It’s September 1981 and Milton Keynes shopping centre is not yet three years old. The UK is in turmoil, undergoing rapid social and economic change, and tension is high after a summer of inner-city rioting. While Thatcher sets about decimating the welfare state, privatising public services and deregulating the workplace, our Cliff – pop icon, legend and all out Summer Holiday good boy – sings and roller-skates through clean concrete underpasses and into the world’s longest shopping centre.

From John Lewis to House of Fraser, Cliff and his dancers, clad in spandex, leg warmers and big hair, skate over travertine marble, past clerestory glazing and troughs of sub-tropical plants and temperate trees. They are smiling happy, bright and pink, green, yellow colourful.

In 1981, colour is a thing.

In Milton Keynes, it is a futuristic bold and brash thing.

Skating up Midsummer Arcade, Cliff sings of a future where he’s plugged in, wired for sound, celebrating our new concrete jungle with a commercially catchy pop song. With headphones on, he is in his isolated Walkman world. Effortlessly passing glass, concrete and steel, new art, and new ways to make people spend their money. There’s no sign here of the recession, unemployment and those this new society will leave behind.

In Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side, colour is a black and white thing.

In jumpy Jamaican one-drop reggae beats, Bob Marley sings of the isolation, alienation and lack of connection this new urban landscape delivers. Pumped out over hot streets on ghetto blasters, music here is a shared community experience where young black men lead normal messy lives without roller skates. Fed up with the scapegoat politics, unemployment, poverty and SUS laws, they vent their anger, attacking buildings, setting fire to cars and fighting the police. ‘This is war,’ shouts The Sun.

Unaware of the dissonance, Cliff doesn’t blow his fuses. He has a cassette in his pocket, a head full of music, and he’s out on the street. There is no inner-city deprivation, no decay, no riots to bother you here. There are no bumps on the shiny new limestone walkways he skates toward a re-shaped future. In leather jacket and trousers, he circles ‘Octo’, the one-sided, one-edged, endless and disorientating sculpture puzzle. In a different Maze, men are on hunger strike for the right to claim paramilitary status. Heroes or villains, they die in the fight for a different future.

Cliff sings on. He loves speakers, stereo, AM and FM; he is ecstatic! We are all ecstatic, aren’t we? We have a Prince and Princess fairytale wedding, the Yorkshire Ripper is locked up, Bucks Fizz win Eurovision, and Trident will now protect us all. ‘You cannot be serious,’ yells McEnroe.

‘There is no such thing as society,’ Thatcher says, and Cliff shows us just how cool it will be in this isolationist new world. Just put on your headphones, turn up the volume – it’s all about me now.

Well, how did that go?