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 Casio
keyboards, hairdresser bands, New Wave,
New Romantics and New
Order. Band Aid, Live
Aid, Farm Aid and hearing aid! In the eighties, when
Thatcher was busy selling England by the pound and caring more about
some sheep in the southern Atlantic than 'her' people, the youthful
reaction was Blitz, Boy George and Marilyn. And the march of
electronic and digital technology hit the music world and punk died
with its boots on.
The Top 40 was full of it: Adam & The Ants (a pantomime Glitter
band), Soft Cell, Duran
Duran, Ultravox, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The
Dark, Visage, Bauhaus - the Casio fops and the art students seemed to
be taking over the asylum. Even Top Of The Pops had a new
electro theme tune
By the 80s, pop music was part of the fabric of life. It was
everywhere. On countless new radio stations, on movie soundtracks, in
restaurants, in supermarkets and even in lifts . . .
The explosion of music
found its way into the tabloid press as newspapers started covering
the antics of pop stories as major news stories, and into an
overwhelming number of new music and style magazines. And most
importantly of all, it found its way on to television. When MTV,
the music video channel, was launched in the US in the summer of 1981
it changed our view of music overnight. Suddenly it was important what
music looked like, as well as how it sounded.
Even though the introduction of the compact disc had improved the
quality of recordings enormously, it was how artists presented and
packaged themselves that really mattered. And the 80s megastars - Madonna,
Michael Jackson, Prince,
Wham! et al - not only had
the videos, they had The Look (and a host of advisers, stylists and
trainers to help them achieve it).
As for the music, the eighties witnessed an astounding variety of
different styles and genres, from new psychedelia to acid house, disco
to death metal, Goth rock to hip hop, folk to technopop - with
reactions and revivals following on from each other (and often
colliding with each other) at an alarming rate. For the most part,
white America was persisting with the arena rock of REO
Speedwagon,
Styx and Journey, the country rock crossover of Eddie Rabbit and
Dolly
Parton and the pretty-boy pop (pap?) of Hall & Oates and Rick
Springfield.
The sheer power of pop music made itself heard in 1984 when The
Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof, and Midge Ure of Ultravox
organized help for starving people in Ethiopia. Britain's top music stars joined
together to form Band Aid, producing a single, Do They Know It's
Christmas? The following year, Geldof organized Live
Aid - two
huge concerts held simultaneously at London's Wembley Stadium and JFK
Stadium in Philadelphia. Watched by 1.5 billion people on television,
over £50 million was raised to help famine relief in Africa. The pop
cast included Status Quo, Sting,
Queen, David
Bowie, Paul McCartney, Madonna,
Joan Baez, Eric
Clapton, Mick Jagger, Led
Zeppelin, Duran
Duran and Bob Dylan. Phil Collins
even crossed the Atlantic by Concord to
perform at both shows.
While the seventies had spawned a phenomena known as the "one-hit
wonder", almost every artists in the 80s was a one-hit wonder.
Let's take Toni Basil as an example: In 1982 she turned up with an
infectious and innocuous cheerleading song called Mickey.
Little did MTV know that this peppy cheerleader was pushing 40! She
had been a Go-Go dancer with Terri Garr around 1964 and even made a
brief appearance in Easy Rider as a New Orleans prostitute. But
anybody could release a song in the 1980s . . .
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