BLOGS 45-46 and 47: FRANKIE SAYS...

FRANKIE SAYS….

“I HATE RECEIVED MEMORIES… THOSE PEOPLE WHO WERE NOT IN THE 1980’S GETTING ALL NOSTALGIC ABOUT THE DECADE … I WISH THEY WOULD SHUT UP… IT WEREN’T LIKE THAT F@CKING VIRGIN ATLANTIC ADVERT.”
Al Tarney Record Producer
FRANKIE SAYS
Never have I supported a quote more - you Al Tarney the way on that point. It drives me bonkers when people talk in clichés because they are just regurgitating all stuff they’ve heard or seen on TV but have never ACTUALLY experienced. So Al… this one is for you…. frontline memories of the decade that good taste forgot.

1980:The year that Pacman was invented and that John Lennon was shot.
I said goodbye to the 70’s on the roof of a house in Bexleyheath, doing the conga. I was very excited about the new decade I was entering as this was gonna be the one I entered as a teenager but would leave as an adult.

However my 1^st birthday in the 80’s got ruined by the shooting of John Lennon by Mark Chapman in New York. I wasn’t even in New York I was here in the UK. But even as a Rolling Stones fan I appreciated the gravity of this awful event. Truth be told though I felt much more sad about the fact that no one watched me blow out my candles in favour of watching the breaking new story.

Well, we knew who shot John BUT the big question of 1980 was…. who shot JR? Dallas turned Britain into a nation of soap addicts. Whilst the glamour of Dallas soothed us, we tried not to notice that unemployment reached 2 million.

We still had a car industry… British Leyland launched the Mini Metro. But we new drivers were not patriotic... if you were buying new you got a Datsun.

Technology was sneaking in, Philips released the Compact Disc player to replace the tape recorder and record player plus some ice hockey player developed Roller Blades to replace Roller Skates. I am on record as saying NEITHER would ever catch on. Meanwhile Pacman gripped the nation in its thrall... and Asteroids likewise. It seemed oh so interactive (you could cause stuff to happen!)... a million miles away from playing Pong on a TV screen. Amazing what money could buy!

On the subject of money...Sixpence pieces ceased to be legal tender that summer. Xmas pudding was never the same!

With clothes some old fashioned brands became highly fashionable… we wore Kickers - even though our geography teacher was probably wearing them too, we also liked T-shirts from a 100 year old brand called Fruit Of The Loom.

After spending the 70’s in designer jeans like Fiorucci, jeans suddenly went horrible – no one cared about the brand as long as they were stone washed, paint splattered, straight, stretchy... just not good.

The cinema was rocked by the fact three greats of the screen, Peter Sellers, Alfred Hitchcock and Steve McQueen all died. No one quite understood how a hotty like McQueen could die of an old man’s disease. Meanwhile we were blown away by the Queen soundtrack on Flash Gordon and Jack Nicholson was doing things with an axe in The Shining… But for dance students there was just ONE film… Fame. Nothing like the famous TV series…the film also had dark moments… the abortion scene affected a generation.

Why did we spend so much time yelling Si...t! and doing weird arm gestures? Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way was on TV. (She was like Mrs Thatcher… but for dogs)… it was addictive telly…even if you didn’t have a dog!

Top of the Pop: the Number 1 Hits from 1980 included The Police (Don’t stand so close to me) to Blondie (Atomic) and The Jam (Start). Brilliant stuff but don’t think for a moment all music was good…St. Winifred’s school Choir were no 1 for ever and they just loved their grandmas.

1981: The year that Charles and Di married and MTV went on the air.

Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer that summer at St Paul's Cathedral. 700 million television viewers watched around the world. All we did was gasp that her dress was SOOO unironed!

Greenham Common protest began against the US Cruise Missiles parked on UK soil. We supported the protest but again were shocked by the lack of fashion savvy of the women who camped out to save us all from nuclear destruction. I bought a T-shirt that said “Send Thatcher on a Cruise”… I popped shoulder pads under it… Dallas Style.

The Pope got shot four times while he was in the Vatican. So the Pope-Mobile (a bullet proof golf cart) was designed for him. (MORE OF that LATER)

We all gave a big sigh of relief when finally the Yorkshire Ripper was brought to justice for the death of 13 women. No one could believe he had slipped through police hands so many times. We believed in the police forces infallibility and would not consider the idea that a serial killer could evade them.

MTV went on the air. The first song to be played was Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star. They thought it was topical... we all thought what CRAP. Who on earth would sit in all day WATCHING pop music (starting with Buggles probably was not the BEST advert for the media). Anyway, no one believed it would catch on and preferred to watch the Ice Dancing live from Innsbruck.

