Child Of The 1980’s

For music the 1980’s was a bit of a mixed bag. Whilst the early 1980’s saw a ton of originality from bands such as Culture Club, Duran Duran and Adam and the Ants, the late 1980’s suffered from an explosion of manufactured pop music, most notably the output from “The Hit Factory” team, as they called themselves, of Stock Aitken Waterman. At their height they dominated the UK music industry, churning out songs for the likes of Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Bananarama and the subject of todays post, Rick Astley.

Rick was originally discovered when he was just 19 by Pete Waterman, but he was at first reluctant to leave his current band, FBI.  Eventually he was enticed away, and hit it big in 1987 with his first solo single Never Gonna Give You Up, the song for which he will probably always be best remembered.

His non-threatening good looks and the lyrics for the song itself instantly scooped him a gaggle of adoring teenage girls as fans.  After all, he told them that he was never gonna let them down, lie or say goodbye, and more importantly seemed fairly honest about it at the same time.  Personally I always thought he looked a little bit like the Harry Enfield character Tim Nice-But-Dim, as the accompanying picture I think shows (sorry Rick).  Rick also only seemed to have a single dance routine, called the Rick Astley Shuffle by many, which involved sidling side to side waving your arms up slightly at the extremes of the shuffle.

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Released in 1986, The Chicken Song spent three weeks in the UK number one slot, despite it being one of the most irritating novelty songs ever written. To be fair though, being irritating was always the point of the song as it was intended to be a parody of songs such as Agadoo and Superman, and any of the rest of cringe worthy group Black Lace’s records.

The song was penned by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, the creators of sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, when they were writers for the satirical adult puppet show Spitting Image, which featured rubber charicatures of famous people of the day, the majority of whom were political in nature, although anybody famous was a possible target. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan were two particularly memorable puppets from the show. The song featured in the show initially, but eventually was released as a single where it found success amongst young and old alike.

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Norwegian band a-ha formed in 1982 and comprised lead vocalist Morten Harket, guitarist Paul Waaktaar and keyboard player Magne Furuholmen. The band are still together today, and have been throughout apart from a period of four years between 1994 and 1998. The band took their name from the exclamation a-ha, like you say when you suddenly realise the solution to a problem.

It was in 1985 that the band really hit the big time with the release of their biggest hit, Take On Me. Not only was it a great song but it also had an exceptional video to go along with it. The video centred around a young girl reading a comic in a cafe. She ends up being literally pulled into the comic, and the video then becomes a mix of live action and animation. There’s one particularly memorable part where there is a kind of window in the comic book world. When the animated version of Harket moves behind this window he becomes real. It’s hard to explain, but check out the video at the end of this post to see what I mean.

Take On Me topped the charts in several countries including the US, Australia, Japan and the bands home Norway. It only managed to get to number 2 in the UK charts on it’s original release, which given the amount it was played at the time I’m really surprised about.

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Madonna is still one of todays biggest and well known music stars, but her singing career began back in the 1980’s. I must admit that I always thought that Madonna was just a stage name, but it is in fact her real name. She was born Madonna Louise Ciccone on August 16th, 1958 in Michigan and raised in a strict Catholic family, which probably accounts for her backlash against Catholicism that was evident in some of her work.

Madonna initially trained to be a dancer, first learning ballet and then receiving a dance scholarship at the University of Michigan, which she left before completing her course after her ballet teacher persuaded her to pursue a career in dance. She travelled to New York to start her new life, where she worked as a dancer before forming a band called Breakfast Club with her boyfriend at the time, Dan Gilroy. This started her on the road to music, and ultimately led to her releasing her first single, Everybody, in 1982. Her first album followed the next year, entitled simply Madonna. This album was originally produced by Reggie Lucas, a successful producer of R&B songs. Madonna was not happy with the music tracks put to her songs, so turned to her then boyfriend John “Jellybean” Benitez, who reworked the songs and added one, Holiday, which is probably one of Madonna’s best known early hits.

The album Like A Virgin appeared in 1984, which of course contained Like A Virgin, but also Material Girl and Into The Groove, which was part of the soundtrack to the film Desperately Seeking Susan, her first well known acting role. Her love for film was evident in the fact that her music videos became much bigger and grander. In 1986 she released her next album, True Blue, which contained the titular True Blue but also Papa Don’t Preach, Open Your Heart and La Isla Bonita. Most of these songs had beautifully filmed videos to accompany them, but this is also where Madonna really began her attack on Catholicism.

