1985 revisited: Irish gig was one of Springsteen’s steps toward superstar status

Springsteen’s memories of what was, at that point, his largest-ever concert remained vivid for years afterwards. Stepping out under the spotlight and confronted by a huge swell of humanity swaying back and forth, he was gripped with dread — only to take heart as he saw his fans looking out for one another.

“The crowd closest to the stage…were deeply into their Guinness and dangerously swaying from left to right. They were opening up gaping holes amongst themselves as audience members by the dozens fell to the muddy ground, vanishing for unbearable second ’til righted once again by their neighbours,” Springsteen wrote in his 2016 biography, Born To Run.

“The crowd settled during the second half of the Slane show and I observed there was a sketchy but ritual orderliness to what appeared from the stage to be pure chaos. The crowd protected one another. If you fell, the nearest person to your left or right reached down, grabbed an arm and pulled you upright.”

In Cork, soon-to-be-biggest band in the world, U2, played the Lark by the Lee at Lee Fields — their surprise nine-song set finishing with ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. Across the city, Kris Kristofferson headlined Siamsa Cois Laoí at Páirc Uí Chaoimh alongside Don McLean and Loudon Wainwright III.

That year also saw Madness bring their Mad Not Mad tour to Cork City Hall while The Damned played Sir Henry’s — then a dingey rock venue, its days as a beating heart of club culture in Ireland still some time in the future.

In April, Man in Black Johnny Cash swept into town for a three-night residency at Cork Opera House.

Heady year for music

All told, it was a heady year for music. Kate Bush released one of the greatest albums of the decade Hounds Of Love (opening with future Gen Z favourite, ‘Running Up That Hill’).

Meanwhile, Phil Collins, a balding drummer from Wandsworth, became an international pop star. His third solo LP, No Jacket Required yielded one of his defining smashes with ‘Sussudio’ — a nonsense word he made up in the studio which felt entirely 1980s in its gaudy silliness.

He didn’t have the middle of the road all to himself. Dire Straits became a million-selling band with their soft-rock phenomenon Brothers In Arms — the single ‘Money for Nothing’ achieving ubiquity thanks to MTV’s support.

Collins and Dire Straits both performed at Live Aid that July, with Collins going over and above (literally) by singing with Sting during the Wembley leg of the fundraiser.

He was then whisked off in a helicopter piloted by Noel Edmonds and took the Concorde to Philadelphia to guest with a reformed Led Zeppelin, who deemed their performance so terrible they continue to this day to veto its release.

If Led Zeppelin were the losers, the winners from Live Aid were Bono — who put U2 on the map when he dragged an audience member up to dance with him during ‘Bad’ — and Freddie Mercury, who led Queen through a performance for the ages.

When we think of Queen today, we think of Mercury framed by that vast audience — an image that has transcended Live Aid to become part of 1980s rock mythology.

In Ireland, the year had started with Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ topping the charts, only to be displaced by Foreigner’s ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’, followed by ‘I Know Him So Well’ by Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson.

Things were just as wacky come December when Whitney Houston’s ‘Saving All My Love For You’ made way for Dermot Morgan’s Barry McGuigan parody, ‘Thank You Very Much, Mr Eastwood’ — which riffed on the Clones boxer’s vocal gratitude to his trainer, Barney Eastwood.

If music was a refuge from the darkness of the nuclear age, then cinema held up a mirror to these straitened times. In Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone tried to reach a detente with Russia by taking his character, Rocky Balboa, to Moscow, delivering a knockout to Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago, and then telling Mikhail Gorbachev that peace was possible. “If I can change ... and you can change ... Everybody can change,” he said. The Cold War was over within five years. A coincidence? Surely not.

Elsewhere, America turned again to Stallone as it tried to process its post-Vietnam trauma via cartoonish shoot-em-up Rambo: First Blood Part II.

The year’s second-biggest-grossing movie, it dispatched Stallone’s former Green Beret John Rambo back to ’Nam to liberate POWs abandoned to the villainous Viet Cong — an excuse for our hero to tote a rocket launcher and clock up an impressive 75 on-screen kills.

Rambo II expressed the United States’ heartfelt wish for a straightforward world of heroes and villains. A similar yearning for simpler times characterised 1985’s biggest release, Back to the Future. It sent Michael J Fox’s Marty McFly back to small-town post-war America, where the apple pie is delicious, and the worst you have to worry about is a run-in with the school bully (or, in Marty’s case, being propositioned by your mother).

As Marty skateboarded through Hill Valley, Huey Lewis’s ‘The Power of Love’ echoing in his ears, the turmoil of the Reagan era never felt further away.

The mid-1980s were a challenging time for Disney, which delivered a one-two of flops with Return To Oz and The Black Cauldron. Both were cautionary examples of what would come to be known as the “Dark Disney” years when the studio tried to win a new audience by piling on the grit.

In the case of Return to Oz, this meant a nightmarish riff on Frank L Baum complete with terrifying “wheelers” characters. The Dark Cauldron, for its part, was a fantasy saga that secretly wanted to be a Cure album — and which immediately vanished in a puff of brimstone.

On television, it was a time of new beginnings. Having sniffily watched the rise of Coronation Street, the BBC belatedly lowered itself to making a soap opera, debuting EastEnders that February. The year also witnessed the arrival of T he Golden Girls, MacGyver, and Bruce Willis’s Moonlighting.

But surely, no show captured these ludicrous times better than The Colbys, a spin-off of the hit US soap opera Dynasty that finished with one of its main characters abducted by a UFO.

Weird, wacky and more than slightly disturbing — it was 1985 in the nuttiest of nutshell.