Various Now - Yearbook The Vault: 1981 - New DLX 4CD

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Format: New 4CDLabel: Now Cat. No. CDYBVXNOW81

Barcode: 198029011227

Released: 13/06/2025

1981 was a seismic year in pop music, with a huge number of new artists making unforgettable chart debuts. We have included more than 160 tracks on the CDs of the 1981 Yearbook, the 80-84 Final Chapter, and their extras so far in our appreciation of the year.

Those tracks were generally the bigger hits of the year, with their chart achievement a factor in their inclusion – however – that’s not the whole singles story of the year, and our celebration of 1981 wouldn’t be complete without shining a light on some of the years’ singles that have been compiled much less frequently over the past 40 years.

To Johnny and Robert, Gilgamesh resonated eerily with the present moment –– and it catalysed their song-writing. For Gilgamesh is a story of friendship, love, loss, grief, bad governance and good dreaming; of natural disaster and environmental crisis. It also contains the first recorded act of human destruction of the natural world: when Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to the Sacred Cedar Wood, slay the guardian spirit of the forest, and cut down the trees with their axes, thereby bringing catastrophe upon themselves.

Johnny and Robert wrote the album between March 2020 and February 2021, during a year in which we all wandered unsure of our path, lost in the cedar wood. The songs were composed in large part as a correspondence, through a back-and-forth of notebook pages, voice-recordings and WhatsApp-messages, at a time when lockdowns made meeting in person impossible. The first eight songs were recorded in an off-grid cottage deep in a Hampshire forest, with the sounds of chainsaws felling trees drifting in through the windows along with the birdsong.

The result is an album at once urgent and ancient, which fuses poetry, landscape, myth and music into something unique. These are songs that ring with hope, love and sadness –– and one need not know anything about The Epic of Gilgamesh to be touched by them.