Synth-pop was new and exciting once. To appreciate the music of the High Eighties, you have to get the freshness, the sense of possibility opened up by synthesisers. Some of it was a bit thin, a bit tinny, but at its best it had an energy, a zip. One of its best practitioners was Vince […]
Category: 1980s
Oh dear. There were some unfortunate fashions in the 1980s. Maybe it’s because I was there at the time, but when I see a picture like this, I shrink inside. This is Ricky Skaggs, one of the greats of country music, on the back of his 1985 LP, Live in London. That’s Westminster Bridge in […]
Planet Vinyl welcomes and loves the obscure, the forgotten, the eccentric and the strange. But we do not discriminate. The best-selling female recording artist of all time? She too is welcome here. I speak of Madonna Louise Ciccone, born in the United States in 1958. By the time I was a teenager in the 1980s […]
I had an eating disorder when I was a teenager. I didn’t think of it that way. I just believed that I was fat, and that it was thus a really good idea to not eat breakfast or lunch. I spent a couple of years like this. I spent the day with a dull ache […]
In Australia, Dexys Midnight Runners are remembered, but as a one hit wonder. “Come on Eileen” was huge, top of the charts for six or eight weeks in 1982. But they never had another hit here: not one. Which is odd, because in the UK they were big, and for years. They had seven singles […]
It would have been about 1985. I clearly remember that it was Anzac Day, 25 August. This is a solemn public holiday in Australia, our annual commemoration for fallen soldiers. The weather was lousy and everything was closed, and I was in my bedroom doing schoolwork. The radio was on, tuned into EON FM. Eons […]
The cliché about books and covers applies double to recorded music. Some LP sleeves, especially those produced by little independent folk labels, take gauche, add extra gauche, then multiply by the number you first thought of. The music may be brilliant; it’s just that the graphic design was entrusted to the bass player’s second cousin, […]
Imagine yourself flung through a space time vortex, emerging you know not when, lost sometime between the Big Bang and the Last Judgment. You can’t yet see, but you can hear. There’s something coming through the ether, a sound. Three seconds is all you need. “Bugger,” you think, “I’m stuck in the 1980s”. That bash-bash […]
The true test of whether a record is both obscure and alternative? You should be able to pick it up and look at the cover, read the words on it, and have no idea what is the band name, and what is the record title. Equal Local (which turns out to be the band) pass […]
“Bobby who?” That is what people will say if you mention Bobby McFerrin. But start to sing “Don’t worry”, they will instantly join in “be happy”, and most of the time will also start to smile. I too knew “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, a novelty hit from 1988, which I liked at the time and […]
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