The five greatest songs about a nuclear apocalypse
Ever since the Atomic Age was unleashed when the USA tested its first nuclear explosive in a New Mexico desert 80 years ago, humanity has discovered a terrible new form of just how the apocalypse may arrive.
It’s a nightmare that has plagued the world since the post-war era and likely ever after. The moment the Soviet Union had developed its nuclear capabilities during the depths of the Cold War, the anxieties of pre-emptive strikes, through offensive action or technical error, and the domino effect of retaliatory mushroom clouds lighting up the globe, were no mere speculative horror.
Before the concepts of Mutually Assured Destruction had been established, the 1950s were a red-hot decade of Duck and Cover anxiety, escalating tensions between the polarised superpowers spiralling to the closest mankind teetered on brink of nuclear extinction with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
While easing throughout the ensuing years, and countercultural flourish across the Western world pushing aside the previous concerns over perceived Soviet threats, the fiery terror of a gargantuan plume of engulfing fire vaporising thousands at its ground zero, melting and maiming scores more in its outer radiuses, and casting a grey shroud of cancer and fallout misery still haunted the collective psyche. The horrifying scale of destruction dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing months of the Second World War, a decision that prompts serious contestations as to its necessity to this day, still burns fiercely on the international stage.
Naturally, such unease around the ‘little red button’ would find its way into popular culture, exploring the topic of nuclear war with serious academic study or gleeful B-movie exploit. As the Neocon wave swept across the West, the ramped-up aggressive foreign policy aimed at the Reds resurrected all the old fears about global destruction, pouring itself into a slew of TV movies and Hollywood features, from the BBC’s grim social realist drama Threads, to a young Matthew Broderick accidentally hacking into the US military system and nearly triggering World War III in 1983’s WarGames. The music charts too seemed to encounter their biggest flurry of nuclear pop yet, Nena scoring East Berlin hair-trigger strikes on the funky ‘99 Red Balloons’, and Genesis dropping one of their biggest hits, ‘Land of Confusion’, shaped from the global knife-edge that threatened to spin out of control.
Currently, the Doomsday Clock, the method of measuring how close humanity is to extinction, is the closest it’s ever been to the point of no return at 89 seconds to dreaded midnight, its hands dialled forward by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in light of the continuing nuclear stockpiles and conflicts across the Middle East and Ukraine. With the world’s end time well within touching distance, now’s as good a time as any to take a look at the songs that have explored the ultimate game over that potentially awaits all of us.
Five great songs about a nuclear apocalypse:
Black Sabbath – ‘Electric Funeral’
Release Date: September 1970 | Producer: Rodger Bain | Label: Vertigo
San Francisco’s flower power felt lightyears away from Birmingham’s Aston suburbs. While the day’s hippy idyll had already curdled by the 1970s, ‘peace and love’ still dominated the charts across both sides of the Atlantic. Inspired by the dark storm clouds that had gathered over the Western sphere amid the turmoil surrounding the Vietnam War and pervading instability, Black Sabbath earnestly pursued the darker side of life as it was revealing itself in grim fashion across every newspaper and TV report.
Taking on the heavy topic of nuclear war, Sabbath weaved Paranoid’s apocalyptic ‘Electric Funeral’. Coated in Tony Iommi’s foreboding guitar attack, frontman Ozzy Osbourne spits a scorched future landscape littered with the remains and ruins of a world destroyed in a white hot flash at the hands of political hubris and rank concern for future generations: “Dying world of radiation / Victims of man’s frustration / Burning globe of obscene fire / Like electric funeral pyre”.
Young Marble Giants – ‘Final Day’
Release Date: April 1980 | Producer: Young Marble Giants | Label: Rough Trade
Striking one of the most unique marks in the crowded post-punk scene, Cardiff’s Young Marble Giants sculpted gripping expanses of sonic atmosphere, engulfing their delicate and austere jabs of skeletal guitar and brittle drum machines. Fronting such a peculiar sound was Alison Statton, lending perfectly unassuming and plaintive vocals to the prickly but eerily soothing nocturnalism the trio had conjured.
