They may have been acceptable in the Eighties, but do the likes of Bananarama,
Curiosity Killed the Cat, Howard Jones and the Human League pass muster with
the pop pickers of today? The organisers of Retrofest certainly hope so.
Described as “Europe’s largest Eighties music festival”, the two-day event
takes place next weekend and is expected to draw 10,000 people to Culzean
Castle in Ayrshire.
“Basically I wanted to see a bunch of bands who were big in my youth, but who
I never got the chance to see,” explains Brad Snelling, the festival’s
director. “I left school in 1983, so for me there’s a warm, cozy, nostalgic
feeling about this. The Eighties was a great time for music. You had
colourful characters like Boy George, MTV poster boys like Duran Duran, and
doom and gloom merchants like the Cure and Depeche Mode. It was very
diverse.”
Alas, none of the aforementioned is on the bill, but to make up for it we have
Hazel O’Connor, Kim Wilde, ABC and “the legendary Kajagoogoo”. Were the
others too busy, or just too proud? “Most of the bands we couldn’t get were
already booked,” Snelling insists. It’s easy to knock the idea of an
Eighties music festival – so let’s start with those “legendary” one-hit
wonders Kajagoogoo, as well as the prospect of people in their forties
desperately trying to relive their youth. Not true, says Snelling. “We have
an Eighties ‘school disco’ called the Reflex in the festival. They have
about 40 clubs in the UK, and the average age is 22 to 24. A lot of these
kids grew up up with this music. Their parents played it, so they have an
affinity with it.”
Other attractions include a dressing-up tent where you can get an Eighties pop
star makeover, and the Slippery Stage New Acts Tent. An Eighties music
festival showcasing new talent? Surely a contradiction in terms? Snelling
doesn’t think so. “The new acts are all people who write their own songs, as
opposed to manufactured bands,” he says. “Most new music doesn’t interest
me. It’s all become so corporate and bland. An artist used to be able to
experiment, record a few albums and build a career. That was very much the
spirit of the Eighties. Now it’s all about having a No 1 single.”
Well, yes and no. For many Eighties acts it was also very much about having a
No 1 single. The majority of the so-called New Romantics were former punks
who had absorbed punk’s methods (confrontation, shock value) but
conveniently ditched its ideals (anarchy, “keeping it real”). Cheered on by
the world’s biggest-selling pop magazine, Smash Hits, they launched an
assault on the charts that led to one of the most lucrative periods in
British pop. It was, in the words of the pop writer David Rimmer, “like punk
never happened”.
The chart rivalry between Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran was matched only by
the rivalry between Duran Duran and Culture Club. Accused of selling out,
Boy George replied that he’d “bought in”. And when the former punk Adam Ant
appeared on the Royal Variety Performance and Duran Duran were seen cosying
up to Diana, Princess of Wales the spirit of the Sex Pistols was long dead.
One artist who lived through it all is the former Soft Cell frontman Marc
Almond. Now enjoying critical acclaim for his latest solo album Stardom Road,
Almond has no plans to appear at Retrofest. “I’m lucky enough to have the
choice whether to do these sorts of events or not,” he says. “And I’m very
wary of doing them in this country, just because there’s so much musical
snobbery. But if people are happy to do them, good luck to them. A couple of
major hits will give you a career for life, especially if you had your hits
in the Eighties. People sold a lot more records then. Everyone watched Top
of the Pops and read Smash Hits. And if there’s an audience still baying for Don’t
You Want Me? or Too Shy why deny them?”
Why indeed? And it’s not as if he never does this kind of thing. “I’ll go to
Europe and happily play the Eighties card. I’m doing a show in Malta next
month and they’re advertising it as ‘Eighties star Marc Almond singing Tainted
Love’. The Eighties gave me a big audience, and the means to maintain
a career. Tainted Lovepaid the mortgage. And it’s still my bread and
butter.”
Eighties nostalgia has never been so “now”. Films such as Music
and Lyrics play to audiences old enough to remember a time when Hugh Grant
was still considered charming, while high street shoppers have another
chance to buy “Frankie Says” T-shirts. Even Tainted Love made a
comeback last year, thinly disguised as S.O.S.,by Rhianna. “So it’s not just
people in their forties who are recycling the Eighties,” Almond observes
wryly. “Look at Rhianna! For me, the Eighties was the last great era of pop.
