Maybe, In The Eighties

It means it's time for the 1990s revival in the hip corners. Grow out your stubble, throw on your flannel, and I'll see you at "Grunge Retro Night."

Erm, weren't the 80s back in 1996 already?

IT FUCKING MEANS THAT DEF LEPPARD IS GOING TO BE THE HIGHEST GROSSING ARTIST IN ALL OF NEXT YEAR!!!!!!!! POISON GOES ON A SOLD OUT STADIUM TOUR!!!!!! I CAN FINALLY LISTEN TO THE TOP GUN SOUNDTRACK WITHOUT SHAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

that luptunes cousin ought to beat the 80's asses cause the decade be lowlives..and creed rules...

It means a few things to me: 1) At parties idiots will come up and ask me (as has happened before) to play some 80's stuff "you know, like Spandau Ballet", and I'll piss them off by playing the Smiths, 2) I can annoy kitschy types with my superior collection of Transformers and Trap Door videos, 3) I can moan about how kid's TV is so much crapper now than it was then (anyone remember 'Round The Bend'? Classic. Not to be confused with 'Round The Twist', though). Wicked!

80s nostalgiacs tend to have very selective memories. I guess that makes 'em no different to most other kinds of nostalgiacs, though.

Maybe it means somebody will release a Fun Fun boxset. I would buy it :)

Who said the Eighties were back?

Dunno, but I'm against the 80s.

I'm against all years except 1993.

Seriously though, the 80s have been coming back for YEARS now, why are people suddenly making a fuss over it? This is another reason I'm a bit irritated with Daft Punk's album; it's like they're being credited with the existance of the '80s. Haven't any of you been to Culture Club???

I personally am having a 90s revival. Fuck the '80s.

The same thing happened with the 70s though. Fashion moves slowly. With decade revivals everyone is willing it to happen from as soon as the decade in question ends and when it finally does it's in fits and starts. There was a joke through the 80s that flares were back before baggy finally led to people wearing bell-bottom jeans. S'Express and Deee-Lite did the other side of it - the glammy side. The catwalks seemed to have recurrent 70s themed shows for ages before they evolved into something that women started wearing as a matter of course. As for the 80s, from about 1991 Pulp were in the unusual position of reviving early 80s synth sounds as a kitsch retro feature despite having made records at that time themselves (I don't know much very early Pulp but I don't remember 'My Lighthouse' sounding like that at all).

In 1992, my university started an immensly popular 80s revival night called 'Club Tropicana'.

The only 80s fashion item I have really seen catch on lately is stilletos, but the fashion pages are full of dreadful batwing blouses that no one seems to be going for.

So yes, it's a bit lame when headlines proclaim 'The 80s are back' as if it's a new thing, but headlines aren't supposed to be reasoned reflections on the complex process of fashion revivals.

I have a feeling there's a lot more mileage to be had from the 80s yet (maybe we'll see the alt.fashion heritage of long grey coats etc come into play).

As for the 90s revival, I have an even less clear idea of what that entails. Time will tell if it's just a distance thing or whether it really was a hard decade to pin down. NOT everyone went around in checked shirts for heaven's sake! Some of us were too busy reviving the 70s..

Around '94 John and I went to our college's 'ents rep' with an idea for a dance. An 80s night. No way, he said, the 80s were shit. What about a 70s night with funk and disco? We said OK, a 70s and 80s night. He agreed. We got the posters done: Adam Ant and Weller in his Style Council warpaint days. He was suspicious - this doesnt look very funky. No, no, there's going to be loads of funk. He capitulated. We did the dance. It was incredibly successful. We did not play a single 70s record and the bloke who wanted funk stood at the bar and looked cross throughout.

As regular NYLPM readers know, we have already DJed our first 90s night. A second one is coming up in August.

I agree very strongly (save that I'm a weakling) with most of what Nick Dastoor says above. That is: to say 'the 80s are back' now is not to proclaim that the 80s have never been back before, or that the 80s haven't been coming back for years now, or that nothing else is back, or that the 90s revival isn't on the way - or whatever. It is merely to say that in at least certain channels of (for want of nicer terms) popular culture and mainstream discourse, the idea of an 80s revival has reached critical mass. In the UK this has been signalled and enacted by a weekly television retrospective on a Saturday night, 'I Love the 1980s' year by year. (Predictably, I have reservations and doubts about the programme, format, choice of interviewees, etc; but on the whole I enjoy it very much.) But there are many other cases too; I do think that a certain retro-80s momentum has built up, for good or ill, beyond this or that localized revival.

It might be a mistake simply to think of this as something that 'the media' are foisting on 'people'. (It may be that no-one is thinking like this: it's just that I want to avoid doing it myself.) What finally sparked me to pop the question was going to some B&Q-type DIY stores, and hearing nothing but 80s music playing: and thinking, 80s pop is now the easy listening (so to speak) that a certain, medium- spending, key-market generation wants to hear on a Sunday: it reassures and places, it takes them (us?) home. 1980s pop, that's to say, is becoming something like 1960s pop - save that the 1980s generation seems to cleave even more closely to its pop, to guard its New Romantic memories all the more jealously, if only in the act of *defying a supposed hostility* to the 1980s.

