Life In Vinyl 1985 – Vol. 2
After a bit of a delay (more on that shortly) we hit the second half of 1985 in A Life in Vinyl. This seems a good opportunity to commend to you the Chart Music podcasts, one of which dealt with an episode of Top of the Pops in 1985. Produced by Al Needham, the erstwhile Nottingham’s Mr Sex with whom I collaborated on this thing some eight years ago, the podcasts have the host discuss with two guests in forensic and often very funny detail an old episode of the BBC show Top of the Pops. The guests typically are alumni of the now defunct Melody Maker, such as David Stubbs, Simon Price, Sarah Bee, Taylor Parkes (who can get a bit tedious with his snarkiness) or Neil Kulkarni. For those interested in British music and culture in the ’70s and ’80s, these podcasts are a treasure. For all other Pop-Crazed Youngsters, they are great fun.
And while I’m plugging sites, I might also mention the repository of old Smash Hits magazines set up by Brian McCloskey on Like Punk Never Happened, and my own side project, Bravoposters, wherein each day one or two posters, title pages, charts or ads that appeared in the German teen magazine Bravo from the 1950s to early 1980s are featured.
And so to the second half of 1985, about which I had written an extensive retrospective. Had I written it in 1985, I might still have it on paper. But I wrote it on a computer and saved it to an external hard-drive. You can guess the rest of my sorry tale. I believe I might have used the words “Oh fucking golly gosh” once to express my sentiments about having lost this and other bits of writing.
The first part of 1985 in A Life In Vinyl took us up to August. The dividing point of my year was not Live Aid but getting a new job in Chelsea, London, in September. My place of work was only three minutes’ walk from King’s Road, and not far from Kensington Market, so there were lots of interesting shops in which to browse. While my fashion sense bordered on the daring — few people could pull off my sartorial combination of Indie melancholy and Duran Duran coked-up what-the-fuck-are-you-thinking-of pastels. I was Morrissey Le Bon.
It was at that time that a flatmate invited me to join him and some friends for a night out at a nightclub called Heaven. As we were leaving to drive to Heaven, two rather gorgeous women joined me on either side in the backseat of the car. Momentarily I thought my luck was in — until they uttered their greetings, in quite unladylike voices. At that point I realised that Heaven was a gay club.
As we walked down Charing Cross to get to the club I was feeling a little apprehensive, as if a reporter of The Sun might be jumping out from the shadows to photograph me for a story headlined “Straight boy attends gay club”. Turned out, I loved the place. I loved that I felt no pressure to evade the fate of Morrissey, one I was familiar with, in How Soon Is Now — “So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home and you cry and you want to die”. Liberated from that pressure, I enjoyed myself more than I did at any other club. And when a very shy Asian guy offered to buy me a drink, I politely declined but felt an elation that somebody actually found me attractive. For an insecure, introverted 19-year-old, that was a big thing.
At that time I also managed to smuggle a group of us into the exclusive Stringfellow’s club a few times by asking the bouncers if Mr So-and-so from the embassy of this-or-that country had arrived yet. No? Well, we better get in to wait for him. The 1980s were a simpler time.
I loved that second part of 1985; it was one of those rare times when everything felt good and warm. For that reason, all of the songs featured here, and many more, evoke that fuzzy feeling I had at the time when I hear them now. What a pity then that not all of the songs of that time that conjure these sentiments were very good. Feargal Sharkey’s A Good Heart or — oh, the humanity — Red Box’s Lean On Me (Ah Li Ayo) are two examples of that. I won’t force those on you, though there are a couple of songs on this mix which I would not necessarily endorse as a critical blogger of music. Still, when I hear Midge Ure’s If I Was, I’m back in my North London room, feeling good about the world. Artistic merit? Unimportant.
As always, CD-R length, home-sentimentalised covers, PW in comments
1. Madness – Yesterday’s Men
2. The Smiths – The Boy With The Thorn In His Side
3. The Cure – Close To Me
4. Cameo – Single Life
5. Hipsway – Ask The Lord
6. Simple Minds – Alive And Kicking
7. Midge Ure – If I Was
8. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions – Lost Weekend
9. The Jesus & Mary Chain – Just Like Honey
10. New Order – Subculture
11. The Waterboys – The Whole Of The Moon
12. Talking Heads – Road To Nowhere
13. Grace Jones – Slave To The Rhythm
14. Dee C. Lee – See The Day
15. A-ha – Take On Me
16. Wham! – I”m Your Man
17. Fine Young Cannibals – Blue
18. Latin Quarter – No Rope As Long As Time
19. Isley Jasper Isley – Caravan Of Love
PW = amdwhah