The Eighties Danny Baker's Rockin' Decades

Friends, New Romantics, countrymen, lend me your years. Ha!

Your '80s to be precise, because tonight I and three equally deluded

time travellers seem to have landed in that tumultuous decade.

What did it sound like?

At the '70s end, punk had turned rock upside-down,

proclaiming musically nothing mattered - anything goes,

and get rid of all things that are boring.

To which the 1980s immediately said,

"Oh, good idea. We'll get rid of you for a start!"

MUSIC: "Blue Monday" by New Order

So, the 1980s, superficially recalled

as the superficial decade of British rock.

A jumbled, hazy fantasia of stadium rock, MTV and giant shoulder pads,

dwarfed only by the sound of even bigger drums.

Are these verities or balderdash?

Is this the decade when British rock's movers and tambourine shakers

decided to sell out?

When rock fans splintered into tribes and guitarists fought

synthesiser play-offs in back alleyways, Ron Burgundy style?

To roast these old chestnuts are three chin-stroking scrutineers

who were actually there.

The music presenter turned publisher, who seemed to oversee

every British music magazine in the 1980s.

The actor, DJ, writer and all-in-one hilarious hyphenate.

And, lastly, the fedora-flaunting ska-monger from Two Tone's finest,

The Selecter.

Over there, a man whose inky fingers have been all over

printed pop culture and televised, this last, what, hundred years now?

Not only that, as an added bonus, if you squint,

he looks like a cross between Paul McCartney and Derek Nimmo.

-That's Mark Ellen, by the way.

-Very flattered.

Over there, a genuine, bona fide, blossoming pop star

who first in the '80s walked through this garden we're discussing tonight

and is still seeding that very same turf in a powerful way,

it's Pauline Black.

And right here, well, man alive,

everybody under the age of 60 will instantly recognise

one of the great broadcasters of the modern age,

a tremendous writer, a true child of the '80s,

which probably means he'll be 24, 25 next week, something like that?

-Nearly 30.

-Adam Buxton.

The question I'm going to put to you, we've previously asked people the first LP they ever bought,

but we're in the '80s now - brand new technology.

Erm, here's something, the first time you heard a Walkman?

Do you remember seeing that and thinking, "What is this? How can this possibly be?"

-Did you have a Walkman early on?

-I did have a Walkman.

-In the Smash Hits office, actually...

-Which of course...

-Where I worked.

David Hepworth had interviewed Stewart Copeland of The Police.

Stewart Copeland had brought one of the gadgets back from Japan.

It seemed completely magical, the idea you could go on the Tube,

underground or anywhere, and listen to the record you wanted to hear.

It was revolutionary.

It really was. I know it sounds like old soldiers talking.

I saw one, Paul Morley in the NME came in one day.

"Listen to that." And I was...

"Golly! Here we are, Metropolis!"

Pauline, did you get in early on the music on the move thing?

Yeah, I had a tape Walkman. It was a really nice, little oblong thing,

-and Chrysalis Records bought them for everyone in the band.

-Did they?

Yeah, that was the nicest thing they did. They weren't quite so nice the following year.

Them were the days, when record companies said, "Have stuff."

But I remember, I think the first thing I ever listened to on it was

-probably Yoko Ono's Walking On Thin Ice.

-Was it?!

-I got the little grey...

-Did it not explode?

Oh, come on!

Only the bit when she got to the vomiting.

-LAUGHTER

-Adam, how about you?

Did you...you took them for granted, I suspect, Walkmans, did you?

No, no. It was a big deal when I got the first one.

I saved up to get an incredibly slimline one

that was really no bigger than the actual cassette, you know?

It was almost as if there was a bit of metal

that slid on to the cassette and that was it.

The first thing I listened to was Hunky Dory by Bowie.

Listening to Quicksand, the bit where it breaks down

and there's guitars popping left and right,

it was unbelievable and, yeah, I couldn't get over it.

It really was an extraordinary break through.

I think more than many of the things we are going to discuss tonight.

The '70s had been merely a palate cleanser for what was to come.

Punk had set the stage.

Sadly, the '80s generation looked at this stage and said,

"Bit dreary, innit?"

The 1980s.

Yeah, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times,

and you can chose which of these images make that work for you.

Your basic rock music had had a new lick of war paint

and, if anything, was more popular and preposterous than ever.

And one imaginary, although thoroughly authentic band,

highlighted rock's contemporary, predictable predicament.

Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number

and make that a little louder?

These go to eleven.

Following the genius of Spinal Tap, it became difficult

to take the antics of rock's old guard quite so seriously.

The decade was often brash

and happily once more pushed the boundaries of good taste.

# Sex dwarf. #

It was nothing if not, erm, bold.

# Wild, go wild Go wild in the country... #

Here was a new generation, with their super cheap synthesisers

inspired by imported sounds that would have baffled Nigel Tufnel.

Behold, John Foxx singing Underpass.

# Underpass. #

Though, of course, everybody called it Underpants.

# Underpass. #

These new pantalooned harlequins scoffed at sweaty bedenimed rockers

and their old-fashioned ways.

Some musicians, like Heaven 17, knew that gigs were all over.

The way forward - business meetings.

Rock was fracturing to create exciting new possibilities.

Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders forged a perfect singles sound.

# Make you, make you notice. #

The Specials punked up ska and politicised pop.

# You've done too much Much too young. #

And these three blokes made the whole planet a Police state.

# Don't stand so close to me. #

New Order, who, despite themselves, helped inspire an indie explosion.

To be young and rocking Croc's disco in Rayleigh in the early '80s

was to be where it's happening. Look, I'm happening here.

Since the beginning of the year, Saturday night has been Glamour Club night

and Depeche Mode have appeared here regularly.

So has Albert. He's the crocodile.

Even I was trying to join in

but suddenly all my knowledge about the 1970s wasn't much use.

# I just can't get enough. #

How did you realise that there was something else going on?

Well, I think I realised most when...

duos where the thing that really struck me.

It was interesting because I was a teenager in the '70s

so I was used to rock and roll bands and duos arrived.