Actually not a bad year for us in European sport, Torvill and Dean did us proud in Innsbruck and won the European ice dancing title and Liverpool FC won the European cup 1-0 against Real Madrid.

Bob Marley died of cancer aged only 36. The fact he refused treatment because of his religion was endlessly debated. Bob Marley and the Wailers returned to the charts.
Also popular in death, John Lennon continued to reign over the UK charts, holding three of the top four places in the January Top Ten. I went off any music associated with the Beatles forever – there was only so much you could take.

Telephone Cards came in. This meant no more groping for change to pump into a phone box just buy a pre paid card and enter the code, wait…. And if you held on for a week… you may even be connected! In the end we carried on using coins but collected the cards as they were pretty.

On the fashion front our mothers sighed when we refused shoes in favour of Pixie Boots. Not made from real Pixie, but they were definitely boots... and made you look like you were planted in a small pot. But we thought we looked fabulous.Next opened. The giant of the High Street was born. Everyone fell in love with high street clothes again and men began to dress better over night.
The ONLY people who didn’t shop at Next were the New Romantics. For those who don’t know what a New Romantic was… here’s a quote from the Plymouth Polytechnic Dictionary:
1. (n.) a bloke who walks around wearing home made clothes, his sister's make-up, pouting…or
2. (n.) a music genre typified by Adam and the Ants, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and the Human League, who walked around wearing home made clothes, their sisters' make-up and pouting.
Despite the opening of Next it was normal in 1981 for some boys to dress like a girl, strike a silly pose, and look like they were severely constipated.

Compact discs began to take on the might of cassette tape and vinyl – we thought they made great coasters and carried on with tape. Thing was getting a tape from your loved one called “our songs” was tantamount to marriage… CD’s couldn’t offer anything close!

At the Cinema we had our generations version of American Pie… Porkies. I thought it was shite, but still saw it about three times. More worth while was Chariots of Fire which not only mopped up loads of awards had stood the test of time as a truly great movie.

On TV, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy came on TV and revealed that 42… is the answer. If you don’t know the question READ THE BOOK! I still can’t justify the love affair with Hi-De-Hi: A sort of Carry On Up the Yellowcoats… but we loved it (you could put any old crap on TV then!)

Top of the Pops: the Number One hits from1981 included John Lennon (Imagine, Woman etc) and Shakin' Stevens (This Ol' House). If you think this is bad it got worse with Joe Dolce and Bucks Fizz. These two acts provided all the evidence you need to convict Eurovision judges (and the British public) of crimes against music. Joe Dolce made Clive Dunn's hit Grandad (another pile of old shite) look like the work of major genius.

1982: The year a truly ugly alien landed in Hollywood only to phone home.
There were two huge royal stories: future heir to the throne, Prince William, was born… his mother did not ‘snap back’ and still looked pregnant when she left the hospital. We always found her a bit perfect so we liked her a bit better for that. At least having a kid meant Di was ‘getting some’. The nation found out Queenie and Phil didn’t share a bed when she found a random man sitting on the end of hers in Buckingham Palace... Phil was down the hall asleep in HIS room..

Channel 4 went on air for the first time taking us to FOUR TV channels we were in raptures…oh the choice! They began broadcasting with Countdown. We were transfixed. (See previous notes on Hi-de-hi)
The government gave the go-ahead for satellite television. We didn’t care cause it was we knew NO ONE would ever pay for TV when we had FOUR count them FOUR channels already!

Italy was in the news a lot. Icon Sophia Loren was imprisoned for a month in her native Italy for tax evasion. She styled it out… it was so classy… she got them to redecorate her cell in pinlk, give her a private bathroom and a telly! Here we had a guest from Italy over...Pope John Paul II became the first pope to visit Britain in 450 years. Children everywhere started stealing golf buggies and pretending they were in the pope-mobile.

Technology marched on...Video laser discs began a short lived existence and the Sony Pocket Television or Watchman was introduced…. You needed VERY large pockets. Twenty years on from the transistor radio and STILL no one had yet got their brains around portable.

Old photos reveal we had Bad hair: very very bad hair. Most popular was the three-in-one hairstyle was better known as the mullet. This thing was worn short and spiky on the top, longer at the back of the head …sometimes REALLY long down the back. This was favoured by many sports stars which just encouraged more copy cats. Some pop stars took this silly hair cut to the extreme. Ex hairdresser and lead singer of A Flock Of Seagulls had a ski slope on his head. Black men and women’s hair got the wet look, leaving sticky patches every where. You fell asleep on public transport at your peril… you could end up glued to the window by someone else’s grease patch. Meanwhile white women contributed to the hole in the ozone layer by using gallons of hair spray to get the USA Trailer park Trash look. As for me…my hair was just BIG... huge...had to be to balance out the shoulder pads. Laugh now but at the time we all thought we looked fabulous.

