It was the year when nothing happened. Bob Geldof was right when he complained in his Hot Press interview that rock didn’t recognise the changes in Eastern Europe. But if you took your history lessons from 98FNM, you would never have known.

Instead the prevailing new trend was the parochialism of Manchester. It’s one thing to accuse such as Sting and U2 of overblown ‘significance’ but all those arguments fall if rock doesn’t simply lose but consciously abandons its own ‘vision thing’. But then maybe it isn’t surprising; the hippies were ever disinterested in the Prague Spring and rock remains riven and handicapped by that culture tag.

For the transformation of Eastern Europe also compels a further revision of the sixties. In that partial radical myth of social liberation and valiant resistance to Johnson’s and Nixon’s Vietnam war, Eastern Europe was excluded and sidelined, even though Breshnev’s tanks lumbered into Prague on the same week Mayor Daley’s police rioted at the Chicago Democratic convention. But if the victims of Chicago were idolized and became part of rock’s radical pantheon, the Czechs were off-limits.

Of course, the Cold War barriers to freedom of travel and information hardly helped rock’s isolation and ignorance as cultural interchange only happened on the plane of high art, in opera, ballet and classical theatre.

Even today, there are mitigating reasons for divisions remaining. The Western music business still has problems integrating with the new, shell-shocked Eastern European economies with all their currency and inflation difficulties. The East still lacks an infrastructure in reliable facilities and people with proven managerial and other professional skills. That record companies should be tentative is understandable.

And yet where were the songs? Even Fatima Mansions bruising ‘Ciao Ceaucescu’ was an assault on Thatcherism. A reluctance to pontificate from meagre experience could be understood yet rock’s silence could be also interpreted as insularity and failure of imaginative nerve. In that sense, the Manchester phenomenon could be judged as just another reflection of Thatcher’s own Little Englanderism. or was rock just too content to play the fattened delinquent in its own comfortable playpen?

Of course rock has confirmed beating its retreat to mere entertainment. It has preferred private worlds of Bohemian fantasy to social engagement. Of course critics could rightly rail against an intellectually flabby and complacent ‘positivism’. But rock diminishes itself it if foreswears the idealism to engage with these new societies, most painfully being born.

Or was rock in its middle-age – and attitudinally, that also includes those in their twenties – too far gone in its reflection of consumer society? With Tina Turner and Rod Stewart selling Pepsi, has it merely become a consumer accessory, another strand in the magic carpet of delights with which Western capitalism teased and tantalised the East? By extension were all Western rock fans implicated and riding in the same limousine to overawe the starstruck East?

In truth, there was virgin artistic – rather than commercial – territory to be explored. Rock radio boosted into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had given generations a vision of a freer life beyond the Stalinist straight-jacket. In the East, the use of rock to fuel discontent had been far more subversive than anything in America or Western Europe since the late sixties. Yet rock seemed ignorant of both its obligations and artistic opportunities.

For instance, why the incuriosity about Czechoslovakia? Vaclav Havel’s employment of Frank Zappa as a roving cultural ambassador wasn’t an eccentric gesture. Havel had also been a rock writer, with friends and allies among the radical fringe of activist, anti-regime bands. This yea one of his rock colleagues actually became a govern minister, supervising the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia. But save Lou Reed who was invited to Prague to interview havel for Rolling Stone, few seemed interested.

A younger David Bowie would have revelled in the opportunities. After all, the collapse of the Berlin wall made ‘Heroes’ redundant. Surely there are still songs to be sung after it?