It was Soft Cell, OMD, Eurythmics, Yazoo.

And duos had dumped the cumbersome paraphernalia of the 1970s

like a rhythm section, like old amps and Marshall stacks and stuff,

and the studio had become the instrument.

And that struck me as fascinating.

I can remember a conversation in Smash Hits, talking about the groups

that we'd grown up with and what if they came out now?

The Beatles, would they just be Lennon and McCartney? Johnny and the Moondog?

Would The Stones just be called The Glimmer Twins, just Keith and Mick?

The Kinks would be The Davies Brothers. You didn't need...

It was very interesting,

these mobile light units of just synthesisers.

Did you ease into the 1980s or were you a bit unnerved, Pauline,

by thinking, "This seems like a brave new world. Anything goes now."

In terms...the '80s is all about everything getting bigger,

but there was a recession going on at that time

and I always thought that record companies had basically got bored

with there being seven people in a band and all the infighting,

and when technology came along and you had a nice synthesiser,

two people, you'd halved your budget, more than halved your budget

in terms of tour support, getting them out there, doing those things.

And you only had two people to grumble at each other.

That was easily kind of sorted out.

And I think also, all of a sudden,

pop stars, the world was full of pop stars,

said, "Want us to smile and wear a suit for that camera?" "Yeah!"

That was nice and malleable as well.

Adam, the 1980s, did you feel of a peace with it?

I was born into it, so...

Well, I was obviously born earlier than the '80s, I was born in '69,

so when the '80s rolled around and I started getting interested

in music properly, I was, you know, 11 or 12, so...

Who would that have been?

I was most excited by people who I thought maybe were robots

or from space or the future - Gary Numan

and Depeche Mode.

You know, I remember listening to New Life and just thinking,

"This is amazing! This is the best thing I've ever heard."

It doesn't sound like any of the stuff with guitars and drums,

this is just a whole different musical palette that I really love.

So how did you view your elder brother's or other people's

record collections that had these hairy old bands in or lone folkies?

Yeah, boring.

I mean, I was the eldest child,

so I was the trailblazer musically in my family,

but other stuff that I heard, like friends of mine who did have

older brothers and were bringing in tapes of, erm, The Beatles

or whoever it happened to be, at that point I thought,

this is a bit boring and this is the kind of stuff my parents might listen to.

Bowie was the only one that cut through that.

-No Deep Purple? No Zeppelin?

-No, there was no rock.

I never really had a way into any of that so when all the big rock bands

started doing well in the '80s,

erm, whether it was, I mean, Iron Maiden,

-a lot of Iron Maiden fans were friends of mine.

-Huge.

But, no, I couldn't get to grips with that at all.

That's the thing people are still uncomfortable with, because people like to cherry-pick

but the real big world-beaters and global was this new wave

of British heavy metal thing, which we'll hear about,

and those groups like Iron Maiden, who did not want the '70s to end.

The '80s more than any other decade put the accent on style.

An accent so thick at times that nobody was quite sure what it was saying, but it didn't matter.

Individuality was paramount. Find yourself a unique look and a sound

and then join thousands of others exactly the same. Rock went tribal.

In the 1980s, it was fantastically important once again

that a pop-picker choose a tribe and stick with it.

Some of these tribes were revivals of scenes

that had thrived in previous decades,

like skinhead, mods and even punk wasn't dead.

Well, not as dead as, say, music hall.

A jump jiving return of 1950s rockabilly stylings

brought us all The Hepcats, The Stray Cats...

..The Polecats...

..and even that shakin' cat, Stevens.

# You ought to see my baby in a hot dog stand... #

At the start of the decade, the thriving ska and two tone scenes

combined searching social commentary...

# Stand down, Margaret Stand down, please

# Stand down, Margaret... #

..with a spectacular dance floor bounce.

# Three minute hero (I wanna be)

# Three minute hero... #

While heavy metal, that stinking, sweaty, swaggering stalwart

had a huge rebirth.

I despise the term heavy metal.

He despises his T-shirt, too.

The new wave of British heavy metal,

or NWOBHM if you want to be unwieldy,

brought in an influential new guard of hard rockers,

including a revitalised Iron Maiden,

an incandescent Def Leppard

and, of course, Dumpy's Rusty Nuts.

From the remains of London's punk scene emerged both the New Romantics

and, slightly later, their pale cousins, the early Goths,

pioneered by acts like Alien Sex Fiend and Specimen.

# With your back in the sack And your leather anorak

# Do you feel dark? #

These dapper darlings fused glam's ostentation

with a rather tongue-in-cheek morbidity.

# Hey, now, hey, now, now

# Sing this corrosion to me... #

They created a style of music and fashion

which was to become one of '80s rock's most enduring.

Lighten up, kids. You're on telly.

But, as ever, pop tribes weren't just about worshipping rock heroes,

they were about sharing your music with your mates.

Pauline, someone ensconced right in the middle

of one of the most powerful of all the youth tribes at that time,

the whole ska movement and two tone, how did you tumble into that

and why did you want that, why did you cling on to that?

I think that I was attracted, obviously, to the two tone movement

by the fact that it was, if you like, it was against racism,

it was against sexism, that was the whole ethos...

-It was a lot of fun as well.

-..and it was a lot of fun, yes.

And you got to dress up.

I had always really liked hats, as you can tell.

You wear it quite well. You do wear it very well.

It was one of those things where you went out and you did the gigs

and everybody was there.

There were mods there, there were old rockers there, punks.

Had you always, like the punks said, "I want to be in a band

"and this is my opportunity?" Had you always wanted to be in a band?

No, I was a radiographer taking X-rays and stuff like that.

I'd... The most I'd wanted to do was sing songs and play guitar.

And then I just fetched up in this band.

I was headhunted, I think, by Lynval Golding out of The Specials.

He said, "I know the geezer who's trying to get a band together.

"The B-side on our record, Gangsters, and stuff like that."

So I turned up and I think I was wearing pink spandex at that time

and then metamorphosed into something like this a week later.

And did you mix and mingle with other people

who were into other things?