And if the hair wasn’t bad enough we wore deelyboppers. A hairband with coils of metal attached onto which would be fitted novelty items... like balls or plastic fish. It remains a mystery why did no one realise how silly they looked.We also wore Ra-ra skirts and legwarmers – we think this may have been inspired by the movie Fame... or possibly Bananarama in the Special’s ‘Tain’t what you do’ video… but it looked ridiculous… and secretly we knew it.

At the Cinema it was all about ET. Pity as Tron came out the same year and was a MUCH better film.

TV got more edgy. …The Young Ones: Rick, Vyvyan, Neil and Mike lived in deprivation amused themselves with mindless violence… we loved it! More seriously the Boys From The Black Stuff coined the catch phrase "Gissa job " . We in the south got to observe the other country (the North) and realised they weren’t having the 80’s we were. But we also loved our American crap ad the biggest of them all was Knight Rider. The plot was simple: A camp talking car with mood swings fought crime and bickered with its macho driver. The world fell in love with the Hof.

Top Of The Pops: NO 1’s from 1982 included freak shows from Shakin' Stevens (the welsh elvis) to Renee and Renato (fat cruiseline-singers). BUT all was saved by Culture Club. Headed up by the weird boy from my local youth club, they dared to be different and confronted gender identity head on. We knew George so we knew he was a man – but it was amusing to watch the nation’s men fancy ‘that girl from Culture Club’. On a side point, we went to Heaven Night Club to cheer George and the guys on and the support band seemed to be a lot of midgets. It transpired they were a group of school kids from Birmingham – Musical Youth. They did good - their huge hit Pass The Dutchie was one of the fastest selling singles of the year and stayed at number 1 for three weeks.


1983: The year Breakfast TV arrived and Shergar was kidnapped.
Sally Ride became the first US woman in space. We couldn’t have cared less… blue mascara was out and we had eyelashes to flutter! The only things that mattered were made by Maybelline.

The technology bods FINALLY cracked it; they managed to make phones work that were not connected to a building. They even got the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell to answer the first commercial mobile phone call…. We were severely underwhelmed. The phone was the size of a limo and the battery lasted a minute. Once more we said it would never catch on.

Breakfast TV started. At first everyone was late for everything cause they didn’t want to miss out on this new phenomena (TV had strict times of transmission and morning was till that point NOT one of those times). But we got to like it but there was a problem… no on knew which side to watch BBC or ITV – they both had Breakfast programmes. Then the Beeb got a girl who looked like Princess Di and talked posh, so everyone watched that channel. Then in a master stoke ITV got a rat puppet that talked in a Liverpool accent and was a common as the sewer he came from. The battle was over. ITV won. Never let it be said us Brits are intellectual.

National treasure and Derby winning horse Shergar was kidnapped - a £2million ransom was demanded. No one ever saw the horse again. Everyone joked that he was in their cat’s food.

Compact discs began to sell on the High Street - but everyone dismissed them as a passing fad like the Eight Track and carried on with tapes and vinyl.

The Conservative party gained a landslide victory in the General Election, with Margaret Thatcher winning her second term as Prime Minister. We all knew she was the devil but no one took the opposition seriously. Labour were complete pants… they had Michael Foot who whilst clever and probably would have been great couldn’t dress for toffee. What part of the 1980’s being a superficial decade did he not get!Anti-nuclear demonstrators marched in cities across Europe in the biggest anti-nuclear demonstrations in 20 years. Meanwhile in Britain 1 in 10 people were unemployed (3 million). The country divided into two… the south had all the service industries and got richer while the north really suffered as one by one the heavy industries closed down. We went on a few demos and really got quite angry with the powers that be.

We managed still to make snide comments about the lack of fashion at Greenham Common while we were wearing shoulder pads, puff ball skirts and snoods. And yes... only tennis players should have been allowed to wear the sweat bands that we all wore.

Meanwhile at the movies, Woody Allen did Forrest Gump YEARS before Forrest Gump... and a zillon times better in the film Zelig. We watched The Big Chill... which featured a load of Americans just letting those feelings out …. we felt embarrassed for them! Much better was Educating Rita: She's poor, he's drunk, they both like reading. We went to see it about 12 times! Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi won eight Oscars; the most ever won by a British film… no one could say the film wasn’t the best of the year… cause it was.

Ah music… it was a truly good year for the Kemp brothers…. Spandau had washed up in the early 80’s after the success of “To cut a long story short”. They could mostly be found drinking in pubs on the Kings road. BUT by 1983 things had changed.. a new image... and hits - Gold and True both hit the top spot. Ensuring as long as we have Olympic Games and first dances at weddings Gary and Martin will always have a penny or two. Also that year Michael Jackson's Thriller: Jacko turned pop videos into a total art form... To see the video was an EVENT. MTV started to seem a good idea.

