I went to see The B-52’s last night, a band I’ve long loved but never seen live. They were huge fun, but the show was also very emotional for me. The band’s fifth album, 1989’s Cosmic Thing, was very important to me when I was a lot younger, and was the soundtrack to a long summer mostly spent with my best friend, the two of us unsuccessfully trying to meet girls.
There’s a real melancholy to the album – it was the band’s first after the death of their innovative guitarist, Ricky Wilson – and that melancholy is amplified for me because the friend who let teenage me play Cosmic Thing constantly on his car stereo died far too young a few years ago.
There’s a strange feeling seeing The B-52’s live, partly because the band were already nostalgic when they began: their vibe is a stylised, almost mythical 1950s America of B-movies and jukeboxes and beach parties. So in a way, seeing them in 2026 is nostalgia for something that was already looking back decades.
It’s complicated for me too because in 1989 I was still battling against being me, and for a long time I’ve considered Cosmic Thing not just the soundtrack to part of my old life, but also the soundtrack to the life I never got to lead, the hot girl summer I never got to inhabit. The “wild girls” of Deadbeat Club talking a mile a minute, dancing in torn sheets in the rain, crashing “that party down in normal town”; the same girls in Dry County sitting on the porch, swinging, to chase away blues that “whomp you up on the side of the head.” I heard myself in those songs, and felt pure joy in songs like Roam and Topaz.
I didn’t know the background to the album at the time; speaking in 2023, Cindy Wilson said that “It was very depressing days. It was a dark time. It was just so awful with what was going on with the AIDS epidemic and so many lost loved ones and friends. We were all so depressed and didn’t know what was going to happen.” AIDS took their friend and guitarist Ricky Wilson, as well as many of their friends in the wider world.
As Pete Crighton writes in his 33 and 1/3 book about the album, “dark times are when queer people find their strength. It’s the dark times, when we’re backed into a corner, that we come out swinging the hardest. Just ask Marsha P. Johnson, or any of the heroes of the Stonewall uprising. Instead of hiding their heads in the sand, or quietly fading out of the pop culture landscape and letting their catalogue languish in the remainder bins, the B-52s decided to go to work. Whether it was conscious or not, they resolved to fight through their grief and show the world that queer people would be visible, that they would dance, that they would sing, and in the face of tragedy, they would still find a way to smile and honour their friends.”
I almost didn’t go to the show last night because I was sad; once again, these are dark times. But I’m glad I did, because at long last I was able to hear songs live that have lived in my head for decades and dance to a band who can turn sadness into joy. As Crighton says of Cosmic Thing: “There is real emotion. Real depth. Real tenderness. And a whole lot of horniness.”
