Like ‘The Sixties’, which began sometime around 1965, The Eighties began in about 1978, with the likes of Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, and Dire Straits’ Sultans of Swing. With the emergence of bands that would dominate The Eighties, escape velocity had been reached; you did not need to stink anymore or throw up on your audience or play every song at what sounded like 78rpm. It was a clear cut from the clip ‘round the ear of punk and a move into something more comfortable - shoulder pads and white sox included. Intriguingly, hair had a completely different trajectory; 80’s synth pop bands were still doing hair, but unlike the punks, theirs utilised a lot of product and serious attention to grooming. In fact, I really should write the complete history of hair in popular music
. From an anthropological point of view, hair in pop music might tell us more about the social condition of man than the songs. Bands like Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran populated the pops. Strange androgynous sylphs, most of whom could not actually sing in tune, became hit makers. Frankie Goes to Hollywood enlightened us all to the mechanics of gay sex, with their anthemic, Relax. It was, incidentally, a recording that firmly established Trevor Horn as the Magister Ludi of high pressure, bombastic synth pop. (More about Horn later)
But for me, it played out in another room. Apart from Live Aid (see TA passim) the music was very much in the background. This has a lot to do with the fact that most people of my milieu were listening on something called a Sony Walkman - very much a personal, exclusive medium - a lever of social disconnection, and one of several that emerged in the decade. I was busy with my work, Others were busy making money. So much so that, when Heaven 17 released Penthouse and Pavement (1981) the Yuppies thought ‘Let’s all make a bomb’ was an encouragement to make loads of money.
I mention Heaven 17, because that album sums up how detached I was from what was going on, musically. I took one look at the album cover and thought, ‘No, they all look like wankers’ - which was of course, the point. I had no idea that they were a band with a clear-cut left-wing attitude and that Penthouse and Pavement, including the cover art, was an ironic satire of the zeitgeist. When you are flipping through a rack of vinyl, there is a 2 second window, where you decide to give it a second look, or not.
Two bands that suffered from my 2 second attention span were Squeeze and Madness.
And Madness, well, they were yobs and rude boys. They seemed at one point to attract a certain type of fan-base who would describe themselves as Far Right, that is if they had achieved any level of self-awareness and could form words. Suggs was the kind of bloke who used to beat me up after school, and get his bandmates along to finish with a good kicking. I could not have been more wrong of course. They were great musicians and performers, but it was their songwriting that, in retrospect, stands out as brilliant. I give you The Liberty of Norton Folgate (2009) by Madness, as an example. In fact, I would go as far as to say that The Liberty was Madness’ Abbey Road. The band claims to have dabbled in a bit of crime before settling down to the day job. They were yobs! Except that one member’s mum was a floor manager at the BBC and Suggs’s mum was an accomplished Jazz singer, so I suspect that was hammed up to bolster the image.
Squeeze appeared to have been recruited from a regiment of military ice cream salesmen; The Queen’s Own 99th Chancers. I expected Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford to break out with suppurating boils and then hand me a Strawberry Mivi. They were young and didn’t appear to be particularly washed. Despite the stop and start nature of Squeeze, they clearly had it in them, years later, to create The Knowledge (2017) an album that shows a consummate maturity and a complete command of the material. I’d pick out ‘Patchouli’ as a very clever demonstration of their literacy. They have long ago left what was described as ‘kitchen sink’ pop and are now writing about their lives as middle aged men. But in a fun and profound way. ‘Departure Lounge’ is the kind of song Lennon should have been writing after The Beatles, but never did.
Even my favourite band, Jethro Tull, failed to make an imprint. They went through a depressing attempt to become a synth band and then thought the better of it and emulated Dire Straits. As usual, Anderson avoided directly sacking band members by pretending to do a solo album, which then emerged as ‘A’, with a modified line-up.
The only artists I can clearly remember from the 80’s are associated with people I either knew or lived with. I had a flat in Putney at the time and my next door neighbour played ‘Smooth Operator’ by Sade, on heavy and loud rotation. It’s a great song, but my neighbour clearly identified with it. He was a yob who had somehow managed to get a mortgage on the flat next door. People forget that the Eighties - in particularly the Thatcher Eighties, provided opportunities for rough people to move up in life; for the first time they could buy houses, become your neighbour and travel on airplanes and get drunk. I shall never forgive Thatcher for that.
I shared the boat with three women. One of them liked Kid Creole and the Coconuts. So, most of the time, we got, Annie, I’m not your Daddy - which must hold some kind of world record for including the word Onomatopoeia in it. Even Paul McCartney never reached that dizzy height. One was hard-wired to a Sony Walkman, so I never really figured her out. She was a card-carrying Yuppie, complete with a Filofax and an ironic Citroen 2CV. I married the other one, but it didn’t last. She did however, have an interesting record collection. (I’m a sucker for Vinyl)
Synth Pop completely passed me by. It has taken me about 25 years - married to someone born in 1970, to even think about Synth Pop. All I can really say about Synth Pop, is that it happened, and that a genius producer called Trevor Horn was behind its best prodigies. He was involved with Yes for a while and produced the impeccable Owner of a Lonely Heart. I think that that song and State of Independence (the Donna Summer, Quincy Jones produced version) are the two stand-out tracks of the 1980s. The crossovers in these two giant compositions are too complex to go through now, but they involve; Trevor Rabin, Jon Anderson, Trevor Horn, Chris Squire, Quincy Jones and Vangelis - but not necessarily in that order.
The 1980’s was the decade when Compact Discs emerged. That more or less sums up how dire the music industry was. It reduced album art and the accompanying sleeve notes to an irrelevance. For the first ten years, CDs were bad. It was the aural equivalent of being promised a nude woman and then being presented with a middle aged lady in a twin-set and sensible shoes, smelling of mothballs. CDs now have a semi-respectable place in the various platforms, so I am not throwing too many of them away, anytime soon. The clothes - the jackets and shirts with tiny collars, and the silly wedge-shaped, pleated trousers are long gone. Some things from the 1980’s just went on, and on and on, and the engines of social disconnection cemented the beginning of the break down of society as we knew it.
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