Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

From the opening segment of Van Halen’s sixth studio album, you can’t help feel the expectation ooze majestically from the American rock band.

The album MCMLXXXIV (1984), was released in the first couple of weeks of the New Year and its space age opening, the sound of a keyboard announcing the record as if some grand state opening or regal ceremony was taking place was the solemn and almost humourless start to a rock album you could ever expect. To anybody hearing it for the first time, it was truly fantastic but it did make the listener wonder what else they could expect from this huge slice of earnest musical offering. The intro almost gave thought to the year immediately, the time that the listener was living in, the year in which George Orwell predicted the era of Big Brother, of the thought police and sex crimes, of untold censorship and where the state knew exactly what you were planning even before you did. It was the era of the beige and unending war and suspicion. The intro felt as if this album was going to going to be dark, Orwellian and completely different to what had passed before. Different it was, fundamentally superb and a touch of genius that wouldn’t be realised again until Dave Lee Roth re-joined the band for their 2012 album A Different Kind of Truth.

The intro was a teaser, what came afterwards was pure and sensational, unremitting in its delivery and the complete opposite of what was felt during the initial moments of 1984. This was perhaps the most complete album that Van Halen could have done in response to the darkness foretold by the great George Orwell. From the ceremonial to the outlandish, the joy of Jump, the sound of America, the sound of a freedom that cut through everything that seemed to be around in the opening weeks of 1984. The taste of the raunchy, the glint in Dave Lee Roth’s eye, all complemented by Eddie and Alex Van Halen and Michael Anthony. It was if the foursome had reached a pinnacle of delivery that could only be matched throughout and never bettered. Eddie Van Halen’s slick and near persuasive synthesiser almost cutting through the guitar sound he was famed for and throughout it all making Dave Lee Roth’s vocals stand out more than they had ever done. This overall combination was exhilarating; it filters even thirty years later into the gut and sets the pulse racing, it was the sign of life that was needed to confirm that Rock was still the powerful force of music and much more interesting than almost anything around.

Never ones to stay too far from any sign of music controversy, the album cover, created by Margo Nahas showed an angelic cherub smoking and a couple of open packets of cigarettes on the table infront of him. This was enough in Britain to make the picture become censored, surprisingly in 1984 nobody from the censoring board decided to pick apart the lyrics to perhaps the objectifying nature of the outrageously good song of Hot For Teacher. The layering of guitar, fantastic drums of Alex Van Halen and the wonderful leer like quality of the lyrics make Hot For Teacher arguably one of the finest songs in Van Halen’s career. Not only was it an honest interpretation on the Senior School system in which young adults who can’t be inspired by the teaching quality, can and will at least do their best to get good results and to have a certain teacher notice them and look upon them with a certain degree of fondness. Like Aerosmith’s Love in Elevator, another genuine classic of the age, the lyrics are suggestible, in a different age they would be frowned upon very heavily but it doesn’t stop the song from being pure class. The sound of an older pupil moaning about the clock being slow, the general unease that a teacher may feel when they have thirty pairs of eyes staring at them in the hope that some inspiration might be forthcoming, the raging hormones that some 15-16 year olds have is perhaps only tempered by either destruction, disruption and outlandish behaviour or by the hormones being kept in check by the typical teenage crush. Hot For Teacher is arguably the song on the album that has the most depth and social commentary thrust upon it.

With an album so full of great tracks, of incredible music composition, it is no wonder that it went to number two in America and reached the respectable heights   in the U.K. charts. It is the rock equivalent of a weekend in your favourite city with the finest company and whatever your preferred drink is being supplied free all weekend. To anybody who took time out to read George Orwell’s 1984 in the first weeks of that year, this is its antidote. Both important, both written by people at the very top of their game and socially revealing but MCMLXXXIV lighting the fire of a party in the making.

Ian D. Hall