If you remember the '80s, you probably were there

Dylan Jones (centre) with the Cookie Crew’s Cookie Pryce and Susie Q
Picture: BBC/Sebastian Barfield/Plimsoll Productions

There is some dispute as to who first quipped “If you remember the ‘60s you weren’t there”, but the prevailing view is that it was American comedian Charlie Fleischer. It’s a line that stands out because the decade in which I was born is revered for its cultural earthquakes - peace, love, The Beatles and all that - which then led to another decade that embraced rock, disco, funk and punk.

The ’60s/’70s sequence is nice and neat, and comes to a full stop with the start of a decade that still seems to be treated like the uncool, oddball member of an otherwise respectable family. But were the 1980s really that bad? I became a teenager in the ’80s, which means that it, more than any other decade, should have had the greatest cultural influence on me. It’s when I really discovered music for myself, and when I passed through all the rights of passage you’d expect, starting the decade as a 13-year-old and ending it at the age of 23, in the process progressing through puberty, school and the start of my career in the media, initially writing about music. Throughout this entire time there was a lot to absorb, culturally. I’m not going to attempt to precis the 1980s in one single blog post (actually, I don’t think an an entire book could capture the decade faithfully), but music does provide a frame with which to consider the period.

It has become fashionable to rubbish the 1980s, but that may be something to with the fact that it brings back dystopian memories of the Cold War, the Reagan/Thatcher love-in, and the very real risk of someone dropping a nuclear bomb on your home. That all tempered the seemingly confected frivolity of the era’s pop music, a point not helped by those BBC Four Top Of The Pops re-runs from the time featuring  cheesy (and disinterested) Radio 1 DJs introducing badly lip-synced performances. 

This was a theme that I expanded on back in July when I interviewed the eminent force of music radio that is Gary Crowley on the occasion of his sumptuous second Lost ’80s box set coming out. “It was an exciting time,” he told me, adding that “half of those artists [in the early ’80s] were all punks, anyway.” However, as we now put a 40-year distance between now and the start of the ’80s, there is room to reconsider the decade, Crowley’s two four-CD box sets have demonstrated, though relative obscurities from some of the era’s biggest pop acts, like Wham!, Depeche Mode, Prefab Sprout, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club and Bananarama, just how much good music came out of a period that hindsight hasn’t always been too kind to. 

This forms the central thesis of a new four-part BBC2 series commencing tomorrow night - The 80s - Music’s Greatest Decade? fronted by Dylan Jones the former editor of GQ, The Face and iD magazines, and author of several acclaimed music biographies. “Interminable television programmes still suggest the whole episode was nothing but a calamitous mistake, a cultural cul-de-sac full of rotten records by shameful individuals with orange skin and espadrilles,” Jones says of the decade. “I’m here to tell you this couldn’t be further off the mark.” 

He believes that the ‘80s were far more inventive, musically, than the tropes about drum machines and over-produced records relentlessly suggest, and in the series calls upon figures such as Nile Rodgers, Madonna, Eurythmics, Public Enemy, Gary Kemp, Jazzie B, Trevor Horn, Bronski Beat, Bananarama’s Sara and Keren Woodward, Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, UB40’s Ali Campbell and others to prove the point. 

Key to this view is Jones’ belief that, unlike other eras, the 1980s weren’t anchored to one single genre, and the notorious tags that the music press, in particular, likes to label an artist. In fact, if you think about it, what is “’80s music”? Were Culture Club a reggae band because of Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? And what were Duran Duran, with their nodding references to Chic, Roxy Music and even the prog rock they were all fans of as teenagers? Gary Kemp - now touring as vocalist and lead guitarist with Pink Floyd founder Nick Mason's outfit Saucer Full Of Secrets readily admits to being a prog fan, and has said that even a band as symbolic of the '80s like Spandau Ballet pulled on references from previous decades. “We were influenced by Floyd,” he has said.

Dylan Jones believes that the 1980s were pop’s greatest decade, when pop became more adventurous than ever. He even thinks the decade gave the ’60s and ’70s a run for their money in terms of excitement. Pop culture, he argues, became even more inventive, “a kaleidoscopic display of musical experimentation,” he wrote in The Sun, “in which genres were born and evolved with dizzying rapidity. While music continues to fascinate to this day, it will never be as varied as it was back then.” I think he has a point.

But, then, every era has its good and its bad. “Whenever anyone tried to say the ‘70s was a period of great music - ­glam rock, disco, punk, soul etc - we had Bay City Rollers, Slik and David Cassidy thrown in our face,” Jones points out. The ’80s, by contrast, offered a “wild variety” of styles, from electro to the New Romantics, rap and hip-hop, and the early shoots of Acid House and Britpop. And that was on top of creating some of the biggest and most influential pop acts of all time, from Michael Jackson to Prince, George Michael to Madonna.

