The year is 1984, with an uncanny accuracy, George Orwell had predicted the dark and sinister forces that ruled the globe. Some men, it is true, had been made more equal than others. Pomo was casting a long pastel shadows over the metropolis and the future looked bleak.

However one group of auteurs had something else in mind. They looked to the dark, foreboding future suggested by Bladerunner, Alien and Oversized Novelty Corinthian columns and said: NO. “No thanks, not for me nor my children, life can (must!) be better than this. Our city need not be these dens of deceipt, crime and cheap appropriation of historical motif.” Geometry had for too long ruled the planning departments of the world, it was time for the bastard lovechild of Rhythm and Blues to take centre stage and the vehicle for this anthem was four heavy coiffed youngsters, Starship.

Under the proposed planning legislation put in place by Starship, all new cities and urban growth were to be forced into a position subservient to an irresistible 2-4 beat. Sweet riffs cut swathes through industrial zones, power chords decimated slums. Needless to say such ideas did not wash well with the establishment nor the weed-tokin’ jazz-listening-to beatniks but Starship were unfazed by the backlash, they had youth on their side and big hair to match.

Mickey Thomas on the Vox:

• “Someone’s always playin’ corporation games
• Who cares they’re always changing corporation names
• We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage
• They call us irresponsible, write us of the page”

“We just want to dance here.” Like Kevin Bacon before them, the kids just wanted to dance.

And boy did those kids dance.

The Starship manifesto, We Built This City on Rock and Roll, expounding their latest theories of urban renewal through the simple backbeat of rock and roll took the world by storm, going to number 12 in the UK before rocketing to Number 01 in the US of A in November 1985. All across North America towns were demolished, cities gutted in the promise of the new Utopia. The plans were being drawn up for a new beginning of civilisation,

• “The city by the bay, the city that rocks, the city that never sleeps,
• We built this city, we built this city on rock and roll”

Sadly these words held false promises. The so-called Cities of Rock and Roll never eventuated. Caught up in planning departments and land and environment courts the world over, the cities that had captured the imaginations of zillions were filed under

Starship, whose mantra “Nothings Gonna Stop us Now” proved ultimately misleading, fought a valiant battle to keep the dream alive. But in the end the bureaucrats and marketers won. It was found through market research that the punters needed something more digestible and “We Built This City on a Pop Tart Jingle” became the essay de jour.