So how was 1986 for you then?
Given that 2016 brings us as far away from that year as Heartbreak Hotel and the Suez crisis were, perhaps it’s time for reflection. It didn’t feel to me like a vintage year for the music at the time, and time hasn’t changed that opinion much, so why is that?
It seems like a year of transition, the decade’s summer holidays. The early 80s pop boom was winding down: Duran Duran, Frankie, Spandau and Culture Club had all seen their best days, but hip hop, house music and hair metal had yet to really make their breakthrough (although they were knocking at the door: Livin’ on a Prayer and Walk this Way both were hits this year).
It also seems to have been a year that a lot of acts that were in their prime at the time sat out. The list of bands who made albums in 1985 and 87 but not 86 is striking: U2, Simply Red, The Cure, The Sisters of Mercy, The Cult, all were touring/resting/drying out. The charts abhor a vacuum of course, and you wonder if bands like The Mission would have been as successful in 1986 had some of the acts on that list made records. Still, this was the year of Parade and The Queen is Dead.
Perhaps the year did have some influence though. For one, this seems to have been the year that bands realised, thanks to live Aid, that they could play stadia instead or arenas. Wham! played Wembley and Queen played Wembley Stadium and Knebworth, where two years previously they had played Wembley Arena and the NEC. Touring would change for good.
Then there was C86. While it can be difficult to name many of the bands that were on the cassette, it does seem to have laid down the basic template for Indie bands that is still used today. Before C86, Indie could have meant Throbbing Gristle or Orange Juice. After, it meant a four piece of floppy-haired students trying to sound like The Smiths. It still does, really.
Elsewhere, while we were able to watch the world’s greatest footballer win the World Cup, we were unaware that a big dreadlocked guy was becoming the first truly modern footballer over at PSV. There was a lot less football on the TV those days.
So, how was 1986 for you? Were you an Advertising big shot with braces and red-framed spectacles and a huge mortgage? Were you nursing some heartbreak over a cider and blackcurrant at the Student Union? O were you hoping to swap Peter Beardsley for Karl-Heinz Ruminegge to fill up your Panini album?
I was 11. I liked classical music, reading the phone directory and climbing trees.
Hopefully other people have more relevant anecdotes to share.
I was 7, going on 8. It was a year in which whole new worlds opened up to me.
In December 1985 my family jumped on a long haul flight to Uruguay, to visit my grandparents. Sat sandwiched between my middle brother, and my mum, who cradled my youngest brother (then fifteen months old), with a 24 hour journey ahead, I sat in awe through a screening of the Richard Pryor remake of Brewster’s Millions. I’d never seen anything so exciting in my life – my hair practically stood on end throughout. It was followed up by the now largely forgotten D.A.R.Y.L, a movie about a robot boy which also had a profound impact on my young mind, not least because the kid playing the lead was virtually my doppelgänger. I have a vivid memory from that flight of being sat in the dark once the movies had finished with all sorts of magic fizzing around my skull. I had found one of my great life’s callings – trashy movies.
In 1986 I took the next step and discovered the video store at the end of the road. Along with the near simultaneous discovery of a local bookstore with a dusty back room full of American comics (the now sadly defunct “At the Sign of the Dragon” – great name), this was a seminal moment in my childhood, and the effect was rather like a three pin plug finally locating a mains socket. I spent much of the next four years stood staring at the covers of movies that were far too old for me, and browbeating my mother into renting them.
Elsewhere, there was a World Cup on. I had only extremely vague recollections of the 82 finals, but I’d long since discovered the joys of playground football, and I knew from my dad’s excitement that this was going to be good. My grandparents are Argentinean, and from that wing of the family there was an enormous hubbub of excitement about a chap called Diego Maradona, who I’d never been able to watch before and was very much looking forward to seeing. Dad had started taking me to games at Fulham, Brentford and QPR the year before (my first trip to Highbury was still a year away), and I wondered whether this Maradona character could possibly match up to the likes of Gary Bannister.
On the day of the opening game of the finals I remember playing football in an alley with my mate Fletcher (great name, wonder what happened to him), then sprinting giddily home to watch Italy draw with Bulgaria. To this day, the details are etched in my memory: the title sequence with the long shadows, the outstandingly tinny theme tune. I couldn’t believe there was going to be whole month of this stuff ahead. I remember the anxiety of England’s group stage performance, and Lineker bailing them out. I remember watching the Brazilians, and marvelling at the likes of Careca, Socrates and Zico. I remember the Belgians and that great, great Danish side (superb kit). I remember the Panini sticker album, of course. But most of all I remember Maradona.
