent time in Germany and who liked Propaganda. I was too shy to talk with him, as summer school, I figured, was a tough place to get to know people; it lasted for a month, and that was it. We learned enough to pass, and the knowledge evaporated before the summer was over.

(Another moment: waiting after our lunch break for the teacher to come back, someone with a boombox walking by with "Like a Virgin" on very loud. Rolled eyes; Madonna, she's for young kids, not us.)

On the 13th of July, 1985, my father was grumpy. He thought I was going to watch Live Aid all day and ruin his own Saturday morning tv-watching marathon. No such luck: we didn't have cable, so I was upstairs, listening to it on the radio. It was a sunny day, a long one, but I remember nothing of the event itself. Only a few years later would I see anything from the day - U2, specifically the part where Bono gets a girl out of the crowd to dance with him, instead of just ending the song and getting on to their big hit at the time, "Pride In the Name of Love" (much to the great consternation of the rest of the band).

I mention Live Aid not just because it happened while I was slogging through economics but because it marks, definitively, the end of the New Pop era. New Pop was bright, shiny, subversive, sexy, not like regular rock or pop. It had no leader, per se, though the stunning survival of Joy Division as New Order could be seen as its emotional if not chronological heart.

(Green and Ian Curtis met once, in May 1980, at the Electric Ballroom in Manchester after a gig. They talked, vented more likely, over their problems; Green had had enough of Scritti Politti as a more-indie-than-thou post-punk collective & didn't know what to do. Curtis had problems as deep as a well. Subsequently, Green disbanded Scritti Politti and went back to his native Wales, to read books and write & sing in a different way. Curtis, tragically, died a week later.)

To get back to 1982, the year of the Falklands War - a year in which Billy Bragg, in a review of the 80s, once claimed 'nothing happened' - Scritti Politti joined the New Pop scene with Songs to Remember - sweet, wordy, political, angular, poppy, different. It fit in with other New Pop classics, including Simple Minds' New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84, The Human League's Dare! and ABC's epochal Lexicon of Love*. (Other New Pop greats include Associates, Altered Images, Soft Cell, OMD, Teardrop Explodes...) It was a remarkable time, to say the least; the figurative Trojan Horse of giddy, shiny and hypnotic music hiding the everything from deconstructionist thinking about love to voices that were stunning in their uniqueness in all senses. It was smartly clever; commercial enough to have transatlantic hits, appearances on Top of the Pops and American Bandstand...

..and then it promptly got bulldozed by groups that came out of the same times and places but were pushed and pushed much harder; groups that were on major labels and favored for any number of reasons. By the time of Live Aid, New Pop was done, over...almost. The last album to appear from the disintegrated scene was, yes, Cupid & Psyche '85. (The aforementioned Propaganda's A Secret Wish also qualifies here, but it was never as popular, even on radio, let alone sales.) Thus songs like "Absolute" and "Wood Beez" and "Perfect Way" all floated and stung like very lonely butterflies and bees, on the radio at the same time as Bryan Adams, Duran Duran, Billy Ocean, Lionel Richie...all of whom performed at Live Aid. (One artist who qualifies as New Pop as well, Adam Ant, also performed; he was the only performer who didn't sell more albums/singles in the following week.) The song that marks this death is (of course) Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing," a song I cannot listen to because it fully brings back the normalizing and dulling of music, the death of something startling and colorful and swift.

* A parallel can be drawn between New Pop and the psychedelic moment in the mid-60s; the three distinct yet linked albums from then being Love's Forever Changes, Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and 13th Floor Elevators' Easter Everywhere. The scene disintegrated in a different way, but The Stooges' Funhouse was the last Trojan Horse from the era (sneaking punk in via psychedelia), though Escalator Over The Hill gets closer to the freedom and experimentation of the first three.