1981 - Mr Rubik - The Barron Knights

 

The Barron Knights gave us the album Twisting The Knights Away in 1981, and reflected the year's main craze on the cover and in one of the tracks - the Rubik's Cube! The Cube blasted out from behind the Iron Curtain, Hungary to be exact, where it had been known as Magic Cube, to become Rubik's Cube in 1980 - re-manufactured to Western World safety and packaging norms.

Small numbers of Magic Cubes had seeped into the West, but there were never enough to spark any major craze, and the Magic Cube was not pliable enough to allow speed cubing, which would become a major feature of the Rubik's Cube craze. The small seepage of Magic Cubes caused some confusion and even the mighty BBC to slip up in its 'I Love...' series, when it claimed the Rubik's Cube arrived in the UK in 1979. It did not actually exist then, and the small numbers of Magic Cubes which seeped over here via a small niche puzzle company largely passed unnoticed. Just check out any UK newspaper archive. The BBC was inundated with complaints and moved the Rubik's Cube to 1980 on its 'I Love...' website. 

As the series had also goofed with the space hopper (UK newspaper articles reveal it was a huge craze from the time of its release in the spring of 1968 and not thrilling and new in 1971) and several other items, pop culture historians now approach the series with extreme caution.

But in the case of the Rubik's Cube, the BBC can't be wholly blamed: rather misleading tales that the tiny niche puzzle company Pentangle in England launched the Magic Cube in the UK in 1978 had been circulating since the early 1980s - taking no account of the tiny numbers available and the Magic Cube's differences to the 1980 Rubik's Cube. As we say, the UK newspaper archives are a great recorder of past crazes, as are magazines of the time.

From the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine's review of 1981 - the Year of the Cube in the UK.

Sadly, the 1980 Rubik's Cubes were also in woefully short supply at first. Although the trademark was registered in the UK on 7 May 1980, the first of them did not arrive until later in the year - and still stocks were low. In the spring of 1981 more Cubes arrived. The craze flamed, and was so ferocious that the colourful little object become one of the main icons of the 1980s. 

Hear the Barron Knights' humorous Rubik's  Cube song below, with some clever modern day Cube animation that just suits the mood - and evokes very powerfully the spirit of 1981! Mr Rubik was, of course, the puzzle's inventor, Erno Rubik, and much more can be read about the Cube by clicking on our "Rubik's Cube" label below.