I couldn’t believe he was so tiny in stature, and yet he seemed to tower above everyone else on the pitch (most notably Peter Shilton). He was everything I’d been told to expect, and so much more. My little seven year old self tried to process the idea of a man with the whole world watching him, all that pressure, just digging deeper and deeper, and topping his own standards with each new performance. The papers were full of articles asking if he was better than Pele. I’d never seen Pele play football, but he surely, surely couldn’t have been the match of Diego, who seemed to be able to do just about anything with the ball and who dragged his compatriots through game after game with his extraordinary talent and monstrous force of will.
I watched the final on a tiny black and white TV from my bed, up way past usual to contemplate the gloriously monikered Azteca Stadium. I remember the jolt of the West Germans clawing their way back from two goals down, the hated Rudi Vollerv levelling late in the game before Burruchaga latched onto a Maradona pass and scored the winner. I remember Maradona being held aloft, and kissing the trophy as if it were a long lost lover. I had no conception that Argentina had last won it only eight years previous – this felt like the end of a quest that must have lasted centuries.
That winter, as the evenings drew long and cold, I found an old hardback book on my parents’ shelves. The Collected Psmith, by one P. G Wodehouse. I devoured it within weeks, and it became one of the great sacred texts of my youth. I’d been read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn from a young age, and had taken all sorts of unintended messages about adults and authority from those stories, but this was something else entirely. The Psmith books seemed to suggest that parents, teachers and other guardians were there to be bamboozled by a quick tongue and a bit of daring, and that there was no higher calling in life that glorious, unfettered boyhood. This was all music to my ears.
I was seven years old, going on eight. The world was vibrant and full of promise. I lived my life in a whirl of football, movies, comics and books, my mind half in and half out of reality, always daydreaming and always seeking that next great thrill. I was Maradona on the playground and Psmith in the classroom, and in between I ran wild with my brothers and my friends.
1986 was a magnificent, transformative year in my tiny universe.
1986 gave us both of my favourite Elvis Costello LPs – King of America and Blood & Chocolate.
I was a student nurse, just split from my first wife and struggling to keep my head above water emotionally and financially.
Costello aside, it wasn’t a very good year for me.
1986: the hinge on which my life turned. It started with me in a dead-end job in the UK midlands, working with people I hated and hated me. It ended with me sitting on this beach near the equator contemplating a complete change in my life:
http://i1220.photobucket.com/albums/dd449/jimathomas/img_03382.jpg
And this was the song I kept listen to at the time:
ube.com/watch?v=d8KynrRA1u8
woops:
‘Twas the year I had my first experience of redundancy, then started working for an increasingly bonkers Japanese firm though it was great & rather weird fun when it all started. Like junior Bingo, Maradona featured in my 86, he started weaving his magic for Napoli which led to our first scudetto the year after. He really did transform the city.
I turned 8 in January of that year. I was a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral – probably just moving up to having earned my surplice and thus becoming a full chorister rather than a probationer. So that was the beginning of my love affair with sacred choral music which is still the sort of ur-music underneath all the other loves for me.
But I was definitely aware of Livin’ On A Prayer (which, poodle-Springsteen-pastiche though it may be, remains a tune).
My sister bought Now 7 in this year. That was our first Now album, and thus is pretty much the foundation of my taste in pop music. I remember my best friend Eddie playing me Happy Hour by the Housemartins on Radio Luxembourg (I think). Thought it was great. Still do. Bought my first album – a-Ha’s debut (suspect my sister coerced me, but I didn’t take much coercion: that remains brilliant too).
A big year. Good old 1986.
Tracklists for Nows 7 & 8 here. God, what I wouldn’t give for these on vinyl!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_That's_What_I_Call_Music_7_%28UK_series%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_That's_What_I_Call_Music_8_%28UK_series%29
Would you give “from 28p”? http://www.discogs.com/Various-Now-Thats-What-I-Call-Music-7/release/438750
Or “from 80p”? http://www.discogs.com/Various-Now-Thats-What-I-Call-Music-8/release/807353
Good old Discogs.