Top of the Pops: Number One hits from 1983 invited us to Go Down Under with Men at Work and drink some Red Red Wine with UB40.

1984: The year Prince Henry Charles Albert David arrived at the Palace, and the pound note bowed out taking the ha’penny with it.
BMX mania hit Britain in 1984… children were everywhere on bikes doing tricks then going to hospital… bikes have TWO wheels for a reason kids!

Not satisfied with ruining Xmas pud by taking away the sixpence… the government withdrew the halfpenny coin and £1 note from circulation in England.

To give us some national pride it was a brilliant year for Brits in sport. At the Los Angeles Olympics we had so many gold medallists, the orchestra didn’t need sheet music for ‘God Save The Queen’ any more! Torvill and Dean were also victorious, winning gold for ice dancing in the Sarajevo winter Olympics. The routine for Bolero gob smacked the world. The Russians claimed we had done so well because they didn’t turn up to the Olympics as they were sulking. We didn’t care… we had a street party for Jayne and Chris… even though they lived in Nottingham and we were down here.

Of course Nottingham was mining country. Everyone was shaken by extended nationwide miner's strikes, protesting against poor pay offers and pit closure programmes. The country got behind the miners in an amazing show of solidarity, it dawned on us all that we had arrived at make or break for us as a nation. The view of police changed when they got used as Maggie’s private army and beat up the protesters. This turn of events shocked us to the core.
The country was also shocked by the scenes in famine-stricken Ethiopia, provoking Red Cross appeals… and of course the Band Aid record and Dinner At Albert’s(a fundraiser at the Albert Hall put together by Bob Geldof) which was the forerunner of Live Aid.

Di gave birth to her second son that September. He was named Henry and about half a dozen other names but everyone couldn’t be asked and called him Harry.

High fashion started to reflect the political climate. Katharine Hamnett, designed slogan t-shirts with political messages on them. Then it all got watered down when pop stars started to wear them. Before you know it everyone is walking around with… RELAX DON'T DO IT, on their torso.

Talking of Torsos... Samantha Fox was huge. This girl was seriously hot property. Sam was a cockney schoolgirl who had her own band and a deal with an independent label, before realising that, having been blessed with unfeasibly large breasts, she could escape the world of punk bands droning on about unemployment and nuclear war by becoming a Page 3 pin-up in the tabloid daily 'The Sun'. Strangely this semi naked teen was taken to the nation’s hearts and became the nation’s sweetheart. (Well, we’d lost Shergar).

While we were still waiting for Rollerblades to catch on...Roller Skating especially roller discos were still popular as the perfect arena to smash into the person you fancy. Worked for us!

The Filofax was a huge diary in an expensive leaver arch file. They were primarily carried around as fashion accessory for yuppies…. But then EVERYONE got one. As the days were sectioned into windows… suddenly people were seeing if they had a ‘window’ open for you. Pretentious crap! (but yes.. we ALL had them).

Music – two huge things of note. A new band called The Smiths turned out to be one of the most important UK contributors of the 80s. The Smiths formed in Manchester and their lead singer was Morrissey. He was accused of writing miserable, moaning lyrics but many critics didn't realise his lyrics were often intellectual and political. Coming up through the college circuit made the band a cult favourite and Morrissey developed his unique image complete with NHS glasses, a hearing aid and bunches of flowers. For some reason the gladioli and daffodils really caught on and their audiences twirled daffodil stems around their heads. In 1984 the NME Poll acclaimed them as Best New Group and hit after hit followed.
Meanwhile from the USA, The Queen of Pop had arrived. The world met Madonna for the first time in 1984. I was on record of saying at the time “OMG – she can’t dance and what is with the screaming voice… SHE will never catch on!” But what did I know.

Top of The Pops: the number one hits of 1984 included Pipes of Piece (Paul McCartney) Nena’s 99 Red Balloons and Wham wanted to be woken up before you go go.

1985: The year of Wham! going international, battery-powered cars saving us from petrol exhaust fumes and when Coke got it sooo wrong!
Proving the Los Angeles Olympic was no fluke, we were so good at sport we competed against our own to break records! Steve Cram beat Sebastian Coe's record for the fastest mile… that shut up the Russians.

The first clean car came in….Sir Clive Sinclair's C-5…. Thing was it did NOT even look like a car it was a 31-inch high battery-powered tricycle! And its designer was Britain’s foremost boffin! How we laughed!
Also with technology, Hi-8 camcorders and taxis with car phones hit the streets of the UK. In both cases they were so large you needed something as big a London taxi to keep the darn things in.

