Nostalgia

Remember please, the 1980s had crap music and food; it cost a year’s salary to fly anywhere, and not everyone got to watch ‘Glenroe’, says Ellis O’Hanlon

Nostalgia is ruining the world. Just to be clear, that’s no slur on those alive today who pine for life as it was before they were born, because they’re obviously right.

Anyone who hasn’t long since come to the conclusion that the world is going to hell in a handcart, and that our grandparents pretty much had everything sussed, simply hasn’t been paying attention. Mankind spent hundreds of thousands of years sloshing around in swamps and enduring all manner of misery and indignity as civilisation advanced, in order to get the human race to the point where we had it made. We’d invented everything that anyone could ever possibly want, such as steam engines and indoor plumbing, penicillin and the wireless radio.

Then, just when the world was as it should be, along came our parents’ generation, then us, to bugger it up by inventing social media, and autotune, and facial-recognition software, and bankers who stopped thinking their job was to look after your money and decided it would be an absolute wheeze instead to start the sort of crazed financial pyramid that might just send the whole world spiralling into debt and despair if it went wrong — which, inevitably, it did. So no, not all nostalgia is bad. Some things really were better in the distant past.

It’s middle-aged sentimentalists feeling nostalgic for the world of their youth who are the problem. Plenty of things may have been better in the 1940s or 50s — apart, of course, from all the world wars, racism and rickets — but they certainly weren’t better in the 1980s, and no amount of dewy-eyed episodes of Reeling In The Years could ever persuade a thinking person otherwise.

Still, those who came of age in that godforsaken decade won’t stop banging on about how great it was.

They start every conversation with the words, “Ah, do you remember...?” and insist on going to see bands they liked as a teenager, even though the lead singer can barely remember his own name after decades of snorting coke, never mind the lyrics. It’s not funny, even in an ironic ‘look at me, I’m so retro’ kind of way. It’s just tragic.

To be fair, we’re all guilty of it to a certain extent. Modern music has been scientifically proven to be rubbish. It’s still better to just moan about it without simultaneously having to pretend that the 1980s weren’t also total crap.

Back then, coffee meant some awful toxic sludge from a jar. There was hardly any nice food around. It cost a year’s salary to fly anywhere. TV was just awful. If I have to listen to one more person going on about watching Glenroe asa child on Sunday evening, I’ll scream. Check your privilege. Some of us grew up in Northern Ireland. The Brits didn’t let us have Glenroe.

Sure, Johnny Logan won the Eurovision Song Contest. Twice. That was great. So was the fact that it was still called the Eurovision Song Contest. ‘Eurovision’ sounds like the sort of soulless multinational corporation which is harvesting all your data in the hope of plugging everyone permanently into the Matrix in order to power the machine overlords.

What’s forgotten is that, the year after Johnny triumphed with Hold Me Now, the contest was held in Dublin, where Celine Dion was first unleashed on the world. As for

Fairytale Of New York being Christmas number one in Ireland in 1987, does that really make up for the aural obscenity that was Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe and Wine topping the Irish charts the same time next year?

This kitschy habit of believing the music of your youth was better, just because you’ve selectively filtered out the dross from your memory, has led to the ultimate crime against good taste, and that’s tribute bands.

I get it. You wish you’d been there. I’m sorry that you weren’t. Them’s the breaks. But just because you were too young at the time to go see some act in their prime doesn’t mean it’s now a good idea to pretend that seeing some sweaty coronary-in-waiting, dressed up like a fondly remembered singer of yore, is anything remotely like the real thing. There are even Thin Lizzy tribute bands doing the rounds these days. If Phil Lynott and Gary Moore weren’t already dead, that outrage alone would be enough to kill them again.

This phenomenon seems to happen in 30-year cycles. Those who grew up with a certain culture inevitably reach a point in middle age where they start getting misty-eyed about the good old days.

Three decades from now, the young people of today are going to be looking back and saying to each other: “Do you remember 2019? Wasn’t it great?”

Anyone with a titter of sense will be saying: “Are you mad? Everyone was screeching about Brexit. The Late, Late

Show was still being presented by Ryan Tubridy. Love Island was an actual thing. Simon Harris seriously thought he was going to be Taoiseach one day. It was an awful time.”

It won’t make any difference. Cloying wistfulness for the relatively recent past is resistant to the antibiotic of reality. Each generation is no more able to hold out against its hypnotic allure than RTE can resist spending money it doesn’t have.

Look on the bright side. Unlike the national broadcaster, at least nostalgia is free.