Jones’ BBC2 series explains that technology played a massive part in pop’s ’80s explosion. With the bare minimum of ability, bands could buy drum machines and synthesisers and, with the help of computers, make distinct sounds. At the same time, MTV gave a platform to pop’s third dimension: image. Image played, perhaps, an even bigger part - bigger than even during the glam rock era - with how bands identified themselves. “You’d hear something and think, ‘oh that’s Bananarama, that’s Culture Club, that’s Duran Duran’,” says Bananarama’s Keren Woodward. “Everyone looked their own way as well.”

‘Promos’, as they used to be called, had been pretty cheesy inserts for shows like Top Of The Pops and Nationwide when either the band couldn’t turn up or Pan’s People couldn’t come up with a dance routine in their place. But with MTV, record companies upped their promotional budgets, sending the likes of Duran Duran off to shoot their exotic yachting videos, and even turning Texan rockers ZZ Top turned into cable TV cowboys through slick promos that didn’t take themselves too seriously. And, then, right smack in the middle of the decade, pop reached its zenith with the “global jukebox” - Live Aid. 

Nile Rodgers, whose work on Bowie’s Let’s Dance made The Dame - and that album - one of the biggest things to happen in the 1980s - tells Jones in the series that the decade was, for many of his peers, the summit of a lot of work that had gone on before. “The ’80s was the pinnacle for a lot of us musicians who had come from the ’60s and the ’70s,” he says. “Reaching that place, you had this great explosion of artistry in the Eighties that ran the gamut.”

Jones says that one of the most surprising interviewees for the series was Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson (who also doubles as a fully qualified airline pilot, when he’s not hanging out with the band’s gruesome zombie mascot Eddie). Asked how the headbanging band became so popular in the ’80s, Dickinson explains, simply: “We were very good at our job, the audience knew that we also had a sense of humour about what we did. We were proud of our music but we tried to keep our feet on the ground.” 

As with any era there were plenty who didn’t. As a journalist in the second half of the decade I encountered some of the more highfalutin’ aspects of ’80s pop stardom, which is why Smash Hits magazine did such a wonderful job in bursting any bubbles that became over-inflated (and do read my interview with “ver Hits”’ David Hepworth and Mark Ellen for their thoughts on this).

We are quick to jump on easy assumptions about anything, and the shorthand about the 1980s was that the decade was a bit naff. That, view, though is informed more by the frivolity, the shoulder pads, the lip gloss, the…er…drug taking (not me, but I can tell you a story or two…) the “gender-bending” and all the other cheap tropes that regularly get trotted out. More objectively, the decade should be regarded for its music. Gary Crowley’s characteristically effervescent curation of the decade has repeatedly underlined that there was plenty of truly great pop. Jones’s series, I hope, will expand on this further by reminding us that amid the puffball skirts and jackets with their sleeves pushed up to the elbows, there was a lot more breadth to the decade’s music than you and I faithfully remember.

The 80s – Music’s Greatest Decade? With Dylan Jones begins on BBC2 at 8.55pm on Saturday 23 October

Party over. Oops, out of time.

When David Bowie died in January two things happened. Firstly, there was an understandable outpouring of grief. Bowie wasn't just a pop star - he'd transcended that status at the outset of his career. His music, his art, his way of life were on a totally different plane, and the impact he'd had on those who'd grown up with his music (as well as those who'd come late to the party and found out in the best way what the fuss was all about) was immeasurable. Certainly more so than any other rock star I can think of.

The second thing that happened was the abrubt realisation that musical icons who'd emerged in the '60s and '70s were beginning to pop their clogs. Well, to be fair, clogs were popping long before 2016 came knocking with its apparently unstoppable roll call of celebrity death. Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Keith Moon, John Bonham, Michael Jackson, et al, should still be rock and rolling, had rock and roll not got in the way. And, then, if you really want a depressing legacy, Wiki the hip-hop acts who have died in an age range of early-20s to mid-40s, with causes grimly including: "shot and killed" (numerous), "car accident", "complications from AIDS", "cancer", "complications from diabetes" and a long list of strokes and heart attacks.

If you were to transplant these deaths into the general population it's likely that you wouldn't see anything greatly different (though "shot and killed" may not be as prevelent an exit in every part of the world...). The bleedingly obvious point I'm making here is that people die all the time: 55.3 million each year, 151,600 people every day, 6,316 people each hour, 105 people each minute. Two people will have died, somewhere in the world, in the time it has taken you to read this sentence.

Unfortunately we expect our icons to be immortal. At some point - whether we like it or not, accept it or don't - we will have to bear with the news of Paul McCartney and Ringo Star reforming the Fab Four upstairs. Even the Rolling Stones can't go on forever. Not even Keith. No doubt the insurers of a special gig this October in California that will feature the Stones, Bob Dylan, McCartney, Neil Young, Roger Waters and The Who are sweating bullets, given the rate we're losing celebrities this year.

