The Afterword

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The Afterword #105: The 80scast

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Twang finally finds the key to the pod and virtually gathers with Tiggerlion, Dave Amitri and special guest Hilary to discuss the 80s, a decade beloved and reviled by equal numbers of people. Perhaps, the team muse, a decade with plenty to feel down about in the world needed frothy, fun, happy and irreverent music to provide some respite.  Unless, Twang sighs, you were a miserable git anyway.



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  2. Hating the dire 1980s doesn’t suggest someone being miserable.
    During the dire 1980s I was listening to the Beatles, who brought more joy into the world than anyone (individual, artist, pop star) has ever done, before or since.

    No, you’re right, I should have lumped on Morrissey.

  5. My take on this debate is that during the 80s there were plenty of people who hated the music and yearned for the old days with real instruments and all that. The “money for nothing” crowd.

    When the music was good, it was very very good – when it was bad, it was horrid.

  7. Well done Twang, Tigger, et al for resurrecting the pod. I really look forward to listening. I almost hope my recollection of the dire ‘80’s will be challenged.

  8. Good listen. I like the 80s music generally, just think major artists lost their way as they reached the grand old age of 40 or something! Most of them had pretty bad decades, Dylan, Macca, Neil, the Who etc.

    Having said that Trevor Horn made Yes listenable. Owner of a Lonely Heart is the best thing they ever did!

    Loads and loads of great stuff from new(ish) bands in the 80s, Human League, Bunnymen, REM, Smiths, Teardrop Explodes/Julian Cope, ABC,OMD, Talking Heads, The Cure, Madness, Specials, Clash, Dexys, Banshees, Japan, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Eurythmics, New Order, FGTH etc etc. Prefer it to any decade except the 60s probably.

    Not joining in for the re-evaluation of Stock, Aitken and Waterman though. Terrible then, terrible now. Conveyor belt, soulless pop music that exists purely as a money making exercise and is almost completely devoid of any artistic merit.

    Probably was in Camden Palace same time as Mr Amitri a few times, and I also spent a lot of time in clubs in Liverpool which was always a fantastic night out, especially if the club played music that strayed from the top 40 sometimes.

  9. I started the 1980s as a 14 year old naive Norfolk boy who loved NWOBHM/Sounds and a chart loving nerd with a wide range of musical tastes.

    I ended it as a house owning qualified pharmacist with a company car and living with my then girlfriend in Leeds with a nice record collection (mine not hers!)

    I did alright in the 1980s…then came the 1990s!

    • I was a spotty 17 year old living in the Welsh valleys, through the decade I lived in Liverpool, London, Liverpool again, back to Wales briefly before moving to Zurich to work for a semiconductor company after I had obtained a Masters.

      Didn’t own a house, didn’t end it living with a girlfriend, saw lots of gigs, drank lots of beer and my father died. Bittersweet I guess.

  14. I had a wonderful 80s. Left school, met lots of new people through the world of work. Lots and lots of gigs and beer. Had two longish relationships but I wasn’t really mature enough, looking back. I had a difficult 90s -late twenties/early thirties seemed a bit miserable and life became hard. Got through it, though.

    • I remember the 80s as a bit of slog, work and children mostly, punctuated by occasional bouts of bad behaviour, and backgrounded by Thatcher. Tom Waits, Lyle Lovett and business to the States though. My 40th was spent on a French campsite and was attended by a puzzled Dutch couple from next door who gave me a jar of mustard.

  15. Left school in 1980 to start an apprenticeship. I left the company in 85 and had a couple of dead end jobs before finding my place in events. By the end of the decade, I was struggling financially having bought a flat in 88 but it was 91 when it all went badly wrong for a few years…….
    Musically, the late 80s was the Q magazine period when I bought quite a lot on the strength of a review. I never bought Smash Hits and I’d given up on the “inkies” by then. With the benefit of hindsight, I can appreciate some great pop songs but they just weren’t my thing at the time, unlike a colleague who loved almost everything and came back with the Betty Boo album one lunchtime and played it loud in the warehouse until asked to stop or at least turn it down. He also loved The Waterboys and Echo and the Bunnymen and went on to be an in demand tour camera director until his love of booze and drugs got the better of him and he became unreliable. He died penniless a year ago and his ex wife had to crowdfund his funeral. Apart from the Betty Boo tape, my other memory is of him playing Great Balls of Fire on a grand piano in The Ritz. Sorry, that just came tumbling out.

  16. Yay the pod is back with a bang! Good listen chaps but tbh I would have been quite happy to have just listened to Hilary telling us about being a working musician in the 80s and what Paul Weller is really like (maybe an idea for another pod @Twang).

    For a long time in my head the 80s music always seemed a poor 2nd to the 70s but in reality most of my music listening today was informed by the stuff I started to listen to in the 80s. Its when I first started buying and really appreciating world music; country; new age/ambient (via the lovely Wyndham Hill label). There was some brilliant British jazz – Loose Tubes ( a memorable gig at the RFH) and Working Week and some of my all time favourite bands and albums Talk Talk, The Blue Nile (in fact a whole raft of superb Scottish bands), The Sprouts, EBTG. I didn’t particularly like some of the pop music but there was Culture Club, Tears for Fears and Frankie (sorry Twang but you are wrong there) to balance it out.

