Eighties Music

I can't remember how many times I've come close to buying a Level 42 compilation. Back in the day I thought Level 42 – the eponymous album and The Early Tapes – were the business. I had their stuff on a cassette for my Walkman when I took a week's holiday in Paris, met a girl on the train over and spent not many nights at the hotel I'd booked. (And you thought Before Dawn didn't happen in real life?) As for the SOS Band, Jackie Graham, Joe Jackson's Night and Day, The Fatback Band, anything produced by Jam and Lewis, Spandau Ballet, MARRS, The Smiths, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ABC, pretty much anything else produced by Trevor Horn (even Hand Held In Black and White)... the list goes on and on. All of them strong songs, great production... and I every time I think of putting a CD of it onto the iPod, I stop and put the CD back.

This only happens with Eighties music. I'm fine with all the other stuff. There's too many memories. Too many feelings. Which is odd, because I “grew up” in the Sixties and Seventies. I did my homework by candlelight in the Three-Day Weeks, I can remember double-figure inflation, flared trousers and the Sex Pistols on Top of The Pops. I saw Bob Marley and the Wailers at university and Sam Peckinpah movies as they came out. The strong feelings are all supposed to be around being a teenager, falling in love all the time and discovering the world.

The Eighties was when I screwed up. It's when my future disappeared (at thirty – that's when you've had a great future behind you), when I realised that the party was anywhere I wasn't and on the rare occasions I found it, I didn't really get what was going on. It's when the Girl I Should Have Married told me she was marrying someone else – I hyperventilated for a couple of hours after that phone call. It's when I realised that at the end of the evening, I was the one who dropped everyone else off and then drove the last stretch back “home” on my own. Always. It's when my career crashed and burned, even as my salary went up. It's when I wished I was an accountant – so that I could be as self-satisfied and apparently as securely employed as they were. Did I mention the property company I worked for company whose CEO wound up in jail? Or the way the decade ended with me drinking myself into... well, let's say a state of mind I don't actually want to visit again in case I don't come back from it. Ever. If your character is built on sand, as mine was, then there's a time the lack of foundations is going to show: teens, twenties, thirties... all the way up to your seventies (after that you get to pass it off as “senior moments”). For me it was Eighties. And that music was the soundtrack.

I wasn't screwing up because I wasn't going about getting what I wanted very well: I was screwing up because I had no idea who I was. I thought I wanted the English dream: one wife, two children, three holidays, a four-by-four, five bedrooms and six good friends thing. I didn't. I'm so much more shallow that that. I didn't know that at the time. I didn't really chase after the English dream but I didn't chase after anything else either. Because I didn't know what it was I wanted to chase after. Other than fame, wealth and beautiful lovers – Freud's account of the motivations of artists everywhere – and there was and is no way I had the courage or talent to chase after that. I was too busy doing the damn day job, getting drunk, commuting, keeping up a reasonably respectable front and pretending even to myself to be having a life that was going somewhere.

If it wasn't for the memories, I think I'd be prepared to say that the popular music of the Eighties was about as good as it gets. Technically the writing, recording, arranging and production was way ahead of anything from the previous decades: the lyrics weren't as good, and I keel over now when critics quote the lyrics from Oughties songs because the entire lyrical output of the last ten years isn't worth the lyrics on Like A Rolling Stone. I'm going to assume that if you were nineteen, it had an emotional resonance that would have passed me by as I wasn't nineteen anymore, but was as strong for you as the music that was around when I was nineteen. Don't ask me what those emotions were though, because I can't guess, but your music provided the soundtrack to my lost years. Which is why I always put the CD back into the rack – no matter how much I remember that I liked the songs at the time.