To say, glibly, that in this respect 'the 80s are the new 60s' is no big deal - save that it means that the cycles of recycling really are (as I suppose we supposed) turning ever faster. The speed of (cultural) history, the historical character of nostalgia - these are big issues which I think go slightly beyond anyone's love or loathing for this or that 80s band or phenomenon.

When people talk of the eighties revival at present, they seem to be meaning a certain sort of eighties thing: new romantic, new pop, (mostly) early eighties business. More Spandau and Duran than SA&W, the Smiths or ZZ Top. Not that this is a good or bad thing, particularly , just an observation I think may be worth making.

I think - as usual - that you have a point, Tim. The past tends to come in versions. I also appreciate your withholding value-judgement here - cos whatever we think of this or that tranche of music, there seems to be a generational (or at least media-cultural) need to revive / memorialize that perhaps needs to be 'understood' before being condemned (or indeed praised).

'New Romanticism', if it ever existed (or if it didn't), seems to be a big part of what 'the 80s' have come to mean for a lot of people. Then again, I think that SAW is becoming a big part of the revival now - Pete Waterman seems to be on TV every night talking about his past triumphs; and the record that broke the camel's back and prompted this thread was none other than 'I Should Be So Lucky'. In a way, what I am trying to get at, or to understand, is how / when / why that record went from being 'exciting dance-floor filler / execrable unlistenable pap' and became something like... well - 'classic'. I'd better be careful here - I'm not saying it's a classic, but that it seems to be getting towards that comfortable, inoffensive cultural status.

Possibly the acceptance of 'I Should Be So Lucky' has arisen from the subsequent success of Kylie's career. Now she has aquired an almost Madonna-like semi-universal respect we (and, especially, she) can laugh off her early career as likeable froth rather than bile- inducing rubbish.

The Eighties to me means Power Ballads!!! Oh yeah! So many classic songs..."Living on a Prayer" "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now", "the Final Countdown", "Take my Breath Away"...and Falco!(I do *like* these songs, no irony here!) I like the eighties coz I was a kid then and was quite happy being a kid. But, as Frank Zappa once said we'd better be careful or we will end up living our lives in nano- seconds...Best to live in the present I think.

Pinefox:

"80s pop is now easy listening (so to speak)."

Of course it has filled that cultural space. Just listening for five minutes to Steve Wright's Radio 2 show, and comparing it to what Gloria Hunniford used to do at that time and on that station while Wright was on R1, proves that.

And in response to Tim's point - of course the current "80s revival" stresses chartpop over anything more marginal because, *by definition*, that's what mainstream-nostalgic movements do. However, late 80s pop is part of it as well as the New Romantic era - the "I Love ..." series has reached the later part of the decade now so it's SAW all the way (the most recent instalment, in 1988, was one of the many recent shows to feature Pete Waterman as talking head), and similarly-conceived series on C4 and Sky One have featured the late 80s intensely. 1989's even inspired a *McDonalds ad*, for Christ's sake.

"On 1988", rather than "in" it, of course.

Robin, what I was saying (quite clearly, I think) is that a particular sort of mainstream 1980s pop is currently being defined as 'eighties' music. Do you really think ZZ Top were marginal?

I wasn't really talking about TV series ("I Love the Eighties" was fairly sure to reach the late 80s, it seems to me) but rather my unhappy experience of attending '80s nights in discos, which seem to fixate on New Romantic and new pop stuff. Granted, with a sprinkling of early SAW. Nasty '80s compilation LPs seem, in the main, to do the same thing.

As for "of course", there's no of course about what gets picked up by revivalists: lots and lots of the most popular records from the seventies would never get picked up even by the kitschiest of '70s nights. Ditto the sixties.

I agree with Tim. Even among mainstream genres, 80s nostalgia tends to focus on UK synth-pop to a much greater extent than it does on, say, power ballads, corporate-rock, disco, R&B, Ozzy Osbourne, Bruce Springsteen or anything else. *Why* it does, I'm not entirely sure of. Maybe 'cause the genre almost entirely vanished halfway through the decade (eventually resurfacing as Trent Reznor, but he just doesn't feel the same), but then hair-metal disappeared even faster and more thoroughly, and people haven't been nostalgic about that to the same degree - though you have those Monster Rock-type compilations that have been selling pretty well lately.

Yes, Tim and Patrick, I pretty much see what you mean. You're right that early 80s synthpop is inescapable in current nostalgia movements in a way that other styles from that decade which were / are equally "mainstream" and commercial are not.

My hamfisted guess at a reason would be that, recorded when it was (mostly predating, in a UK context, the real onset of Thatcherism after the June 83 landslide) it has an air of innocent charm around it which the much more consciously cynical pop at the end of the decade ("No more weirdos anymore" and such statements) doesn't have, and that it evokes the part of the 80s before aggression in pursuit of acquisition really took off, so it seems more pleasant to remember today. However, it might just be that the late 80s aren't that long enough ago yet to be remembered in such a way. In five years' time, when their peak will be getting on for 20 years ago, I think SAW could well be as prevalent, in this context, as New Romantic and new pop are today.

When you say "early SAW", Tim, are you referring to stuff like Dead Or Alive? "You Spin Me Round Like A Record" was certainly their first number one, pretty much exactly halfway through the decade, and it fits in at the tail-end of the new pop era.