-Did you knock around with any of the heavy metal...?

-Yeah!

Oh, heavy metal? No, never. I hate heavy metal.

I hate heavy metal with a passion.

We should call this show I Hate The '80s.

-It was a big heavy metal decade, of course.

-As far as I was concerned

and the people that I knew, heavy metal didn't exist.

That existed somewhere else in some white male,

kind of, long-haired situation.

Erm, I hung out with people who were a little bit more gregarious,

with people who might be into reggae and things like that.

And, erm, also was acquainted with punk.

-Erm, or any of the other genres.

-Sure.

Black music at that time, that was the crossover

and that was the good thing about the two tone movement.

It made that crossover, it made that synthesis between white kids

who were into punk and a bit of rock maybe, or whatever,

and black kids who were into reggae

and wanted something a bit more danceable.

Adam, what about you? Did you ever belong?

Are there photographs of you saying, "It's a necessary phase for me to go through.

-"There I am, I'm a Goth."

-Not really.

-THEY LAUGH

-No, I never really belonged.

I got into Talking Heads and saw Stop Making Sense

and convinced myself that if I wore one of my dad's oversized suits

and did my top button up, I would be like David Byrne.

Then I thought, "I should go further with this

"cos this look is really going some exciting places now.

"So I love punk music so I should..."

-What I did was get a string of safety pins.

-Did you?

And I pinned them from one shoulder to the other,

as if I was a kind of decorated army guy from the punk wars.

Commissar. And where did you go?

Did you find anyone else who was like that?

No, not really. My friends laughed at me...

It is a lone club, isn't it?

They gently sort of took the piss and I found out years later

that I was a figure of ridicule amongst them.

-You were searching for something, that's the main thing.

-Yeah.

Yeah. The make-up thing I certainly was attracted to,

but not in a massive way because it would be too embarrassing.

I'm very middle-class. That's my background.

And my parents would have gone mental but I sort of subtly...

before I went out, I would grab some of my mother's make-up

and do a bit of eyeliner,

put some make-up on my lips to make them all white

-as if I was a kind of sexy corpse.

-What was your hair like?

The hair has always been a problem and I was too embarrassed

to make any proper statements so all it was was a sort of wedge.

And did this marry up with any one particular type of music?

Was there something you thought, "I'm dedicated to that"?

No, I was kind of cherry-picking from all over the place

cos I loved... You know, tunes is where it was at, right? Pop music.

I loved all the ska and two tone because that was tune central.

-Loved Bowie.

-Were you a snob, though?

And I mean that in a good way.

Did you like, for instance, Duran Duran and Adam Ant?

Yeah, absolutely.

I was wary of Duran Duran because there was too much...

There was a huge amount of social pressure not to like them

cos that was girl music and if you like that then you were a girl

or you liked girls and at 11 that was not an option.

But I loved Bowie enough to think,

"Well, it's OK to embrace all these different kinds of music."

Mark, as an older fellow, and we are peers...

No, that's fine.

How did you adapt to that?

Just listening to Adam and Pauline it made me feel very envious

and I remember feeling envious at the time because when I was a kid,

the tribes, broadly,

were people who liked rock music and those who didn't, in a way.

And within rock music

I suppose there was a soul tribe and then there was the glam tribe

and then the American rock fans.

So that was denim jacket versus a bit of eyeliner.

But I remember in the '80s when I was, again, at Smash Hits,

and we used to look across out of the window down Carnaby Street,

directly under the window where we used to work at the NME

was a shop called Cascade and they sold - this would have been '82 -

and they sold skinny mod ties and shiny suits,

they sold mohair jumpers and Sid and Nancy posters.

They sold New Romantic throws and pixie boots.

But this is telling because, again, you're seeing for the first time,

even though you could always buy Ben Sherman or whatever it is

and you could find your stuff, it was starting to get catered for.

Completely. And that was a look.

And I used to watch teenagers going into this shop

and they would come out an hour later and they would either be

Steve Strange of Visage or Brian Setzer of Stray Cats or something.

And they had those various options and I remember thinking that being very, very exciting.

Obviously, I wasn't the generation to be in those particular tribes

but it became very fascinating and Smash Hits readers would write to us,

particularly the Goths, and I could really understand it.

Because Goth was about feeling alienated, feeling misunderstood.

The scattered building bricks tossed about by the punks

in the late '70s were suddenly gathered together

to create the '80s indie movement,

a burgeoning cottage industry that in its own charming,

homespun way, seemed to have no desire to rule the world,

just to make some simple, honest music in its own time and style.

Yeah, crafty.

The '80s was the decade had give us a fresh kind of musical maverick.

This was the indie boom.

In 1983, Manchester independent label Factory Records

released the biggest selling 12 inch single of all time.

New Order's Blue Monday.

Here was the UK independent record label making a global impact.

Inspired by their DIY ethic inherited from punk...

It really is almost like a folk industry.

..labels like Creation, 4AD, Postcard and Rough Trade

carved out a new market for their idiosyncratic turns.

The indie boom brought with it a whole bunch of bands from towns

and cities around the country,

unapologetically proud of their regional roots.

These acts came from Liverpool,

from Glasgow and from that hitherto untapped hotbed of avant-garde,

Cardigan, West Wales.

# Coginio mewn saim... #

1984 saw the release of the first album by The Smiths.

# Would you like to marry me

# And if you like you can buy the ring... #

These were the days when Stephen Morrissey actually turned up for things.

Above all, The Smiths proved that the indie rock star could

incite as much feverish devotion as any uber produced pop moppet.

The fact that indie really was just a music biz distribution term

meant that some unlikely acts crept into the so-called indie charts,

many put there by aggressive pop pedlar Pete Waterman.

Still, in the emerging indie genre,

twee jangle pop was in generous supply.

Others took a more robust approach to alternative rocking.

East Kilbride's finest The Jesus And Mary Chain

even managed to spark an actual audience riot

at the notorious North London Poly gig.

By the late '80s, indie had left the solitary bedrooms

of shambling music fans and was heading out onto the dance floor...