British bands were keen to prove they had international appeal… but hardly anyone broke America. So any old thing would do so a band could claim to be international… Japan was a favourite. Then Wham! became the first Western group to perform and sell records in China. China was an odd choice but it made a change from a band telling us they were big in Japan! (a euphemism if there ever was one)

Coca-Cola changed its 99-year-old recipe to a new "more rounded" formula. It was hilarious… people were spitting out Coke and practically fainting. Pepsi picked up the odd sale but to be fair Coke’s fans were loyal… marching on HQ and demanding that the old recipe be reinstated. Coca Cola had no choice – the old recipe was back! There’s people power!

On the fashion front things just got worse. Fingerless Gloves were suddenly no longer just for tramps and winos. ..Madonna and Nik Kershaw have to be seriously blamed. Goths arrived: They looked stupid then… and nothing has changed.

The Gothic mask at least gave the appearance of blemish free skin. Not a red spot in sight. Not the case for many teenagers for whom soap and water was no longer enough. In 1985 the nation was blasting its pores with Oxy, Biactol and any number of different acne treatments. No-one was really sure if they worked or not, but no one was brave enough to take the risk – nothing stopped you trying the latest concoction. Not even the rumours that your face would glow green in the disco if you used it. (and YES… before you ask)

Meanwhile on TV…a different North/South divide -EastEnders started – the first soap opera set in the South. Northerners moaned that no one wanted to watch Cockneys in Kitchens moaning at each other. Then there was Blind Date: “If I were a piece of toast, what would you spread on me? Number 3.” My flat mate from college got picked to be a contestant on it. We thought she was a super-star. Nothing in the world happened whilst Blind Date was on. We were obsessed. Meanwhile America gave us The Cosby Show… this show was radical in America as it had a black cast who had a middle-class life-style but to us it was just a sit-com… no one understood why the yanks got their knickers in a twist about the programme.

MUSIC: it was the year of a lot of big hair and a big mouth. Live Aid happened and all I can say is “Oi, Geldoff. Stop *&!*ing swearing” Back in the days she didn't need a pharmaceutical company to supply her, Whitney made her name bouncing around in pastel eyeshadow, wearing huge hair and outrageous lycra singing bubblegum hits like I Want to Dance With Somebody. No one imaged she had a soul diva in there…anywhere!

Top of the Pops: Number One hits from 1985, featured a list of solo female artists Madonna to Whitney. Women ruled the charts.

1985: The year Argentina won the cup with the help of God and Sam Fox commits a wicked and cowardly act of class betrayal.

The Wapping printers' strike in 1986 was a tragic re-run of the violence police had been meting out to striking miners. The nation’s sweetheart Samantha Fox was enlisted by her paymasters at The Sun to break through the picket line in a tank. This cheap and nasty publicity stunt was made all the more sickening by the fact that the printers were regularly being roughed up by Maggie’s private army. Fox, to her eternal shame, actually went ahead with this sordid farce. The boss of The Sun was also the boss of several TV companies. Samantha Fox left page 3 and became a TV presenter.

Bimbo became the tabloid buzz word of the year.

The "hand of God" helped Argentina defeat England in the quarter final of the World Cup. Diego Maradona's goal was the subject of much controversy particularly in our pub.

While I decorated my bathroom I watched Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew get married at Westminster Abbey on my Sony pocket TV. She had a better dress than Lady Di… but ruined it with chavy details like the ANDY Luvs SAR in a love heart on the back. We should have figured out she’d be sucking Texan toes in no time!

The world's worst nuclear disaster struck in Chernobyl expelling 190 tonnes of highly radioactive uranium into the atmosphere. We worried, but the government said it was perfectly safe and the poison wouldn't spread over borders. (Like there is passport control for poison clouds) But we stopped worrying even though we knew they were lying.

The first Norwegian band ever to top the UK charts did so when Aha released The Sun Always Shines On TV. This was nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the fact all women liked Morten Harket... a lot... everyone knew the song was rubbish. But Morten sure could fill his pants.

Y-fronts became a thing of the past… the boxer short took over and we all sighed with relief.
Big Glasses: Why, oh why? Suddenly in 1986, glasses went beyond functional and became fashion accessories... and they became extremely large… comically large. But this wasn’t for comedy; serious people wore the ridiculous frames. But most worryingly of all Coronation Street’s Deidre Barlow wore them and a zillion women copied FOR REAL.

Talking TV there were just two things that mattered. Neighbours: Kylie and Jason's wedding - well not theirs the charecters they played. I watched it on a TV that was in a shop window on Tottenham Court Road – along with about 200 other shoppers. We were transfixed. We really cared! And of course there was Bread: The ups and downs of a Liverpool family on the dole. Yes we rich southerners liked to look at the poor northerners and laugh at them.