Today pop is largely a celebration of mediocrity.”
“Everyone always thinks their era of music is the best,” says Mark Frith, a
former editor of Smash Hits and now editor of Heat. “But the Eighties
stars really did seem to have better songs and more of a love of pop music.
People took their role as a pop star very seriously back then. Not that they
were ‘serious’ about it – anything but – but to them being a pop star took
effort and you had to be really, really good to stand a chance.”
They weren’t all good, of course. Every decade has its dross. For every Soft
Cell there was a Department S, for every Culture Club a Haysi Fan-tayzee.
Men in make-up and frilly shirts quickly became passé, and when Simon Le Bon
capsized his yacht some people thought he’d got his just deserts for poncing
about in the video for Rio.
But this was a time when pop stars weren’t afraid of quoting Sartre (as David
Sylvian did on Red Guitar) or making political statements (as Mor-rissey did
on Meat is Murder). Big ideas were squeezed on to 7in singles, and who cared
if people called you pretentious? (As Adam Ant sang, “Ridicule is nothing to
be scared of”). The stars of the Eighties brought with them a combination of
creativity and individualism rarely seen among the warblers who compete for
the nation’s affections these days on The X Factor. “A lot of Eighties
artists came from an art college or fashion background,” says Almond. “They
were strong characters who weren’t prepared to be told what to wear or how
to look.”
Someone in X Factor winner Shayne Ward’s camp recently let slip that Ward’s
manager had been busy planning his wardrobe for the next six months! When
today’s pop stars can’t even dress themselves, is it any wonder people are
taking inspiration from the past?
And the Eighties revival isn’t all retro festivals. Alongside the main-stream
marketing of nostalgia there’s a growing underground club scene that harks
back to the age of gender-benders and electric dreams in more creative ways.
Clubs such as Duckie, Horse Meat Disco and Pop-starz have been playing
Eighties records for years, while others – Foreign, Nag Nag Nag and Trailer
Trash – have spawned a new generation of club kids not unlike the Blitz kids
of the early Eighties.
“The whole club kid thing is definitely back,” says Mark Wood of the Readers
Wifes, the resident DJs at Duckie. “Suddenly you’re seeing these
larger-than-life characters who live their lives around clubs and maybe
cross over into music. You walk around Hoxton between 7pm on Friday and 7am
on Sunday and you’d swear you were walking past the Blitz or the Wag 25
years ago.”
“There’s a very creative energy in the clubs again,” confirms the DJ Tasty
Tim. “You’d think that someone like me, who’s been clubbing and DJing since
1980, would be very ‘seen it, done it, made the T-shirt’. But I still
get a kick out of seeing someone wearing a handbag on their head, or a
laundry bag as a dress.”
For fellow Eighties icon and DJ Princess Julia, “the whole dressing-up thing
never really went away. More people are referencing the Eighties, both
visually and musically. But not in a literal way: it’s Eighties with a
twist”.
Julia also co-publishes the music fanzine The P.i.X, and is optimistic about
the state of British pop. “There’s a lot of exciting bands coming through,
people like Neils Children, These New Puritans, Ali Love, Electricity in our
Homes – people with good songs and strong ideas about how they want to look,
which is very Eighties.”
The same could be said of the Readers Wifes, who’ve recently graduated from
the DJ box to the recording studio. Their album, Gaslight, features the
crunchy synthesizer sound of the Human League, and their single Nostalgia was
produced by the former Banshee Steve Severin. Musically, at least, it seems
we really have gone back to the future.
“I DJed at my 16-year-old niece’s birthday party the other day,” says Mark
Wood, “and almost all the music they requested was Eighties. It was the same
stuff I was listening to when I was at school – ABC, Eurythymics, Soft Cell,
Depeche Mode, Dead Or Alive. People literally just can’t get enough.”
That’ll be music to the ears of Brad Snelling. And a challenge to the club
kids to make music we’ll still be listening to in another 25 years.
° Retrofest is at Culzean Castle, Ayrshire on Sept 1-2. www.retrofest.co.uk.
Gaslight, by the Readers Wifes, will be available for download on Sept 10.
The novel Lovers & Losers by Paul Burston is published by Sphere