# Pump up the volume... #

..where it was met by an even newer wave of pop rebels,

the emergent acid house scene, who carried DIY into a new decade.

-Are you feeling more at home, Adam?

-No.

That's just like a whole list of scenes that I felt excluded from.

Really?

No, towards the end certainly,

when things started getting ravey I was totally disenfranchised.

I can imagine. I was.

Because it was so much about the drugs

and I was too frightened to do any of that.

I mean, before then,

when it was the janglier side of things, the indie movement,

I was certainly on board for Orange Juice

and that kind of slightly fey pop thing.

How about something like The Fall, who I didn't consider it...

-Too frightening.

-Really?

The Fall was something I got into later on when I was at college and

then sort of mined retrospectively thereafter and, you know, loved.

But at that point, too frightening

because I felt like they probably would hate me.

You used a collective term then.

I think you mean "he" would probably have hated you.

He would hate me but probably Morrissey would hate me,

probably anyone from the North would hate me

because I was this little middle-class Southerner

so it was too scary whereas Edwyn Collins looked as if

maybe he would hold my hand and...

Let me go onto middle ground. Julian Cope.

Yeah, well, you couldn't deny the tune power.

-Magnificent.

-Reward, when that came out,

that sort of blew my mind cos it was so sort of exciting and epic.

And, of course, one of the great opening lines of all pop history,

-"Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news."

-Yeah!

Pauline, and on one of the most famous of all indie labels,

when you are recording and working within 2 Tone,

did you feel they were going places, that this is where you wanted to be?

Did it feel any different from subsequent experiences you've had?

It had a wonderful identity because of the Walt Jabsco, you know,

the little cartoon figure that there was

and the whole black and white thing.

It was simple and it was out there and we were doing it

and it all had little numbers.

-The first one was stamped, you know.

-Yeah.

The Specials versus The Selector,

just like old sort of things from Jamaica

at that time with the sound systems.

So it wasn't new for us

when people started coming along and doing this indie stuff.

-It was like, "Yeah, OK."

-And yet you were part of Chrysalis.

Chrysalis owned that label, as such,

and gave us the money to be able to go away and do things

and also we were regional.

We were from Coventry and who else had heard...

What did Coventry have before? Frank Ifield!

-THEY LAUGH

-Is Frank from Coventry?

Yeah, Frank is from Coventry. No, I mean, my mum loved Frank.

I mean, I'm not putting Frank down.

If EMI had come in with a great big fat cheque,

would you have jumped ship?

Erm, things like that did kind of happen, maybe not with EMI,

and we really were that dumb.

We thought, "Oh, no. It's great." You know, "Our independence."

And then along came Spandau Ballet...

-You know, I remember sitting...

-You spat that out!

I remember sitting in the offices of Chrysalis. I know!

It did sound a bit bitchy, didn't it?

I remember sitting and we were there more or less begging for an advance

cos we needed to do another album and stuff like this, as you do.

In the A&R department and the head of A&R at the time, Roy Aldridge,

picked up, ceremoniously,

this kind of single or something and put it on.

I think it was To Cut A Long Story Short or something like that

and said, "This is the future of pop." Really, that pompously.

The '80s was all about being pompous, just like old Maggie,

-do you know what I mean? Being pompous.

-There was a lot of that.

And people in the Chrysalis record company went,

overnight, from wearing black and white and rude boy hats

and all this kind of thing to wearing scarves, kind of...

And kilts and we just thought, "It's all over now!"

And it's almost as if the record companies are fickle and disloyal.

I don't know if I'm getting the wrong message.

No, it's just they're selling baked beans and if you can make

money off that can of baked beans we'll make money off that can. Thank you, goodbye.

The upside for you, of dealing with all of this indie stuff,

it's everywhere from Nottingham, from Devon.

Yeah, I've got a real fondness for it.

Firstly, it meant that you travelled.

I remember going to Liverpool pretty much virtually every day of the week.

You'd go on Monday and it would be Teardrop Explodes,

on Tuesday you'd be interviewing the Bunnymen and Wednesday with Wah! Heat

and Thursday, Big In Japan and then suddenly we would switch to Sheffield

and it was ABC and Human League.

Why weren't these bands getting on trains to London all of a sudden?

Because the journalists wanted to go and interview them on home turf.

That was half the excitement of it, was that Liverpool was back.

I remember that being very exciting and I also that London...

it was very humbling for London.

London had been the...particularly with the New Romantic thing,

that happened in Covent Garden clubs and suddenly it was on the back foot.

The other thing I remember about indie

was the wonderful home-made artefacts.

The actually physical sleeves of these records.

I had stood in for a while and was working briefly on Radio One

for John Peel and how analogue is this?

I used to go on a bicycle in 1982 and I would cycle

down to Rough Trade records in Notting Hill.

I'd buy records because half these people didn't have distributors.

There wasn't a plugger giving you stuff for free

and I would cycle back and play, you know,

Helen And The Horns or somebody on some little thing.

And somebody had sat in a kitchen in Petersfield

and they had hand coloured this sleeve

and I would go on the Peel show,

which had a 2.2 million audience in stereo across northern Europe,

and play these records, which by definition,

because they were indie, were actually riotously and proudly mono.

And I love that idea.

I remember thinking it was very wilful and very right

that these regional...all over from Scotland and Northern Ireland,

everywhere, would say to the record industry,

"We're not coming to you. You are coming to us."

-There was a definite feeling of that.

-Very much so.

So, in recalling the '80s it's heavy on style, light on substance.

In spite of its fascination with the new, it was actually quite retro.

Rockabilly, glam, plastic soul souped up heavy metal,

jangly punk pop. Modish, faddish.

Where was that one innovation that would lift a whole generation

into a brave new world?

Here is a clue - you're watching it now.

The 1980s, the pop video. The pop video, the 1980s.

The two phrases really are synonymous.

In '81, MTV launched with this frankly underwhelming video

but could they have possibly known

how soon its prophecy was going to be fulfilled?

# Video killed the radio star

# Video killed... #

This new phenomenon soon had rock fans chanting, "I want my MTV!"

