No wonder we can’t wait to pop back to the 1980s! TODAY
A new optimism, a bullish economy, a woman in No.10 – the parallels between then and now are striking. As even Bananarama reform . . .
WItH their big hair and fun, up-tempo pop songs about love (and Robert de Niro), they helped to define the Eighties.
Now they’re back. Girl band Bananarama have announced they are to make a comeback tour, almost 30 years after they last performed.
Keren Woodward, Sara Dallin and Siobhan Fahey haven’t played together since the Brit Awards in 1988. Shortly afterwards, they broke up amid squabbles and infighting.
But Fahey says: ‘It felt like something I needed to revisit, to go back to my roots and that time with my best friends. We’re going to celebrate that extraordinary life we led together in our 20s.’
For those of us who led happy, if less extraordinary, lives in our 20s, this reunion is similarly good news. We all enjoy being whisked back to our youths and suddenly, Eighties music is everywhere.
As they hit the road again, Bananarama, whose hits included Cruel Summer, Love In the First Degree and Robert de Niro’s Waiting, will be in reassuringly familiar company. other Eighties acts already out there include Adam Ant, Culture Club, Simple Minds, Heaven 17, Human League, Altered Images, t’Pau and tony Hadley from Spandau Ballet.
Phil Collins and Depeche Mode are going on major tours, too. If George Michael hadn’t died, he might even have got back together with his old Wham! mucker Andrew Ridgeley — husband of Bananarama’s Keren Woodward. But
it’s much more than a collective rush of nostalgic bliss.
After a decade of penny-pinching since the great financial crisis, Britain is ready for another dose of sassy, over-thetop Eighties exuberance.
And just as that great decade followed the strikes and struggles of the Seventies, the next big boom time may come about as a result of the bright promise engendered by Brexit.
For it’s not only Eighties music bouncing back. the High Street is embracing the decade in which upbeat consumerism replaced the grim austerity of the Seventies.
‘Don’t you forget about me,’ sang the Scottish band Simple Minds in 1985. Evidently we haven’t. Last November, when fashion designer Marc Jacobs threw a glitzy party in New York, his theme was Eighties chic. And Jacobs knows a trend when he sees one. Ruffle shirts are back and make-up colours are bright and bold again.
the outrageous spirit of Grace Jones and Boy George lives on, as beauty product manufacturers acknowledge the era as a highly creative, experimental decade.
this phenomenon straddles the Atlantic. In London last September, topshop unique — the High Street chain’s more upmarket line — held a show that celebrated iconic Eighties New Wave music, and the company’s global design director Jacqui Markham enthused that ‘it’s such a great era to look back on for inspiration, as it championed individualism, expression and exhibitionism’. No one championed individualism more than Margaret thatcher, and sure enough, the Eighties revival extends even to politics.
Britain has a female, Conservative Prime Minister just as it did 30 years ago, while the u.S. has once more elected an ageing celebrity as its Republican commander-in-chief.
Could we eventually look back on Donald trump’s presidency as affectionately as we do now on that of Ronald Reagan? that may be stretching the analogy too far.
Here in Britain we are approaching a General Election where a hopelessly divided Labour Party is led, ineptly, by a dinosaur of the Left. For Michael Foot in a donkey jacket in 1983, read Jeremy Corbyn in a shellsuit now. Britain stood on the edge of an economic precipice as the Seventies, so blighted by power cuts and strikes, gave way to the prosperous, go-getting Eighties.
the 1978/79 Winter of Discontent, which effectively marked the death throes of Jim Callaghan’s Labour government, had yielded the grotesque spectacle of even gravediggers striking.
It is hard to think of two adjacent decades so different as the Seventies and the Eighties, when Britain’s recovery of its self-confidence was reflected in popular culture.
time will tell if that process is unfolding again as we adjust to a future outside the Eu. Certainly, there are other parallels between then and now. At the start of the Then and now: Keren, Siobhan and Sara in 1984, and today, with Siobhan on the right Eighties, there had for decades been few advances in technology that really changed how we lived.
Few of us owned anything digital, except possibly a watch.
In 1980, the Sony Walkman was unveiled, letting us, for the first time, listen to music anywhere.
It was followed by mass production, affordable tV video-recording machines, camcorders, and mobile phones. And the CD.
this was almost as influential then in altering our leisure time as the internet is today, though it’s also worth noting that sales of old- fashioned vinyl records recently reached a 30-year high.
It touches on the very foundation of this Eighties revival, being fashioned by men and women who came of age at that seismic time and now seek echoes of that era in what they create and buy.
A few years ago, the same thing happened with the Seventies. Much-derided food favourites of the decade, such as Black Forest gateau and butterscotch Angel Delight, were recreated. It wasn’t always a good idea. In tV’s corridors of power, the decision-makers were people who yearned to revisit their own formative years, hence ill- advised remakes of shows such as Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. NoW,
teenagers of the Eighties are the movers, shakers and highearners. In the u.S., that’s why one of the decade’s defining tV dramas, Dynasty, is making a comeback (albeit with a far more racially diverse cast).
And it helps to explain fashion and music throwbacks, too, though there is another dimension: the children of those of us who came of age in the Eighties grew up looking at our old photos and listening to our albums.
Now they have spending power, they want a taste of it, too.
Hardly a week goes by in which my three children, aged 23, 22 and 18, don’t add a much-prized vinyl record to their collection.
But this Eighties revival is not just a retro movement. It doesn’t just reflect a world we used to live in; they are trends for now.
And it makes it worth pondering why we are ready to embrace brighter make-up, bigger hair and more exclamatory clothes — and listen to Bananarama again.
Surely, more than anything else, it’s because we’re ready to have some fun.