  18. Finding out Hilary had been in The Style Council 2 minutes in to my first podcast completely threw me to be honest. Could easily have made it into a Style Council pod. I’m annoyed I didn’t mention Tal Talk. Such an incredible band for any decade…

    This was an answer to @Feedback_File

    • I forgot to tease Twang about Becker and Fagen who fully embraced the eighties sound. They stopped auditioning drummers and used machines. Kamarikad is full of eighties production techniques. Becker joined China Crisis, a band that is completely eighties.

      Talk Talk are a very interesting band. They could occupy a cast all to themselves.

      We couldn’t just list bands. That would be such a boring cast.

      • And made their worst album before returning to having a drummer. 🙂 There’s nothing wrong with drum machines per se though some of the early ones are horrible sounding now. Idlewild by EBTG has the crappest sounding drum machine ever on it which is really annoying.

  19. Well what a triumphant Return to Form! One of the most enjoyable pods to date with four articulate and interesting contributors. Hat tipped.

    I had a great 80s personally – started it a few months into my first job, which I loved, and which brought me to London for a few years where I had the best time. And ended it, married, a home owner, and having taken on a big and fulfilling job which took me very happily into the 90s.

    I listened to a lot of music of course but if I’m honest most of what I listened to was from artists from the 60s and 70s many of whom did amazing work in the 80s – Bruce, Van, Elvis C, Joe Jackson, Paul Simon, Talking Heads, Weller (I love Cafe Bleu so how amazing to hear Hilary) and many more.

    I was never that bothered by the big anthemic sound of Big Country, Simple Minds and U2, or the New Romantic stuff. But two acts who sum up the 80s for me are the above mentioned EBTG and Eurythmics who I think were magnificent and now seem somewhat underrated and undervalued.

    I think there is a lot in Tiggs’ theory as to why the 80s are so often reviled – it got big, business like, stadium scaled. The sound and the look of much of it was glossy and shiny and some of that hasn’t aged well. But as the pod illustrated, there is no one 80s music – it was in fact broader and more eclectic than the 60s or 70s.

    Would have loved to hear Hilary say more about the classical music from that period she admires – do ask her when you see her next Twang.

  20. The problem that I think many of the older generation e.g. me had with 80s music at the time was the emergence of digital technology that made us think , much like our mothers and fathers before us, that this isn’t proper music. Hepworth notes in his 1971 book that this was the high-water mark for rock where the confluence of talent. money and technology (but not too much) was just ‘perfect’. By the 80s the galloping acceleration of music tech seemed at the time like opening the sweetie shop and saying help yourselves boys and girls. Never mind the quality check out those synth pads.

    That theory was all nonsense of course – you still need to be able write, arrange and deliver songs that people want to hear. Ok some of those early production styles might not have aged well but it didn’t take long for musicians to start to master this new world and for every cheesy ‘synth’ band there was a plethora of really good new guitar based pop/rock bands – REM; Blue Aeroplanes; The Bible; The Go Betweens; Lloyd Cole & the Commotions who were pretty much continuing the tradition of the 60s and 70s but bringing some fresh new ideas to the concept.

    • Drum kits are expensive and cumbersome. A young band starting out in 1979-82, with most of its members on the dole when the dole allowed you to get by while being creative with your time, would struggle to source a kit and transport it around. Echo, the leader of Echo And The Bunnymen, was a drum machine, remember. When I first saw Joy Division in 1979, I was stunned by Stephen Morris’s kit. Those pads were so flat and the boing sound so different. He still thrashed around as energetically as Keith Moon. Once you have a drum machine, it’s a small step to synthesisers generally. They were cheap, cheaper than a decent electric guitar. BC rightly points out (below) how Depeche Mode started that way. So did Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, The Human League, etc. One of my favourite singles at the time was by The Normal, Warm Leatherette/TVOD, that was pure synthesiser.

      The technology allowed better access to music-making by young, imaginative kids. It unleashed a tide of independent creativity that kick started the eighties and was an antidote to the misery in the UK at the time.

  21. This thread has caused a build up of Depeche Mode in my guts – I can’t stand it any longer so I’m going have to let rip and blame it on the dog I haven’t got.

    They came about in 1980 as a direct consequence of cheap synths becoming available. Vince Clarke mastered the art of creating catchy pop music using them. He left the band in 1981 and continues to this day almost exclusively using that technology.

    By 1989 Depeche Mode were still very much a synth band but guitars and real drums were beginning to come in. I think they reached “peak synth” with Violator and then moved to more actual guitar based songs in the early 90s.

    As a live act they realised that there is only so much you can do with keyboards – so their live set up is now no different from most big bands.

    I do get a thrill when they have an occasional synth-heavy song on an album. In their case, this is them going back to their roots.