Sort of.

Initially American artists lagged behind us

in choreography and face painting

and so it fell to the visually savvy Brits to lead the charge.

The generation of largely synthesiser-driven acts

who'd enjoyed success in the UK in the early '80s...

# Gold! Always believe in your soul... #

..were suddenly catapulted into millions of American homes,

making international stars

of an unlikely roster of overdressed limeys.

Almost two decades on from the first British invasion,

Uncle Sam was falling for our pop kids all over again.

Rock's old guard soon unhappily tried to muscle in on the new act.

# I wanna take you to Bermuda, Bahama Come on, pretty mamma... #

Yeah, this sort of works.

But things went spectacularly wrong

when the strict Teutonic stylings of the young bucks...

# And I wonder what I'm doing in a room like this... #

..were 'alf inched by the try too hard rockers of the old wave.

# We're all clones

# All are one and one are all All are one and one are all... #

Alice, you're a long way from your snake.

Of course, this proud British ascendancy couldn't last forever.

Our cousins over the pond soon cottoned on and started turning out

videos that made ours look cheap, cheerful and underfunded.

SHE SCREAMS

But they shouldn't take away that for a brief, shining moment

a lad from Sheffield with a half cut haircut

could count himself a genuine US star.

It's unlikely such a glorious moment for the massed ranks

of British pop will never come again.

Corporate control has the last laugh.

Now come on, Mr Alienation. That's a lot of fun, that looks.

-Do you recall it suddenly being there, MTV?

-Yeah.

MTV, it took me a while before I saw MTV proper but the music videos,

obviously, they were the most exciting part of Top Of The Pops.

The video for Vienna, which was amazing, from Ultravox.

Do you know Midge Ure, I was talking to him once

and he said when they made Vienna they wanted to do it themselves

and they spoke to a director and he said,

"If you can give me a storyboard I'll see what I can do."

And he had no idea what that was but in the style of the '80s

he said, "Storyboard, yeah, I'll get you a storyboard."

And he went to Ryman's and asked for one!

He really did! He said, "Have you got a storyboard?"

And he told it years ago.

He said...honestly, I know it sounds like a lie

but he just went and asked for it.

-And that was on, it seemed like, for months.

-Yeah.

-I would be sat in front.

-HE IMPERSONATES INTRO

THEY LAUGH Very good.

I remember there was a guy who came round to my house and said,

"Your air drumming is amazingly precise!"

-I felt very proud.

-"I put the hours in!"

THEY LAUGH

All those images were mind-blowing to me and then, of course,

the big innovation, as far as I was concerned,

was the video for Sledgehammer

from Aardman Studios, Stephen Johnson, I think, directed that one.

I had never seen anything...

Because, you know, they were so exciting because

you couldn't predict when they were going to be on.

They would just sort of pop-up, pre-VCR.

It was new to see something with a band...and a lot clung to it.

They clung to their instruments and they would just play it to camera.

Were you comfortable with video or will your first allegiance

-always be the live performance?

-Video was strange for us.

I think the first video that we did

had a white background as I recall, and lots of other bits and bobs

but I didn't feel comfortable with it.

The one thing, from what we've just seen,

that I take is that Video Killed The Radio Star.

We were actually on Top Of The Pops with On My Radio when that came out.

And they were right at the end so we'd done our thing

and were thinking, "On My Radio, this is great. Follow that!"

And they did, with that! I mean, they just killed it.

Man! That is an unfortunate billing.

But it was so prophetic, that particular one.

-Because that's exactly what happened.

-Absolutely.

I played a record on the radio once by a group called

Better Than Ezra, an American band, a great single.

The next week I received a letter from a Welsh band called Ezra

saying, "Could you ask this band to stop calling themselves that!"

"My learned friends were in touch."

The thing that really struck me about video was

I felt there was an invisible line drawn in about 1979, 1980,

between the pre-video boom groups and post-video.

Pre-video it was Elvis Costello And The Attractions,

it was The Clash, it was The Jam, it was The Police, The Stranglers.

Those guys got up in the morning

and they went to work like their forefathers had done in the '70s.

They picked up their guitar case and expected to go on stage every night

and convert a load of people.

And after that it was your pals Depeche Mode and U2 and whatever...

Culture Club.

These were people who could reach, via the new network of television,

in three minutes on a video - that often they didn't even appear on, actually -

they could reach more people than those live groups,

groups like yours, had played to or could play to in an entire lifetime.

And that created an extraordinary tension between the two camps

and which, for a musician it would be difficult,

for someone who was observing it like me, it was really interesting.

The other thing I remember is I interviewed Michael Jackson in 1982.

-In fact, you interviewed him, I remember, at the NME.

-Yeah.

And what a fascinating and strange and canny person.

Michael Jackson, I thought of his album Thriller,

which I had an advance cassette of, I thought it was a series of tracks

but he talked about it in a completely visual way.

He talked about it solely as if it was a series of soundtracks to miniature movies.

And his great pal at the time, his phone friend, as he called him,

was Adam Ant, who was a huge deal.

In some ways they were very, very similar.

And big children of the video boom, in fact.

And I asked him what he talked to Adam Ant about and he said

he talked about clothes, dance moves, dressing up, make-up, videos.

The whole thing he saw as a visual experience and that really struck me.

I will always remember Not The Nine O'clock News

did an amazing spoof, Nice Video, Shame About The Song.

Nice Video, Shame About The Song. Brilliant.

It kind of encapsulated the whole thing.

You can still find it on YouTube, I think.

But you could invent different lives as well, like the Vienna thing,

the pomposity and the wonder of standing around in an old raincoat

in Vienna and being all windswept

and stuff like this, or being on a boat. A yacht.

-Then it got all sort of aspirational.

-Duran Duran.

And that was it, the aspirational thing, what to do with my money?

Reflecting the world, what is now an archaic term, but the yuppie thing.

Suddenly rock, which always prided itself on its integrity

and honesty, falsely so, most of the time,

suddenly found itself in a brave new Tory world, one way or another.