Released a few months after their sole album Colossal Youth, the ‘Final Day’ single spun another expert collage of muffled keys and swaddled bass, lyricist Stuart Moxham crafting the domestic panic of an impending nuclear strike as awaited by the families huddled across the UK’s suburbs. Buzzing with a disquieting, pitched whine throughout, ‘Final Day’ stands as an unnerving vignette of nuclear war as the nation awaits its impending drop, the anxiety gnawing every household preparing as “…the world lights up / For the final day”.
Kate Bush – ‘Breathing’
Release Date: September 1980 | Producer: Kate Bush and Jon Kelly | Label: EMI
By her third album, Never for Ever, Kate Bush had wrested further artistic control, ensuring greater production direction and pursuing an uncompromising sound eager to embrace the era’s developing recording technologies. First deploying the landmark Fairlight CMI sampler and the latest polyphonic synthesisers, Bush enthusiastically sculpted a new aural terrain that would grow richer and more immersive as the decade’s following albums rolled out.
While the more canonical ‘Babooshka’ and ‘Army Dreamers’ would follow, Never for Ever’s lead single ‘Breathing’ was the record’s most ambitious. Casting a typically fantastical lyrical canvas anchored in the human condition at its most naked, Bush depicts the dystopian tale of a foetus in their mother’s womb, all too aware of the nuclear tensions or fallout holocaust that’s embroiling the world outside their protective womb. Replete with a stirring break that remotely details a nuclear flash with dry but chilling reportage, ‘Dreaming’ sees Bush tackle the topic of mankind’s extinction full of aching heart amid its grand fable.
The Specials – ‘Man at C&A’
Release Date: September 1980 | Producer: Jerry Dammers and Dave Jordan | Label: 2 Tone Records
Having bottled the wayward social drift that was hovering over the country’s decline at the tail end of the 1970s, Coventry ska outfit The Specials stood as the leading force of the genre’s revival during the UK’s new wave, resurrecting the old Jamaican rocksteady hits from the previous decade and spiked with the grit of punk’s urgency. Racially unified and socially conscious, The Specials’ eponymous debut landed as the nucleus soundtrack to the day’s working-class youth.
Creatively restless, Jerry Dammers pushed The Specials toward unorthodox new styles and flavours, including subtle electronic textures and muzak flourishes at its most psychedelic. Such experiments birthed More Specials’ ‘Man at C&A’, a thunderously spooky horror trip soaked in Scientist reverb and stormed percussion, casting an eye on the little man caught up in seismic political battles without his say-so. Shopping at C&A, the former British high street clothing store specialising in drab and unfussy garments, our titular man laments the Cold War machinations at play that could upend his world while the political order buries itself deep in their safety vaults.
Frankie Goes to Hollywood – ‘Two Tribes’
Release Date: June 1984 | Producer: Trevor Horn | Label: ZTT
Gleeful provocation and mammoth studio bombast had found the perfect pairing with Liverpool’s Frankie Goes to Hollywood and former Buggle Trevor Horn. Having stormed the pop charts and twisted prurient knickers with the palpably homoerotic ‘Relax’, Holly Johnson and the lads turned their subversive eye toward the Cold War’s dangerous heating up as the USA and the USSR began their nuclear sabre rattling in earnest, unseen since the 1950s.
Deploying their unique humour, Frankie Goes to Hollywood unleashed the electric monster ‘Two Tribes’, Johnson sending up the superpower tensions with DEFCON 1 disco swagger, samples of Patrick Allen’s unsettling Protect and Survive narrations, and the strongest sequencer line ever heard, the Hi-NRG scousers whip up a near media circus that crackles as both a UK number one and some fantastic art project. Aided by Godley & Creme’s arresting MTV-ready video of President Ronald Reagan and communist General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko fighting it out in a wrestling ring, ‘Two Tribes’ captures the madness and the paranoia of the Cold War’s final chapter with sharp, satirical bite.
