A look back at the Eighties

 

MOCKING Eighties music was a bit of thing about 20 years ago.

But why? The hallmark of Eighties music is just how diverse it was.

The decade kicked off with David Bowie, who owned the early to mid- Seventies with his many incarnations and turned the new music video “promo” into an art form.

The video for Ashes to Ashes, the lead single from his 1980 album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), remains one of the most expensive ever produced and is still one of the most iconic.

Bowie went to the now famous Blitz club in London, where the New Romantic movement was born, to cast the video.

New Romantics were very much the sound and look of the Eighties. New Romantic fashion was about flamboyance, style and colour, an antidote to the drabness of the Seventies.

The most famous New Romantic bands were Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran and how we struggled at school to know how to pronounce their names.

Similarly, there were a lot of conversations about whether Boy George was a boy or a girl. Don’t laugh — there was no internet then, so we were relying on the music and photos.

New Romantic style quickly became mainstream with a parade of pixie boots and knickerbockers (mostly velvet) passing through every high street in the country. Princess Diana was very fond

of a piecrust collar. Legwarmers, rara skirts and fingerless gloves all became must-haves. Go big or go home was the ethos of the Eighties and pop stars like Boy George, Toyah, Adam Ant and Steve Strange (who appeared in the Ashes to Ashes video as an unknown) led the way with OTT make-up and ordinary women, and some men, soon followed.

As far as face-paint goes, you could trace a direct line from Boy George to Joan Collins as Alexis Carrington in Dynasty. As the decade went on, big hair got bigger too.

Until the Eighties, Coronation Street and Emmerdale Farm (it dropped the “farm” in 1989) were the only soaps in town.

It wasn’t until 1982, with the launch of Channel 4 in November of that year, that they had any serious competition.

Brookside, set in Liverpool, quickly became appointment television. This drama set out to break boundaries and introduced the first gay character in British soap, “Glum” Gordon Collins, while women across the nation fell for the bad boy charms of Barry Grant.

It wasn’t until February 1985 that the BBC started its own soap EastEnders, which rapidly became a hit. Dirty Den became a household name, even in houses that didn’t watch

the show. Way before The Crown, the Windsors were the best reality TV. The July 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer was watched by more than 750 million people worldwide. The viewing figures

in the UK were similar to those for the “Corrie” episode two days earlier in which Ken Barlow and Deirdre Langton tied the knot.

Diana’s wedding gown, designed by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, could not belong to any other decade but the Eighties and the look was still very evident when Sarah Ferguson married into the royal family five years later.

Like them or loathe them, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are the political figures that are synonymous with the decade’s ethos of ‘Get rich or die trying” personified by Yuppies, Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko and Del Boy Trotter.

 

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