There has been of late some love for the pop culture zeitgeist of the 1980s. The hit show "Stranger Things" have brought back Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" to prominence after nearly 40 years, Kenny Loggins' "Footloose" got its day in the sun on "The Umbrella Academy", and there's that whole thing for Japanese City Pop since the late 2010s. And now I hear that one of my personal 1980s cultural touchstones may be making a comeback: Max Headroom! One of the streaming networks is thinking about rebooting the suave and stuttering AI for a TV show in the not-too-distant future (maybe 20 minutes later). I told this to my brother last weekend and on hearing that Matt Frewer will be returning as Max, he remarked on how carbon-dated he had to be.
When the smarmy Max Headroom first popped up on television screens whether it be through MTV or those Coke commercials, I actually thought (hoped) that he was actually the first sentient artificial intelligence since I was (and still am) a hopeless nerd. But as it turned out, he was actor Frewer in some elaborate makeup against greenscreen. Still, the character invented in the mid-1980s by George Stone, Annabel Jankel (whose brother is up here on the blog) and Rocky Morton was a hit because of the allure of all that cyberpunk and computer animation. Those brief appearances turned into a British TV sci-fi movie, a music video show hosted by VJ Max and then a 1987 American television series adaptation of the original British movie.
I remember catching that ABC series which I think lasted for a year. I ended up having an increasingly tenuous relationship with the show as the episodes crept along since I believe that the producers were perhaps a little overly focused on the techno-dystopian elements than they were in a long-standing and cogent story. Not even sure whether Max was all that compelling to anyone by the end which made me think that wrapping an entire series around a pop cultural phenomenon was a step too far.
Anyways, this special holiday edition of Reminiscings of Youth (it's a Civic Holiday here in much of the country) features this wholly appropriate collaboration between this bizarre 80s pop icon and the avant-garde synthpop of Art of Noise. Released as a single in April 1986, "Paranoimia" is all about Max's difficulty in getting to sleep due to various extreme worries (the title is a portmanteau of "paranoia" and "insomnia") while the usual AON bells and whistles are whirling around his ironically soothing tones.
"Paranoimia" hit No. 31 on Canada's RPM singles chart while in America, it got as high as No. 32 on Billboard's Top 100. I got my original version as a track on Art of Noise's album "In Visible Silence" which came out in the same month as the single. The above video features an extended mix.
So, how was the Oricon chart for April 1986 doing? Well, I've got No. 3, No. 5 and No. 6.
No. 3 Sonoko Kawai -- Aoi Station （青いスタスィオン）
No. 5 Yuki Saito -- Kanashimi yo Konnichiwa （悲しみよこんにちは）
No. 6 Misato Watanabe -- My Revolution
Hello, Brian. Yeah, it looks like I hit a bumper crop in the rankings with April 1986.
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