    • I love your passion for Depeche Mode. They were such Top Of The Pops regulars in the 80s and they just kept hitting the mark with incredible consistency. From Dreaming of Me to Everything Counts was a journey, what came after the 80s is perhaps even greater. Great band, great story, great memories…

  22. ‘badly misunderstood decade’? Not by me, Twang – I was 12 to 21 in the 80s and bar the first couple of years (1979-82 being the last great time, and a really diverse time, for pop) it was a thoroughly rotten time for music – and also clothes (really badly fitting jeans, in my recollection). I hated it at the time – it managed to sound tinny and crappy yet also excessively over-produced and sloshed with money in direct disproportion to the musical quality.

    No offence to Hilary, but I thought Loose Tubes were ghastly. Every genre seemed to go crap in the 80s – and anyone who sounded magical and herculean in the 60s/70s who was still making music in the 80s were like giants with shorn locks (metaphorically – possibly literally, but that doesn’t matter).

    I lived through it, hated it, and see no reason to change that view. It really, really baffles me that things like 30CD box sets of Bananarama records have a market these days.

  23. Colin thought fashion was bad in the 80s? My glory years were the 70s and my God the clothes were awful (and I have the photos to prove it). My full length fur lined Levi coat with opposing quarters of dark and light denim was unbelievable. Of course I thought I looked magnificent at the time. Then there were the loon pants – two quid on Leicester market. They left nothing to the imagination from the waist to the knee and then enough cloth to equip a small sailing vessel from there down. Not to mention the acres of itchy cheesecloth and cheap tie dyed T shirts. The 80s was sartorial elegance in comparison.

  24. Plenty of less happy music around in the 80s too. Post punk becoming goth and indie among other things but even those lovers of gloom would dance, even if in the case of JAMC fans that meant curling up on the floor twitching like a dying fly. I definitely think being up for a good boogie was required to fully appreciate certain records. I still have that outlook even if I’m not going out clubbing these days, it’s a hedonistic thing. People who don’t care to dance may dismiss some of the most joyous records you can find.

    • Absolutely agree with you about dance music.

      I went to see JAMC in the eighties. 1986 if I recall correctly. I think they under estimated the size of the venue. The crowd was sparse. Or, maybe I couldn’t see them because they all wore black. I certainly didn’t see anyone twitching on their backs. The band played with their back to the audience and the gig was short. Mercifully. Their main feature in their sound was feedback.

      • It was Newcastle Mayfair student alternative disco, circa 1988. The DJ played Sisters of Mercy, The Cure, New Order, The Smiths and more. The JAMC fanatics only came onto the dancefloor for their band and everyone laughed at them during their antics. Happy times. At some point you would get The Timewarp. I always hated those ones where you had to all do the same moves, like with YMCA. Last time I went to a wedding all the songs were like that. I don’t dance at weddings any more. Another avenue of pleasure closed off to me he added, bitterly.

      • Little has changed. Whilst I love JAMC on my own terms: i.e. recorded music, played at home to my ear’s taste. They were at Bearded Theory a couple of years ago, and, even outside, it was a muffled din. Pity. I had been looking forward.

  25. Wonderful to have the podcast back and on such a high too. Everybody’s contributions were excellent and I learnt what a gated drum is. Extremely enjoyable and thanks for introducing me to John Coltrane’s Spiritual track, Twang. Transcendent – he seems to be tapping into the divine.

    • Lovely to see you, Carolina. I hope all is well.

      Live At The Village Vanguard (Master Takes) is my absolute. favourite Jazz album. Every time I listen, I hear more. All his work with the great quartet touches the divine, in my view.

      Matthew Halsall plays modern day spiritual jazz. His trumpet style is far more gentle than Coltrane’s constant searching. Salute To The Sun, is a soothing balm for the soul in these troubled times. Try it on Spotify. I think it’s there.

      • Thanks Tig. I looked up Matthew Halsall Salute to the Sun, and his trumpet playing was beautiful and I loved the melodies too. I would have bought it if not for the background tweeting sounds that sounded like an aviary had been released into the studio which I found too distracting!

  26. I have no idea why, but I’ve never listened to any of the Afterword podcasts before. I gave this one a go and really enjoyed it, so thanks to all involved for putting it together.

  28. Really good to hear you all again! It strikes me that a lot of one’s reaction to the 80s is age dependent. This is probably true of a lot of decades, but the changes introduced with the new technology was such a step change that it was bound to jar with many of us who were brought up with 60s and 70s pop and rock, but it is so easy to generalise. I would probably say now that I don’t much care for 80s music, but I certainly bought plenty of it at the time – in the early 80s I loved Eurythmics, for example, but I now hardly ever play them and when I do I find myself thinking it hasn’t aged well. My memory is of a period dominated by singles, and I’m really an albums man, so Lexicon Of Love and Dare are my early 80s touchstones, as well as Roxy’s last albums.

    I don’t think U2 got a mention – I realise the opprobrium I will get, but their 80s outpit was terrific, and Simple Minds and Big Country still get played here.

    On the Style Council, I didn’t embrace them until later when I went back via his solo work and the penny dropped. I just didn’t get it at first! Always late to the party me….

  30. I finally got round to listening. Very enjoyable, so well done to all concerned.

    No mention of The Comsat Angels though. Nor The Icicle Works.

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