A year when I was single again, between two long-term relationships. Records I remember I bought were: Siouxsie and the Banshees Tinderbox, The Cure Staring At The Sea/Standing On A Beach, The Queen Is Dead, Sonic Youth EVOL, B.A.D. 10 Upping Street, and Prince Parade. I was out a lot at weekends with new friends having quite a lot of fun. Talking Heads Little Creatures (taped off a friend’s copy), singles like True Colours, Rock Me Amadeus and Absolute Beginners *sigh* remind me vividly of those times. Sledgehammer was ubiquitious and I soon got sick of it. This was the era when some people seemed to think videos were as important artistically as the music. Iggy Pop had some rare commercial success with Wild Child and I went to see him at Brixton Academy, well I got brief glimpses of him and his celebrated, bare torso between boughts of writhing on the floor (him not me).
Year three of four – both my PhD and being with the first great love of my life. We had huge posters of the Cure and Prefab Sprout, and a black cat and a white cat. We worked the gigs at the Uni (apart from Wham!). I loved C86. And it was one of the best years of my life.
Don’t ask about 1987.
1986. Pretty damn good. I was deep into the charity/service organisation, Rotaract, being Vice Chairman of District 124 (Essex & Herts) and President of Billericay Rotaract Club for the second time, Having been part of the national conference committee in ’85 I was invited on to the 1987 international conference organising committee and seemed to spend most of my time travelling around the country each weekend to parties and meetings. Work was a distraction. Most of all, I met the quite wonderful and future Mrs Phil, managing to trample her feet for the first of many occasions on the dance floor.
I was 12. Which means I got into Metallica and Iron Maiden. Baby steps into a world of music. Via them Anthrax. Via Anthrax Public Enemy. Via Public Enemy, anyone good I have heard since I reckon.
Outside of music, my mum and dad joined a lunatic Christian organisation prompting major problems between us which have never entirely healed. Frankly, it was like losing them. They lost their minds for about a decade; amusing normal people became humorless catholic zealots overnight (and it was overnight). Truly I hope I never dump anything like that on my own child.
The main man in that organisation later served time in prison when it was discovered that he had sexually assaulting some of his pupils, back when he worked as a teacher.
So a major year for me.
I turned 19 in -86. Had just moved into my first flat (in the building next to the one I’m living in today) and spent every hour (not spent at work) with my friends, having what is still some of the best times of my life.
Thinking about it I reminds me that almost all of them are gone today. As in dead. And most of them died at least ten years ago.
But at eighteen we were going to live forever!
We had some wild times, but what I remember best today are those “insignificant” moments, in between the big events that we were looking forward to and planning for.
Sharing a cigarette and a laugh on a metro station early in the morning trying to get home from some unlikely place we’d ended up at the night before… Riding around in the souped up Toyota at night, singing along loudly to the latest mix tape (or something filthy). Those constant train journeys between Stockholm and Uppsala on weekends, chatting and laughing with strangers to pass the time. Cooking together. Renting bad movies and watching them three times in a row to get our money’s worth…
The music was mostly crap. But being the soundtrack to those days still makes it more than OK.
“The music was mostly crap. But being the soundtrack to those days still makes it more than OK.”
That’s an interesting point. I was 17 in 1986 and a lot of my friends were Heavy Metal fans. It means that these days if I hear some shriekingly bad stuff like Manowar or Poison I can’t help but smile to myself.
I draw the line at Motley Crue though.
I turned, er, 39 that year. At the end of the year we moved into the family home that we didn’t sell until 2013.
I was working for Sphere Books, running the Abacus list. One of the happiest times of my working life, largely because I was left alone to get on with it – my boss said, ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about half the time, but you seem to know what you’re doing, so carry on.’
High spots of the year included The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, The Kingdom of the Wicked by Anthony Burgess, War Cries Over Avenue C by Jerome Charyn, The Aerodynamics of Pork by Patrick Gale, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth, Kennedy for the Defense by George V Higgins, This Space to Let by Ray Lowry and That’s Doctor Sinatra, you Little Bimbo by Gary Trudeau.
Brag over…
I loved the Primo Levi books that Abacus put out. I also loved the artwork, and how they lined up on my student bookshelf: The Wrench, the Sixth Day, Other People’s Trades. They were beautiful books to look at, handle and read.
A fine year. Infected, Raisin’ Hell and of courseThe Housemartins. It felt at the time like a deliciously fresh, shiny, exciting year for music. To be fair it was the year I started to look beyond the charts for what I listened to – though, to be fair, they improved noticeably.
To be fair.