1982 - memories are made of this: ordering a cold beer in a Portuguese beach bar in July, wiping beads of sweat from my forehead, ear half-cocked to a beat-up transistor radio blaring out from behind the counter.

The announcer finishes another between track spiel with a heavily accented but unmistakable Dexy’s Midnight Runners and a record I don’t recognise kicks into life. The static is coming hard and heavy like an aural blizzard, but I can make out a banjo in there and Kevin Rowland singing about a girl called Eileen. Something is happening here I don’t know what it is … myself and my partner in crime grab our luggage, catch a Dublin-based plane and arrive home in time to see Kevin Rowland and Dexy’s Midnight Runners commence their climb up the charts with a record that makes just about everything else around it pale into insignificance by comparison.

A month later and the appearance of ‘Too Rye Aye’ fulfils the promise implicit in ‘Come On Eileen’. By year’s close I have seen the band live on two occasions, interviewed Kevin Rowland among bacon-burgers and busy coffee in a Manchester Wimpy and come to the conclusion that the creative and commercial renaissance of Dexy’s Midnight runners is the most outstanding, inspiring musical happening of 1982. And ‘Let’s Get This Straight From The Start’, swinging sweetly and seductively from the domestic jukebox’s e’en as the piece is being written, gives me no cause to question that assessment. It’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it.

Other reasons to be cheerful in 1982: Van Morrison’s ‘Cleaning Windows’ and ‘Beautiful Vision’, the album from where it came Kool And The Gang for ‘Get Down On It’; Marvin Gaye with ‘Sexual Healing’; The Beat for ‘Special Beat Service’ and a concert in Dublin that defined the phrase “positive vibrations”; Gregory Isaacs for ‘Night Nurse’ – the pleading way he sings the line “Oh gosh this pain is getting worse” on the title-track says more about pangs of the heart than does volumes A-Z of the icon of love; The Jam for ‘A Town Called Malice’, ‘Beat Surrender’, ‘The Gift’ and for having walked it like they talked right up to and including the end; Tom Verlaine for the magnificent ‘Words From The Front’, Madness for ‘Our House’ and attendant video, Bunny Wailer for ‘Rock’n’Groove’ – it doesn’t matter that it was recorded last year, since it showcases the kind of music that will always be this year’s thing, from here to eternity; Grace Jones for ‘The Apple Stretching’, a song at once personal and panoramic which wondrously evokes a sense of place; Kid Creole for, in the words of Lenny Bruce, the style and the attitude; Bruce Springsteen for rolling up his sleeves and getting down to basics on ‘Nebraska’; Warren Zevon for being Waren Zevon – check ‘The Envoy’ for further illumination; The J. Geils for proving that R’n’B stormtroopers can grow old gracefully; Grandmaster Flash for ‘The Message’; Smokey Robinson for ‘Being With You’, a purely personal pleasure, and Paul Brady for the devastating solo performance of ‘Nothing But The Same Old Story’ at an Anti-Amendment gig in the Baggot Inn.

Hope for 1983: that Irish-made music will give much cause for celebration. Prediction for 1983: Aswad will confirm and cancel at least ten Irish tours.