And I think that sort of video did reflect that.

The possibilities of the video promised to make pop stars of us all.

Many embraced that while others felt less comfortable

getting their money for nothing and there kicks for free.

Nagged by the thought they were wasting their platform,

these rebels were not long without a cause.

To hear some tell the story,

gullible pups might be forgiven for thinking the '80s

were a nonstop jamboree of stock-market windfalls,

royal nuptials and sun-kissed yachting videos, but in reality,

it was a decade of deep division in Britain

and the rocking fraternity went big on social conscience.

The '80s in rock was a time

when there was a great importance on being earnest.

A time when music wasn't afraid of grooving to big-ish ideas.

# A town called malice... #

Trumpeting your stance and slogan out loud.

# Free Nelson Mandela... #

Indeed, this might well be rock's most right on, or left on, decade,

when Billy Bragg's Red Wedge movement

united bands against Thatcherism while others embraced Maggie.

And such was the force of feeling at the time,

some maintained their position might even have dented their chances in the charts.

# And them rough boys

# They turn on me. #

As skinhead style movements like Oi! took hold,

bands and fans found themselves polarised at different ends

of the political spectrum, causing no small amount of schism, angst even.

At the outbreak of the Falklands War,

the nation's politicised rockers were determined to prove

that there really is such a thing as a listenable protest song.

# That people get killed in

# The result of the ship building. #

This truly was an age when even the most glamorous of popstars

were moved to offer trenchant social criticism.

# War war is stupid

# And people are stupid. #

But this earnest spirit wasn't just reserved to party politics.

The very issues of rock itself would be endlessly debated

in the music press and by fans.

Were you a rockist or a popist?

Best choose a side. Everything depends on it.

# Keep going and stop me now

# Cake. #

It's gone now, the idea of social commentary through pop music,

rock music, whatever way you want to put it.

Some might even say it was an intentional pogrom to get it out

so there was no youth movement any more.

Is that fair to say, it's gone, and do you lament that if it has?

I don't believe it's ever gone.

It's just that it's happening somewhere else and not within the genre.

But not overground and in the charts as mass?

Not overground and in the charts. That's very rare indeed.

In a way, I think that is a real shame myself.

But I think things are cyclic and I think it will come around again.

You've got to remember that all the kids, well, not kids,

but people who are around now who have maybe got the money

to make music and all those kinds of things,

their parents grew up during the '80s.

They grew up during all of those Thatcher years and then beyond.

Then we got Blair and that wasn't much different either, was it?

So you can kind of understand why that has happened.

Do you still work politically

and did you always think you were political?

We were kids of the '60s so we had grown up

during all those great times when students went to college.

You didn't do any studying at all.

You were just having sit-ins and all that kind of thing all the time.

And the civil rights movement.

There were huge, great,

big swathes of political action in America and in Europe.

And then suddenly we had Thatcherism and it was the '80s

and nobody really thought about those things.

That greed is good and suddenly that was the ethos.

Who wanted you around with your sort of political ideas?

But, yes, when all that Red Wedge nonsense was going on and stuff like that,

I thought who wants to be part of the Labour Party?

Who wants to give Kinnock a chance?

All power to them that they tried,

but I really didn't want to go to Number 10 Downing Street.

It fell dreadfully flat.

Adam, do you think it had any business in pop?

Was it cynical itself when people aligned themselves to a big old cause?

Did that interest you at all?

At the time, I didn't know where to start with it

because I was about 13 and a sort of comfortable,

privileged, little middle-class boy.

You didn't wear a Lenin badge though?

No and one of my best pals at the time fancied himself

as a kind of class war guy,

even though he was at the same posh school as me.

It's an old story!

But he loved Billy Bragg and everything

and would pore over all the lyrics.

I think it was partly self-hatred and just thinking,

"Shit, why was I born into this nightmare of privilege,

"when I should be out there with my brothers on the front line?"

And I think it was difficult also because a lot of that music

was very stripped down, Billy Bragg, for example.

So it was quite grown-up sounding music.

I've come to it later in life and understood it and enjoyed it but at the time...

But do you feel that is a duty because it can be a drag?

You don't have to get your politics through pop.

It came as part and parcel of it.

No, because the thing you understand later on, or the thing

I understood later on was the passion in it

was exciting in itself and the fact that it was agitating for an important change or whatever

and I could hear that though in other types of political music like

Bronski Beat that was talking about gay rights and stuff like that.

I responded more to that because that made more sense to me.

-It was more like personal politics.

-Sure.

And Smash Hits, of course, may be seen as the vacuous

vanguard of, let's not look too deeply at all of this,

even though it was sly and in other ways just as a subversive.

Do you think in the end it's down to the music and the tunes

and for every "Free Nelson Mandela" there is a big old crass album,

which isn't easy on the ear?

To some extent. Funnily enough, I remember Elvis Costello

coming into the office of Smash Hits with a copy of "Shipbuilding".

He was so proud of the lyric and felt so strong about it.

He wanted us to write about it, which we did.

But the thing that struck me was the '80s, again very

maligned for being ego obsessed, self-interested, superficial.

I think a lot of that political movement was to do with

the enormous commercial success that was going on.

Records sold in enormous quantities. Vast commercial momentum.

There was room for everybody.

Everybody believed that everything was possible

and therefore that allowed them to believe that from their enormously powerful platform,

selling a lot of records to a lot of people, that music was an agent for change.

Now, we don't need Culture Club telling you that war is stupid and people are stupid, but...

It stopped a lot of wars! To be fair. Five wars.

I don't know. Maybe even more!

I can't take that away from them.

But I still felt that was wonderful that people were engaged.

What actually happened in the 1990s I think was that rap and hip-hop to

some extent became the platform for folk protest and now, I don't know.

While most of the planet saw Live Aid as a magnificent

melding of music's higher ideals and social conscience,

one or two others saw something else.

Huge stadiums full of paying customers.

Gigs would become shows, extravaganzas, events.

A once underground culture began to transform into an unstoppable

production, a true industry, a boom.

