Casio keyboards, hairdresser bands, New
Wave, New Romantics and
New Order. Band Aid, Live
Aid, Farm Aid and hearing aid!
In the
eighties, when Thatcher was busy selling England by the pound and
caring more about some sheep in the southern Atlantic than 'her'
people, the youthful reaction was Blitz,
Boy George and Marilyn.
And the march of electronic and digital technology hit the
music world and punk died with its boots on.
The Top 40 was full of it: Adam & The Ants (a pantomime
Glitter Band), Soft Cell, Duran
Duran, Ultravox, Orchestral
Manoeuvres In The Dark, Visage, Bauhaus - the Casio fops and the
art students seemed to be taking over the asylum. Even Top Of
The Pops had a new electro theme tune.
By the 1980s, pop music was part of the fabric of life. It was
everywhere. On countless new radio stations, on movie soundtracks,
in restaurants, in supermarkets and even in lifts . . .
The explosion of music found its way into the tabloid press as
newspapers started covering the antics of pop stories as major
news stories, and into an overwhelming number of new music and
style magazines. And most importantly of all, it found its way on
to television.
When MTV, the music video channel, was launched in the US in
the summer of 1981 it changed our view of music overnight.
Suddenly it was important what music looked like, as well as how
it sounded.
Even though the introduction of the compact disc had improved
the quality of recordings enormously, it was how artists presented
and packaged themselves that really mattered. And the 80s
megastars - Madonna, Michael
Jackson, Prince, Wham! et al - not
only had the videos, they had The Look (and a host of advisers,
stylists and trainers to help them achieve it).
As for the music, the Eighties witnessed an astounding variety
of different styles and genres, from new psychedelia to acid
house, disco to death metal, goth rock to
hip hop, folk to
technopop - with reactions and revivals following on from each
other (and often colliding with each other) at an alarming rate.
Things were changing very fast: - The very first number one
record of the decade for example, was by a little known group
called Pink Floyd, and a year later it was the turn of Joe Dolce
with Shaddap You Face - a new star for a new decade who
came from nowhere, scored a number one hit and then, mercifully,
returned to nowhere.
The most important innovation of the 80s was the wealth of new
bands who made their impact on the scene. And the earliest
flowerings of an 80s style was the group of strutting young
peacocks who called themselves the New
Romantics.
The birth of the New Romantics took place in basement clubs in
London where groups like Ultravox, Spandau Ballet and
Blue Rondo a
la Turk first gathered to dance to their own brand of music, dress
up in outrageous clothes , show off their latest makeup and spend
hours deciding whether to use the ladies or gents toilets.
The most important club of the time was Blitz run by Steve
Strange. The essence of the New Romantics was style. The clothes,
the make-up, the image were all important. So anyone could become
a star in the early 80s as long as they had long, flowing hair,
wore layers of mascara and dressed in glamorous party frocks.
Anyone that is, except women! Faced with this problem, many female
singers started dressing like men.
Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics took cross-dressing so far that
in one video she played a woman pretending to be a man pretending
to be a woman. Or possibly a man pretending to be a woman
pretending to be a man.
Amidst all this gender-bending some people gave up their sexual
identity altogether and simply settled for looking like Michael
Jackson. Not an easy task since Michael Jackson spent millions of
dollars on plastic surgery trying to look like anyone but Michael
Jackson.
The sheer power of pop music made itself heard in 1984 when The
Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof, and Midge Ure of Ultravox
organised help for starving people in Ethiopia. Britain's top
music stars joined together to form Band
Aid, producing a single, Do
They Know It's Christmas?
The following year, Geldof organised Live Aid - two huge
concerts held simultaneously at London's Wembley Stadium and JFK
Stadium in Philadelphia. Watched by 1.5 billion people on
television, over £50 million was raised to help famine relief in
Africa.
The pop cast included Status Quo, Sting,
Queen, David
Bowie,
Paul McCartney, Madonna, Joan
Baez, Eric Clapton, Mick
Jagger, Led Zeppelin, Duran Duran and
Bob Dylan. Phil Collins even crossed the
Atlantic by Concord to perform at both shows.
 For the most part, white America was persisting with the arena
rock of REO Speedwagon, Styx and
Journey, the country rock
crossover of Eddie Rabbit and Dolly Parton and the pretty-boy pop
(pap?) of Hall & Oates and Rick
Springfield.
While the Seventies had spawned a phenomena known as the
"one-hit wonder", almost every artists in the 80s was a
one-hit wonder. Let's take Toni Basil
(pictured at right) as an example: In 1982 she
turned up with an infectious and innocuous cheerleading song
called Mickey.
Little did MTV know that this peppy cheerleader was pushing 40!
She had been a Go-Go dancer with Terri Garr around 1964 and even
made a brief appearance in Easy Rider as a New Orleans
prostitute. But anybody could release a song in the 1980s . . .
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