Stage names are funny things. Sometimes a white sandwich loaf is re-labelled as a baguette, or pane de casa, or Tibetan mountain bread. And sometimes horiatiko psomi is re-labelled as … white sandwich loaf. This is pretty much what happened to Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou. Born in London of Greek heritage, he became known to the […]
Category: 1980s
Ah, the Eighties. The decade when marketing and pop music really hopped into bed, good and proper. “We are living in a material world,” declaimed Madonna. “Greed is good”, said Gordon Gecko, who didn’t actually exist though there were many like him. Margaret Thatcher did exist, and ran a country, and she said “There is […]
I will admit to having low expectations when I picked up this single. The name Jive Bunny, and the image of said bunny in a Hawaiian shirt aboard a Polynesian war canoe – not promising. Apart from anything else, rabbits are a major pest in Australia. Anyone who grew up in a rural area here, […]
There was a lot of pretence and posturing in the 1980s: the pout and mid-distance stare was the template’ for fashion models and pop stars alike. Cyndi Lauper was an exception. She didn’t take herself too seriously. She dressed in what looked like second-hand clothes, though it is too much to expect that they really […]
One of the better things to happen in Australian music back in the 1980s was a band called Mental As Anything. In the slang of the day, to say someone was “mental” was an insult. It implied eccentricity and stupidity rather than mental illness, but even so it was a bit unpleasant. The Mentals, as […]
The town I grew up in – let’s call it Spud – was a homophobic place. Nothing unusual in that for rural Australia in the 1970s. The strange thing was that we were so averse to gay men that we had no idea what they might be like. And so as kids we played air-guitar […]
First there was Genesis. Then there was Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins and … Mike and the Mechanics? The Mike part was Mike Rutherford, the Genesis bass player, who put together a sort of session musician supergroup in the mid-1980s. On Planet Vinyl, a band is never judged on its name. But I will admit that […]
Nineteen eighty-seven was my first year at university. Like a lot of people at this stage of life, I struggled a bit. I moved to a big city, and into a share house. I received a very modest government stipend: $87.30 a week, which even in those days was not much. Rent was $45 a […]
This was one of the very first records I sold online. The purchaser lives in Queensland, Link is his name, and he is a fan of eighties pop. He bought a few discs, and we exchanged some emails. I asked why he was into the eighties stuff: was he, like me, there at the time? […]
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