# One, two, one, two, three, four. #

Truly, this was the dawn of unashamed inflated bombast.

The successful rockers of the baby-boom generation had now

begun the gentle slide towards middle-age and as they did,

they succumbed to the lure of the high-profile megawatt arena gig.

# Around the world. #

This was a decade in which rock became a little more grown-up,

but not in a good way.

Even the recently infallible made some serious missteps.

# Dancing in the street. #

David. David. Don't, David.

As the decade wore on,

a generation of newly minted adult orientated rockers were

joining the big guns in grooving amidst global aircraft hangars

requesting millions keep their lighters firmly aloft.

# Don't you forget about me. #

Steadily, through the '80s, venues, PAs and events had been growing,

swelling in size to match the egos they served.

And then, in 1985, Live Aid.

Albeit for a higher cause,

this was the pinnacle of rock as a global event.

Though some may question whether the music itself was really much cop.

As the gigs went big, so album sales went even bigger.

# I want to run

# I want to hide. #

U2's The Joshua Tree with its understated Anton Corbijn cover

established the band globally in a distinctly overstated style.

While Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms album

shifted more than 30 million copies worldwide,

many of them in the miraculous new CD format.

Tragically, it also heralded the forerunner of the rock bandanna,

the tennis headband.

# Play the guitar on the MTV. #

The '80s stadium rock boom gave us

global stars adored by millions but also ushered in a corporate

concert model which paved the way for today's festival experience.

In just a couple of decades, rock had gone from being

an underground scene to an overgrown phenomenon.

Unavoidable, enormous, everywhere.

Mark, of course, you were one of the faces of Live Aid

and therefore entirely responsible for it!

My fault, entirely, as a presenter!

Away from of course, it seems even wrong to say it,

but away from what Live Aid was basically about,

do you think it spawned what we now have?

This heritage thing, this extravaganza.

Rock as a show rather than an experience or gig?

Yes. I think it was incredibly influential for a number of reasons.

It was the coincidence actually of Live Aid

and also the invention of the compact disc.

The compact disc made a lot of people who maybe had slightly given up on music in their early 30s,

go back and re-buy the records they bought on vinyl

and listened to them again and became interested in their old heroes and what had happened to those people.

And on the day, 13 July 1985,

a lot of people watching at home with their hot dogs in the garden

and the telly on, they thought firstly that the old guard,

who let's be honest were knackered old pensionable gits of 40!

They were 40! Paul McCartney, The Who, Neil Young, Queen.

They had forgotten about these people.

They saw them on the television and I think they thought they'd given a really good account of themselves.

And I think the new guard, the Style Councils and Sade

and people like that who were on early on in the bill,

you got the illusion watching Live Aid on the television

and seeing them playing to 80,000 people going absolutely mental,

you got the illusion they were much bigger

and more significant than they were, which really helped their careers.

And lastly, I think people looked at that stadium itself with the blue sky above it

and this extraordinary day and a very supercharged event

and they thought, actually, those stadiums look like quite a lot of fun.

And I think it was enormously influential in returning a load of people...

I mean, we now know you can stay interested in music all your life,

but weirdly in the 1980s, people thought maybe this won't last forever.

And now we know it does.

People who thought they had given up went back to live music

and were prepared to drive a car to Wembley Stadium and see who was playing there.

What did that do to a musician? What did you think?

As somebody whose life's blood was in the clubs

and seeing people's eyes and all of a sudden it was enormous.

Did the explosion of pop culture becoming THE culture,

did it have an effect on a working musician?

Do you remember thinking this has gone somewhere else now?

Well, I like to see the whites of people's eyes myself when you are playing.

It kind of gets lost when this noise, this sound,

this huge kind of... I come back again to the word pompous.

It really became pompous at that time because you got to get

to so many tens of thousands of people.

Definitely Live Aid, I thought things had gone somewhere else.

It was that marrying of the use of celebrity and charity

and charity as a business.

It was like nobody actually ever sat down and said,

"Why are these people starving?"

And it's a little bit like saying, yes, we've got a conscience,

yes, there are people starving,

and as long as I give a bit of money every now

and again I can salve my conscience

because there is no way out of this, there is no politics

that is actually trying to fight this at the time.

It seemed like people looked at Live Aid and thought this is good,

if it wasn't for that damn politics involved in it and that is what it became.

What is your take on this, Adam?

For me, the practical consequence was the first Bowie gig that

-I ever went to, sorry to crack on about Bowie again...

-No, please do.

..was the Glass Spider Tour...

-IMPERSONATES DAVID BOWIE:

-..where he erected the giant glass spider in Wembley Stadium.

-I've told you, stop doing the act!

-He can't help it.

And there was a whole choreographed thing with dancers in rags

jumping around on bits of scaffolding.

-IMPERSONATES DAVID BOWIE:

-We're the future. No, we're the future.

LAUGHTER

It was very bad. I mean, it was indefensibly bad.

I have got soft spots for all parts of Bowie's career,

but that one was pretty indefensible.

I wouldn't mind so much if it was this great party atmosphere,

but you are stood amongst dicks and they are just stood there

getting lagered-up and having chats.

So you are just in the middle of a big crowd of dicks

watching a guy with a bad haircut a long way away,

sort of doing bad versions of songs that you really used to like.

Despite that, it was exciting. There's Carlos Alomar! Wow! There's Carlos Alomar!

Why is he no good? Peter Frampton! There's Peter Frampton!

I don't care about Peter Frampton.

You should have been backstage, it was right bitchy back there!

LAUGHTER

All right, we seem to have hammered the political

aspects of the 1980s into the ground so let's have some fun

and see where we take the mere flights of fancy and opinion

and turn them into hard physical facts.

We've asked everybody here to bring both an album

and a piece of memorabilia from the 1980s to put into our

flight case to the future,

so generations may know we weren't just pulling this out of the air.

It did really happen. I'll start with you, Adam. What album have you brought?

I've got Swoon the first album by Prefab Sprout.

Actually, this is something that my comedy wife Joe Cornish got me into.

I can't say enough good stuff about this.