However, like Bowie's death, last night's news of the 57-year-old Prince moving on came from nowhere. Even if the tabloids have since been intrusively digging around reports of prevailing ill-health, here was another icon departing as unpredictably and, in a way, as eccentrically as he had conducted himself throughout life and as an integral figure of that trio of Madonna (whom Prince was older by just a couple of months) and Michael Jackson (who was just a couple of weeks younger than La Ciccone).

They were children of the first pop era, who'd learned their way in the world in the '70s to become the premiere megastars of the MTV age, mixing dance and pop with gawdiness and sexuality, to take over the very arenas rock's behemoths had occupied the decade before.

Prince, Madonna and Jackson were the undisputed pillars of the 80s in pop. Just as Bowie, glam and art rock had done for the 70s, they established put image, reputation and music to work. And while Jackson may have been the self-styled King of Pop and Madonna its Queen, Prince was by no means the errant offspring. Like Bowie, he was an innovator who took recognised forms and adapted them to his own idiosyncratic sense of artistry, crucially both in the studio and on stage.

Prince was an analogue musician in the pre-digital age who sounded like no other. His 'Paisley sound' was his own, uniquely, and unlike any other contemporary in black or white music. And, of course, with his adrogyny, he challenged what black or white musicians should sound and look like. Somehow he appeared to be overtly sexual and asexual at the same time. In his music there was a lot of funk, soul and R&B, but also a lot of rock, blues and psychedelia, and more than a lot of knowing humour. The thing is, we just knew so little of him which, actually, in this era of knowing what everyone has for breakfast thanks to social media, is fine by me.

My abiding memory of Prince was being crammed into the Stravinski Auditorium in Montreux three years ago on a hot, sweaty Saturday night. Somehow I'd managed to get down to the front of the stage, which is not my normal MO at concerts at all. The Stravinski is perfectly shaped to see artists from almost everywhere in the room, such is its pleasant intimacy, but by virtue of the fact I'd been forced to use a side entrance, I was right up against a human barrier of security people shining torches on anyone who dared to get their phones out to photograph the Purple One. By the time he was on stage, I was resembling one of the bodies in Picasso's After Guernica, deformed and bent totally out of shape by the crush.

Not exactly being the right shape or physique for such exertions, I ended the concert with cramp in both feet and both calves, gasping for the drink I'd been denied by being hemmed in down at the front. And I wouldn't have had it any other way - as Prince, backed by his muse-du-jour 3rdeyegirl, funked out for close to three hours barely 20ft in front of me. It was one of the gigs of a lifetime, coming in the midst of a long summer of concert-going. You can read my review of it here: http://whatdavidbowiewoulddo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/party-over-oops-out-of-time-prince-at.html

Instagram/Montreux Jazz Festival

I've been less effected by Prince's death than Bowie's, simply because Bowie meant much more to me, and in a way, that gave me greater licence to wallow. But, like every obituary and music fan who has thusfar commented on the Purple One's sudden demise, his genius was truly, really unparalleled, even if that does, after so many celebrity deaths, sound like hyperbole. Much of that is down to the fact you can't, really, nail down what it was that made him so innovative.

The starting point would be his starting point, the 1978 debut album For You - written almost entirely by him and performed exclusively by him. It's personnel listing reads: "Prince - all vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, Orr bass, bass synth, singing bass, fuzz bass, Fender Rhodes electric piano, acoustic piano, Minimoog, Polymoog, ARP String Ensemble, ARP Pro Soloist, Oberheim 4-voice, clavinet, drums, syndrums, water drums, slapsticks, bongos, congas, finger cymbals, wind chimes, orchestral bells, wood blocks, brush trap, tree bell, hand claps, finger snaps."

Over the next three albums - which included 1980's Dirty Mind (the one with Prince posing on the cover in, well, his underpants) - his polymathic virtuosity expanded further, along with more of his American moral sensitivity-challenging mild eroticism (Smash Hits named him The Purple Perv). In 1982, 1999 put him squarely on the map with the a whopping, 70-minute double album that featured the brilliance of its title track, along with Little Red Corvette and Delirious. Purple Rain, which followed, is arguably one of the greatest albums of the decade, removing Springsteen's Born in the USA from the top of the US charts and featuring the hits When Doves Cry, Let's Go Crazy, Purple Rain, I Would Die 4 U and Take Me With U and ending with the anthemic, nine-minute gospel-meets-blues opus of a title track, one which showcased Prince's excellence as a lead guitarist, an attribute he was rarely credited for.

These were the albums that introduced me to Prince. These were the albums that established him as an artist, really, like no other. There would be 33 more to come from Paisley Park Studios, each as confounding and as their predecessor, some without fanfare, some without even a name attached to them (), but all unmistakeably without parallel or without imitation. That may not be your definition of genius, but it certainly comes close to mine. And that is what we mourn for. Death is inevitable, that we know. But loss is something you can't allow for, especially the loss of someone as brilliant as Prince Rogers Nelson.