»Remember eighty something …«
With the video for “Back In The Days” from the current album “The Big Easy”, John Diva & The Rockets of Love start the year 2024.
A new year, a new song, a perfect radio hit. A melancholy hymn to youth, to a long-lost love and to the unshakeable loyalty to an oath that was almost forgotten in everyday adult life – but only almost …
“Back In The Days” is (of course) a tribute to the music of the eighties, even if the sound and vocals are produced in a much more modern way than the 80s fans of the Rockets might be used to. Rather, it is the lyrics with which John Diva dives deep into the most popular decade of all time to move upstream like a fish in water.
»Remember eighty something …« it says at the beginning of every verse. Remember yourself! And indeed, everyone has colorful memories of that decade, whether you were there or not. It seems almost impossible to distinguish your own memory from the cliché – or from a story that perhaps everyone (or your big brother)has told or experienced.
»The day you got your first car, you took me swimming in the raw«.
In the 80s, the images in our heads learned to walk. MTV broadcast the RnR clichés around the globe into the bedrooms of teenage lovers. Diva skillfully plays with all these images in “Back In The Days” when he sings »Back in the days, around the camp fire, two lost souls living on the run« and almost everyone feels addressed by this teenage romance that John tells as if it were his own – which perhaps it is.
»The day your mother found out, was the day my father kicked me out«.
Diva ties in – consciously or unconsciously – with the narrative structure of the great storyteller. It is always the same stories that move us in that the two protagonists of the song have long since grown up. That they may be listening to this song separately on the other side of the world and remembering a time when everything was before them and when one song could change everything. Songs like those written to perfection by Springsteen, Tom Petty, Phil Lynott and Brain Adams.
Here is a new one, add it to your collection and dream on, teenage lovers.
It‘s a new year, it‘s an old dream!
John Diva & The Rockets Of Love are synonymous with wild parties, passionate live shows, but also liberal messages in their lyrics. “Back In The Days”, on the other hand, is a rather nostalgic song, the genesis of which John describes as follows:
„As a teenager I loved these kinds of lyrics, which is funny because as a young person you can’t feel nostalgia yet. Somehow that feeling was still conveyed, and I always wanted to get to a point in my life where I could write a track like that myself. As I got older, I reached that point. I keep coming back to great songwriters like Bruce Springsteen, a great storyteller. I wanted to write a lyric that I could take from myself and that would provide a point of reference for others. So, my own fiction becomes everyone’s fiction. It’s a real challenge to achieve this with just a few lines.“
You can watch the video here:
https://youtu.be/p08Of8Z_i6o
