It was a great party while it lasted, but now we have to pay the tab. By December, it wasn’t just the weather that was chilling as Anglo-American workers (and us also by infection) succumbed to the monetarism of Reagan and Thatcher intent on forcing wages down to South Korean levels. Sing the old song: give us money, that’s what we want!

Pop was the playground that gave access to the same technology that was destroying traditional workplaces. On one side; intoxicating, rainbow thrills; on the other: Talking Heads’ ‘The Overload’ and I kept remembering David Byrne’s prophecy that we’d all be residing unemployed in dismal tenements surrounded by the latest entertainment technology. Welcome Walkman, welcome Channel 4, welcome compact disc!

I enjoyed the carnival but I also learnt that the same festival was a 19th century slave-owner’s adaptation of an earlier and much more subversive trinidadian ritual. Still universal rhythms did destroy rock’s lethargy and point towards a more tolerant, global consciousness and the rampant hedonism did have an essential thawing effect in this still-uptight and puritan culture.

But as The Jam disbanded, they confirmed the end of an era. Jaded, sated veterans of ’77, now 23, must have wondered what their younger brothers and sisters were imbibing from their video visions. Even as the sullen punks became the tinkers on the side of the New Pop street, striking the consciences of the revellers as they stumbled home, their abstention marked a refusal, a collapse into a pretty vacant sub-culture. they became as the tabloids defined them and John Lydon downed the lager in New York.

It was a most tidy, polite year dominated by young professionals pop-wise beyond their years. ABC’s re-writing of the alphabet was astute. As the British music industry reported summer album sales plummeting 20% down on the previous bleak year, winners were demanded, romantic losers spurned. Pragmatism replaced the sold techni-colour yarwns of conspicuous consumption and over-the-top outrage.

The prevailing mood left rock stalwarts adrift and confused. Bruce Springsteen sought to hitch low-budget into the past but couldn’t distinguish between true history and its movie images. For all his honourable intentions, Springsteen, unlike the tutored Dernell, was falling into Reagan’s nostalgia trap. I know only one thing now: in 1983, radicals must harness hope and not let others counterfeit it.

personal pleasures were Darnell and Coati Mundi (of course!). Bryan Ferry’s lessons in dignity and resilience, the resurgence of Black America epitomised by ‘The Message’, Rockers Revenge and Marvin Gaye’s resurrection. Also the emergence of a second American wave led for me by Romeo Void and The Del-Byzanteens. In Ireland, it was the partial vindication of The Prunes and all the friends I met through Big Self and Some Kind of Wonderful.

Worries and depressions centred on Ireland: the way people put up with festival squalor and lost their dignity, the groupiedom of an ageing mass media babbling on about the Stones and, Eamon McCann excepted, their blindness to the financial coup pulled by the Stones at Slane.

When Irish artists are crawling to maturity, the wastefully exported money was essential. Furthermore while sectors of the Irish music business complained about recession, they couldn’t break from their old patterns and recognise the qualities that make them profit. Worse, I’ll be repeating this paragraph next year and the Prunes will be selling even more records!

Still a final word to the wise. 1983 is the year the guitar fights back.