Paddy McAloon refers to it as Sprout Mask Replica

because I think it's an incredibly odd and ambitious album.

Uncategorisable in many ways.

Strange time signatures and almost avant-garde bits of harmony and stuff in there.

It's a magnificent piece and for every bit of frivolity

and surface we've brought to the '80s here, there was

always somebody like Paddy McAloon saying there is still some great musicians out there.

So there is your album. What is your memorabilia?

It is similarly themed.

-It is my ticket to Prefab Sprout, the first gig I ever went to.

-Is it?

Yes, for the Steve McQueen Two Wheels Good tour

and in my insane, nutty diary, I've written in tiny writing

and I've got a review of the gig on the back of the ticket.

A little sketch of the Hammersmith Palais. It was a good gig.

I didn't like this support band.

"Hurrah came on at 8.15pm. They were bollocks."

LAUGHTER

Honestly, that is plenty there.

And by the way, you do realise in high-definition,

people are now reading your diary on a freeze frame!

Beautifully done. Pauline, what have you brought?

I've brought Bow Wow Wow, mainly because...

Not because I think the album is so brilliant musically or whatever,

although I do like it,

but just for the joie de vivre that Annabella brought to it.

Considering she was 14 or 15 at the time, I'm all for bigging up

females in music and particularly one with their own style.

She completely, even at that age, brought her own style to it.

How about your memorabilia?

Memorabilia is a bit of a rare photo, really.

There weren't that many women, as we saw within the VT clips for the '80s.

Here we've got Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry,

Viv Albertine, Siouxsie Sioux,

the late and the great Poly Styrene and yours truly.

All got together and you've got something to do with that

haven't you, I know, for getting us all together.

That is a magnificent photograph and you showed me before the show,

you showed me that and I was stunned I'd never seen it before.

I'd never seen it. I was on the magazine that commissioned that picture,

New Music News, which was an underground rock magazine.

We wanted to get these fantastic girl singers together

and the reason you haven't seen it is because the magazine sold

so few copies!

The overused word, "iconic", really is such a massive...

-What have you brought?

-Actually, at the same time,

when I was at New Music News, the, kind of, house band -

three of the girls in the office went out with members of Doll By Doll.

They were just - I love them, cos they were born at the wrong time.

The timing was so wrong - this was very intense psychedelic rock music

led by a guy called Jackie Leven, who had a soaring, operatic voice.

They were just destroyed by the synthesiser boom.

I found, inside it, the original press release, which is brilliant.

It says, "The album includes talents as diverse as David Gilmour" -

spelt wrong - "of Pink Floyd and Mel Collins of Camel,

"the thinking man's sax player."

So, you know, so John Coltrane was a superficial twerp.

So good work there from Richard Robson Associates.

What's your memorabilia?

My memorabilia is the original presenter's running order of Live Aid,

and on the 11th July, 1985 - two days before the actual event -

we were given the original running order.

I found it in the attic the other day. It's fantastic.

-I'll bet.

-"At 12 o'clock, opening ceremony, fanfare, royal salute,

"national anthem and speech by HRH Prince of Wales."

That didn't happen.

At... He arrived late.

11...13...13:11, we get "Richard Skinner links to Trent Bridge

"for an interview with Bob Willis and Ian Botham."

-No!

-Didn't happen.

-Didn't happen.

-The line went down.

Amazingly, the line went down for that,

but we managed to link into Yugoslavia,

a country called Yugoslavia, and a country called Soviet Union.

My favourite bit is at 21:14,

"David Hepworth, intro to Cat Stevens."

For five minutes, Cat Stevens is meant to be on stage,

followed, bizarrely, "by Madonna OR Rod Stewart."

LAUGHTER

The point I'm making is, you know, how chaotic that event was.

Two days beforehand...

To be fair, Mark, you had us at "running order for Live Aid."

That's beautiful, great thing.

Well, I didn't...

I felt pretty disconnected from a lot that happened in the '80s,

and the groups I saw through it were going before that.

And nothing sums up what happened to old rock music in the '80s

like this peculiar album by a group called Crimson Glory.

I bought it for the cover alone, but I realise it's now

a harbinger for how some people couldn't fit in the 1980s

because these brand-new, thrusting...you know,

"Big-Legged Woman With My Dinner Ready When I Get Home From Mars" heavy metal band,

and they chose to look like that.

If you have a look...

This is how they embraced the New Age.

And this - I'll be as quick as I can about this -

is a thing from one of my old shows that I did

when I got to meet Elvis Costello, after many, many years.

In the meantime, my wife and I had got together

over Good Year For The Roses, his single, and that line -

we were married to other people at the time,

I was in the NME Review Room - it said,

"After three long years of marriage,

"this is the first time that you haven't made the bed,

"The reason we're not talking

"is they're so little left to say that ain't been said."

And she looked at me and went, "Oh, that's a leaf out of my diary."

And I said, "Me, too."

And we looked at each other and I walked towards her and I held her

and said, "What are we going to do?"

That was 33 years ago. We never went home again

and Elvis put on the back of it, in the 1980s,

"To Wendy - don't blame me. Elvis Costello."

I'm sorry to introduce a note of sentiment and, perhaps, emotion

to this wonderful evening we've spent together.

I hope people indoors got something of the flavour

of a perhaps still-not-reinstated age.

-Thank you, Mark Ellen.

-Thank you.

-Thank you, Pauline Black.

-Thank you.

Thank you, Adam Buxton.

I'd just like to say that Hurrah! are probably an excellent band,

if you give them a chance.

LAUGHTER

Well, that's our 1980s -

rock music being superseded by all that technology.

"We can't rewind, we've gone too far.

"Put the blame on VCR."

That's what the song said.

The VHS had vanquished vinyl and there was no going back.

Rock possibly was dead.

Gigging bands, seemingly a thing of the past.

However, this past would have a name - the 1990s.

See you there.

# Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news

# The king sits on his face but it's all assumed

# All wrapped up the same

# All wrapped up the same

# They can't have it

# You can't have it

# I can't have it too

# Until I learn to accept my reward. #