"Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)" - Mike + the Mechanics

Unless you lived through it, it’s hard to describe just exactly how huge Genesis and its members were for a time there in the mid-1980s. In 1985, Phil Collins released No Jacket Required, spawning hits like “Sussudio,” “Take Me Home,” “Don’t Lose my Number,” etc. But that same year, Collins’ Genesis bandmate Mike Rutherford’s Mike + the Mechanics released their self-titled album featuring “All I Need is a Miracle” and today’s pick “Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground).” Then the next year in 1986, Genesis regrouped and released Invisible Touch, which unleashed the titular track, “Land of Confusion” (which had that video with the creepy puppets), “In Too Deep” and “Throwing it all Away.” You may hate all those songs, I wouldn’t blame you if you did. But you have to admit that’s a crazy two year run.

“Silent Running” is almost a perfect distillation of the 1980s Cold War environment in which it was created. The song is about fighting in some rebel alliance in a dystopian future against some invasion from an evil oppressor. The movie Red Dawn had come out just a year earlier, so this idea was very much in the zeitgeist. Then there’s “Silent Running’s” music video, which, in classic 80s fashion, was a mini-movie with its own narrative structure… kinda. In it, a dad leaves his family to go fight in some war either in the future or in space, it’s unclear. At the end of the video, his son, who seems to be ten or eleven years old, gets beamed away to, presumably, join his dad in the fight, which, in retrospect is horrible parenting and a total d*ck move to the mom.

Either because of or despite all that, this song has stuck with me all these decades. I think in part because I was living in a foreign country in 1985 and rarely got to hear it. So it became a rare treat. Paul Carrack’s metallic voice, the atmospheric synth in the background, the overwrought lyrics. “Silent Running” could only have ever come out in 1985, a year or two in either direction and it wouldn’t exist. Thankfully, Genesis and Mike Rutherford were in their imperial age then and could manifest the Mechanics and “Silent Running.”

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Class of ‘90 rulez.