Morten Harket's filed jeans aside, music wise it was misery or politics. After being dumped you could listen to a power ballad and make yourself feel ten times worse... but we bought a lot of them. And of course…there was The Chicken Song (British political profanity at its best). Spin off from the satirical puppet TV series Spitting Image, the Chicken Song amazingly reached number one in the UK charts. The song was sung by the impressionists to (what seemed to be) the tune of Agadoo. The lyrics were unbelievably offensive but the majority of the population must have found it amusing otherwise the song wouldn't have spent 3 weeks at number 1.

Top Of The Pops: Number 1 hits of 1986 included Billy Ocean (When the going gets Tough), Diana Ross (Chain Reaction), and Cliff Richard and The Young Ones doing Living Doll.

1987: The year that Sunflowers were pricey stocks were cheap and the wind blew southerly
Van Gogh's Sunflowers sold for £24m at Christie's Auction House. We just didn’t get why when you cold buy a copy at Athena for a couple of quid!

Fifty billion pounds was wiped off shares in the London Stock Market after panic on Wall Street in New York. Suddenly everyone in the City was selling Porches cheap for cash. Yuppies had to ask how to use bus stops and the tube.

22 people died and hundreds got injured, when winds of up to134 miles per hour hit the south of the UK one night. It was fortunate the eye of the storm hit in the early hours when most people were in bed. Notoriously, BBC weather man Michael fish said that very evening “Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way; well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't”. But my favourite memory was the following day when the newsreader Michael Buerk interviewed the Met Office and made the remark "a fat lot of good you guys were last night" . The hurricane cost the insurance industry two billion pounds.

Also in the news, film star and dancer extraordinaire Fred Astaire died. I went into mourning alone with all lovers of dance.

More death…Fourteen people were killed by gunman Michael Ryan in the Hungerford Massacre. McDonald’s never felt safe again. And yet more death…Two hundred passengers were killed when the Zeebrugge cross-channel car ferry sank when the bow doors weren’t secured properly. As the Zeebrugge victims were primarily Sun Newspaper readers and the nation was still angry about ‘Fortress Wapping’… loads of sick jokes about ‘shutting that door’ were cracked.

Drugs came with a smile.(E-verywhere). Ecstasy became cheap and every one was eating piece of paper with a smiley face printed on it. The drugs popularity went hand in hand with fashion becoming totally ridiculous… maybe it was anaesthetic!

Fashion went sporty. Cycling shorts became no longer just for cycling. But maybe they should've been. Size 20 women thundering about with their thighs shielded from view only by lycra acting like skin on over stuffed sausages… SHUDDER to recall. Then of course we had Nike Air trainers which claimed to turn you into a superhero. They didn't exactly let you leap tall buildings in a single bound, but Air Max trainers certainly put a spring in your step. The heels contained a revolutionary plastic bubble filled with gas - which school bullies enjoyed puncturing with penknives and/or compasses. The trainers became such a popular fashion accessory that wearers were regularly mugged, and victims could be spotted hobbling tearfully home dressed only in their socks.

Disco’s had become boring so people took the dancing else where. Favourite activities were boat parties on the Thames (legal) or Acid House Raves (illegal). The former involved cruising up and down the Thames soaking in the stunning river frontage and a stunning amount of alcohol while music played. The boats were well furnished with often with club style dance floors, bbq areas, and everything a guest could want. Summer was warm enough that if you squinted you could pretend you were in Ibiza. Meanwhile (in a misnomer if there ever was) Acid House raves did not involve a House of any sort. Following a complex set of clues and word of mouth city kids would find their way into surprised farmers’ fields and dance till the sun came up. At some of these events (usually located around the new M25 motorway) up to 24,000 people would dance the night away… the fields didn’t tend to fare well from the experience. The police couldn’t contain the trend and farmers worried about their livelihood being trodden under foot.

On TV some things were also worrying. It was the age of Strike It Lucky: Awight. Yup I first became aware of Michael Barrymore and felt that the world was somehow better beforehand! Then for no reason a sock puppet called Gordon the gopher became popular. It was just so many kinds of wrong. Meanwhile the USA was sending us Moonlighting. Before his hair fell out and he started blowing up buildings, Bruce Willis was the star of this romantic adventure serial, set in a US detective agency. He and co-star Cybil Sheppard would trade wisecracks while dodging bullets and swearing blind that they didn't fancy each other. Every week it was "Will they, won't they". Many cycles later they did…it… in a twenty minute slow motion love scene in which tables got up ended and vases got smashed. Everyone VCR’d this season finale it and it was watched over and over. In the next season she found she had gotten pregnant and Bruce voiced the wise cracking foetus. The world was appalled - the series was promptly cancelled.

