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Music of the 1980s
 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 80s, pop music was part of the fabric of life. It was
literally 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.
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.
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 Concorde to perform at
both shows.
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 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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One-Hit
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