When Bucks Fizz sang New Beginning in 1986 it seemed to signal a bright new dawn. Mike Nolan had come through a near-death tour-bus crash, Jay Aston was out, Shelley Preston was in and Cheryl Baker still had a lustrous head of hair. Sadly it was to be their last hit. Yet the world turned and life went on.

But did people really move on? This week it was announced that from December you will be able to enjoy the decade of excess to absolute excess with an online and digital radio station dedicated purely to the 1980s; Absolute 80s, which will exclusively play pop bands such as the Human League, Bon Jovi, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Duran Duran and, with a bit of luck, Bucks Fizz.

Clive Dickens, the chief operating officer of Absolute Radio, believes that he has spotted a gap in the market for nostalgia-seeking 30 to 54-year-olds. He refers to the untapped demographic as “reluctant adults”, summoning up images of someone trapped in their 1980s teens, like Miss Havisham in Molly Ringwald’s prom dress.

“A huge chunk of our audience grew up in the 1980s and want to stay in touch with their fun-loving youth,” Dickens explains. “These are people who have responsibilities but still want to participate and have fun and be involved in music.”

You might imagine that it would be easier to participate and stay in touch with your youth by sticking on some Biffy Clyro and playing the air guitar with a frying pan. Do we really need more 1980s nostalgia on our radios? And, more pertinently, why do people want to limit their musical enjoyment to the tracks of their teens? Our generation often accused their parents of living in the past, while they banged on about the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that we are now expected to become them is enough to send us flocking to download the entire back catalogue of Tinchy Stryder.

Apart from being quite sad, limiting music to one decade is ridiculously arbitrary. If it’s the 1980s to which you’re restricting yourself, Blondie is in: but expect The Tide is High and Call Me, not Heart of Glass, Denis or the sublime Dreaming, which came four months too early to qualify as 1980s — sorry.

People don’t subcategorise music into decades. How often do you think, “I’d love to hear something from 1996”? Probably not very, because our brains are more in tune with types of things than dates of things. A synth-pop station would be worth listening to, but saying you can listen to Eurythmics but not the Tourists or Annie Lennox is silly.

If they construct their playlist thoughtfully, this station could become something special to dip into, especially if it encourages us to discover “new old music”, the lesser-known 1980s classics. Who wouldn’t want to tune in to a Pat Benatar Day or five hours of Five Star — obviously with some Debarge and Miami Sound Machine thrown in to shake up the pace?

There’s already a radio station doing a fine job of bringing us golden oldies. If you had flicked on Radio Two this week around 3pm, you would have heard Steve Wright — something of a 1980s institution himself — playing Fascination by the Human League, Roadblock by Stock Aitken and Waterman, Hazell Dean with Whatever I Do, Wherever I Go, Turn It On Again by Genesis, and Tanita Tikaram’s enigmatic perma-riddle Twist in my Sobriety, with odds and sods from the current chart thrown in for good measure.

The fear is that Absolute 80s will concentrate on the greatest hits of the biggest players, terrified that if you tune in and they’re blasting out Amazulu you’ll tune straight back out. Lowest common denominator play-listing already exists on stations such as Heart and Magic that also play a lot of 1980s music. Songs you never need hear again because they’re indelibly imprinted as the soundtrack to your first fumble and last outbreak of acne. Take on Me by a-ha, Careless Whisper by George Michael and Red Red Wine by UB40 all cropped up predictably during the same period on Magic.

By all means celebrate the 1980s, but life should be about variety, and what gives you goosebumps. For every Go-Gos there should be a Lady GaGa and for every Passions a Passion Pit. But of course there is and will only ever be, one Bucks Fizz.

Absolute 80s begins broadcasting online and on the London DAB slot occupied by Absolute Xtreme in early December

Editor's choice

• Alicia Keys lets rip
• Streep and Baldwin get complicated
• Guy Ritchie on Sherlock Holmes