The music factory that was Stock Aiken and Waterman (SAW) couldn’t stop giving us more and more acts including a ginger nut called Rick Astley. Time has helped us forget what a massive phenomenon he was. But nothing will make us forget he had the voice of a middle-aged club singer trapped in the body of a 19-year-old tea boy.
However not all mainstream music came from SAW. Acid House tracks littered the charts “Put your hands in the air, like you don't care.”Aciee-ed! Aciee-ed!" squealed the vocals, "Boing-boinga-boing" went the bass-synth. Throughout 1987 ecstasy-fuelled dance fans made silly shapes with their arms, grinned a lot, wore Smiley badges, and made DJ Dave Pearce a very rich man. As KLF would say “UNBELIEVEABLE!”.

Top of the Pops: the number one hits of 1987, included Madonna's La Isla Bonita, Starship's Nothing’s gonna stop us now and another of SAW’s acts Mel and Kim who pushed Respectable into the top slot… another bad year for music.

1988; The year Salman Rushdie went into hiding and BBC News went gay for a night.
Salman Rushdie published his Satanic Verses to much controversy... then went to live with Shergar. Salman was not found in anyone's cat food, but we began to realise the Middle East could over react and may need to lighten up a bit. The word Fatwa entered the language.

Sue Lawley was attacked by lesbian protestors whilst reading the news. We watched it was laughed. We had no idea what it was about… oh happy days when the word security meant nothing!

Prozac was launched to make the depressed smile. If that didn’t work they had red noses to raise money for charity... Comic Relief had arrived.

The Turin Shroud was declared a fake. About four real people and every newspaper, radio and TV station seemed to care.

Despite it's fake sets wobbling, it's mute extras stareing blanking at the screen and a ancient heroine called Meg, there was no place in our TV schedule for crappy soap Crossroads. Even though The Sun newpaper mounted a SAVE OUR MEG campaign, the Midlands Motel Soap was finally cancelled.

Old Hippies rebranded…. Suddenly they got a haircut, stopped wearing kaftans and started talking earnestly about saving the planet. The phrase Greenhouse Gases entered the language. Green Politics had begun.

We were less concerned about the Greenhouse and more about the fact that Ninja Turtles were living in the sewers… and much copied by kids in playgrounds… injuries EVERYWHERE! “Cowabunga Dudes..."

There was a groovy kind of love for singer Phil Collins who played the part of one of the Great Train Robbers in the movie Buster. The real Buster had to give up his flower stall in Waterloo as fans of the movie kept asking him to sing. Also at the movies was Bill and Ted's excellent Adventure. The plot was something about two airhead school kids being in danger of flunking their finals… no one paid attention to the plot, we just LOVED Keanu. Suddenly we all knew what autistic was thanks to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man... and expected autistic people to join us in Vegas… bright lights and noise NO problem. (I dare you... try it!)

And our streets were littered with Brosettes lying on the pavements. You knew they were fans of Bros as they were wearing ripped jeans and DMs! (Oh they also did have a Grolsh bottle top attached to the laces of their Doc Martins) Bros were the biggest new sensation in 1988 despite the fact that they wore mascara and lip gloss, contradicting their macho image. Their fan club was more than fanatical. They would pretend to faint to get attention and even blocked the pavements around the Goss brothers' house in Peckham. Like that poor town didn’t have enuf problems!

At the other end of the scale people were wearing Barbour Jackets. Now these things were waxed jackets for agricultural work but for now reason at all became trendy accessory for townies who marched around town looking like farmers. It was stupid, and we knew it.

However more daft was the obsession with aar accessories. It was widely believed that accessories gave your rusting banger an individual value and a bit of character. So we added go faster stripes which certainly did not increase our cars performance. We also added "My other car's a Porsche" stickers to show we had Class! And if you didn't have a Garfield teddy with sucker pads on its feet then you just weren't cool.

In the world on TV, This Morning started. Richard and Judy became the husband and wife team who took over morning telly… we loved them so much we forgot to go to work! And of course Harry Enfield's catchphrases were all the rage: “Loads a money”. Comedy became the new Rock and Roll as Enfield filled the airwaves and the stadiums with his brand of comedy.

We were still enjoying Acid House Raves which had moved from fields into abandoned Warehouses. (Farmers would let us take their Jackets BUT NOT their fields) Warehouse parties were all the rage that summer. There was a lot of happy dancing and no violence but the events were still very much illegal.

Top of The Pops: the Number 1 hits of 1988 included stuff from Tiffany and Yazz And The Plastic Population… incidentially I think we are alone now so I’m gonna say they were crap songs BUT they are STILL being played now… I guess the Only Way Is UP!... Bahybee?

1989: The year that Sky went up, and the Wall came down.
The Berlin Wall fell after 28 years of division between East and West. It was time for the Superpowers America and Russia to declare an end to the Cold War. We worried who would now be the bad guy in movies and TV now that we were friends with them from behind the curtain. The Chinese Army turned guns on student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. We were shocked to the core and carried on looking east for trouble.

At home the Marchioness disaster shook every young person in London. In the early hours of a beautiful summer night the pleasure boat Marchioness sank after being run down by the dredger Bowbelle. The two boats collided near Cannon Street Railway Bridge. 51 of the passengers on the Marchioness, who were attending a birthday party, drowned. .. they were all barely in their 20’s. A chill passed through the city…the age of the boat party on the Thames ended.

Satellite TV network Sky was launched. When Rupert Murdoch launched it everyone was sure it was doomed to failure. "Who needs more than four channels?" people asked. "Who wants an ugly dish on their wall? Who's going to pay to watch Sky when all the good stuff's free?" But he went to see the free channels and got out his cheque book. He bought the soaps, he bought the sport, he bought the news. Finally he got Channel Four to sell him The Simpsons. Resistance was futile. Dishes began sprouting everywhere. There simply weren't enough to keep up with demand. As John Lennon once said: "No hell below us, above us only Sky.”

If you had a sky dish you would have known that sport that year was a mixed bag. Mike Tyson defeated Frank Bruno to retain the heavyweight title of the world. Bruno vs Tyson became the TV event of the year helping further establish Sky TV. Also in sport, Liverpool beat Everton 3-2 to win the FA Cup, but the Hillsborough Stadium disaster made it was a tragic year for football, claiming the lives of 94 football fans. Football changed forever.

However it wasn’t all gloom. England enjoyed the hottest summer since 1976. From May onwards London temperatures regularly reached 90 deg F, and we basked in the sun.

More really bad 1980’s fashion to round of the decade. London was not to blame for ANY of it! Firstly there was the well named Madchester look. As Manchester started to make it’s bid to take over from London as centre of youth culture, the words Top, Banging, Nice-one, and Sorted entered the language. However the clothes they gave us were baggy, tramp like and seemed to always involve a ridiculous hat… and that was just the menswear. There was a lot of wearing coats indoors. NEVER embrace a fashion trend from Manchester. It was just wrong. But what could be sexier than an adult baby-grow? American Designers Azzedine Alaia and Donna Karan gave us The Bodysuit -a form-fitting garment that covered the torso and arms and did up with snaps at the crotch, NEVER embrace a fashion trend from USA… no one could go to the loo. Then of course there was The Lambada look: A taste of sexy South America. Lambada fashion was launched by a dance craze that was launched by a film, that was launched by a song, that was launched by a fashion. Confused? We must have been to wear it or overly confident of our legs to pull on tiny flippy skirts just to dance the Lambada with men in tight Chino pants and garish open shirts. Strictly come Dancing it wasn’t!

On TV there was only one programme we ALL watched; Challenge Anneka. Anneka was the Lara Croft of 1989 - but with a bigger bum. She first appeared on a programme called Treasure Hunt. Contestants would guide horsy but lovely Anneka around the country in a helicopter to win cash prizes .But as the 1980s came to a close greed was no longer good. It had to be "for charity, mate." So Anneka got back in her helicopter for the good of mankind. She travelled the length and breadth of the country browbeating hapless carpenters and DIY store managers into giving away their stock to build scout huts or community centres for goats. EVERYBODY watched it….But only because they could watch Anneka's huge sexy arse (which seemed to have its own camera crew, director and script).

On the Music front SAW had not gone away. It seems hard to believe that Kylie Minogue was not always an Icon and Jason Donovan was not always in West End Shows. Back in 1989 they were two fresh faced Ozzie ex-soap stars that sung a bit for SAW. Then they were brought together for a much hyped duet… Especially for Yooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. They stormed the charts with saccharine sweetness. The not so fresh-faced Happy Mondays stormed out of Manchester… but the music WAS a huge improvement on the rubbish that the mainstream was pumping out… they gathered their badly dressed army to take over the south in the 90’s.

Top of the Pops: the hits of 1989 included Eternal Flame by The Bangles, and Jive Bunny's Let's Party. Please don’t ask me about Jive Bunny; it has taken this long to get over them. Put it this way… we had a way to go before we could put the Cool in Britannia.

So Al… there you go. That sure weren’t the Virgin Atlantic commercial. The 1980’s …No received memories, No clichés… just prompts from a box of old photos, some old letters… and some treasured memories. The above was the real 1980’s from someone who was ACTUALLY there. It’s pretty accurate.

At least... I THINK IT IS. Cause maybe it's like the 60's if you can ACTUALLY remember it…..maybe YOU WERE NEVER REALLY THERE!