Her final album of the 1980’s was Like A Prayer, which also featured the hits Cherish and Express Yourself. After this Madonna started to enter a sequence of reinventing herself. Her work became more experimental and more sexy, swapping her old wardrobe of lacy edged skirts and knee length leggings for unfeasibly pointy bras, corsets and stockings. As the years have gone by she has courted controversy by kissing other female artists (most notably Britney Spears and Christina Agueleira), married movie director Guy Ritchie, joined the Kabbalah (an offshoot religion based in Jewish mysticism) and been involved in the scandal over her “adoption” of David Banda, a child from Malawi.

Billy Joel stormed the charts in 1983 with his classic song Uptown Girl, reaching number three in the US and claiming the top spot in the UK for five weeks, knocking Culture Club’s Karam Chameleon off. The song was incredibly popular due to it’s catchy tune and simple to learn lyrics, and is the song most people will think of first when asked to name a Billy Joel song.

The song itself tells the story of a regular bloke (referred to as a downtown man in the song) who is smitten with a class socialite woman (the uptown girl of the title). The lyrics describe how this man thinks he would treat this woman were he ever to get the chance, claiming that whilst he may not be able to “buy her pearls” he would treat her well and provide the best life he could for her.

The song was written by Joel with supermodel Christie Brinkley in mind. She was his girlfriend (and later wife) and so the song is somewhat autobiographical in nature, as Joel often wondered how he could have been so lucky to end up with Brinkley as a partner. Unfortunately they divorced in 1994.

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If you wanted to know anything about pop music during the 1980’s then the best place to start was with Smash Hits! magazine. For most of the 1980’s and early 1990’s it was the first choice magazine for many teenagers, at it’s peak selling half a million copies every bi-weekly issue. A record breaking issue in 1989, featuring Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, sold more than a million copies!

The magazine covered whatever was hot in the world of pop, which could reasonably encompass anything that was lighting up the music charts at the time. It was slightly biased towards a female readership, being more likely to cover Rick Astley or some other Stock, Aitken and Waterman produced artist, which was fair enough since that was the music that was selling in the largest quantities at the time.

Inside it’s pages you would find a mix of interviews with different bands and singers, reviews of new albums and singles, competitions and most importantly the lyrics to the current hot songs. The latter is probably the reason why the magazine was so popular, as it allowed you to sing along with Top of the Pops and the radio.

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June 1987, and the UK goes barmy for Star Trekkin’, a single celebrating all that was great (and stereotypical) about the classic Star Trek series - i.e. the series with Captain Kirk and Spock. No Trek cliche was left unused, except perhaps the one about Kirk always kissing the pretty female guest character. The song knocked Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody off the top of the charts (thank God) although it was only at number one for two weeks (also thank God!).

The song can be credited to a group called The Firm, though confusingly there have been three bands with the same name including a rock band formed in 1984 and a hip hop group - well, sort of, the full band name appears to have been Nas, Foxy Brown, AZ, and Nature Present The Firm: The Album. Anyway, the “The Firm” that was responsible for Star Trekkin’ were also responsible for another TV programme related novelty song, Arthur Daley E’s Alright, based of course on Minder.

Star Trekkin’ is a song in the mould of “The Music Man” or “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly”, with each new verse added to the last so that by the end of the song it consists of five lines instead of the original one. Each new line was delivered by a different Star Trek character, the basics of which were as follows:-

Uhura: There’s Klingons on the starboard bow!
Spock: It’s life Jim, but not as we know it.
Dr. McCoy: It’s worse than that he’s dead Jim.
Kirk: We come in peace, shoot to kill.
Scotty: Ye cannae change the laws ae physics.

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Today we are more likely listen to our favourite band via a digital medium, such as compact disc or MP3 files, but in the 1980’s vinyl records still ruled the roost. Cassette Tapes may have been another popular and more portable media format (thanks to the invention of the Walkman) but for home use records were definitely the most popular option.

The humble record was originally invented in 1887 by Emile Berliner, taken the work done on recording sound by Thomas Edison ten years earlier and making it more accessible to the general public. Edison’s solution involved recording sound onto a cylindrical medium, which was cumbersome and hard to manufacture. The record invented by Berliner was basically a flat disc, which was much easier to mass produce, and so the music industry was born.

The first records were made of a material called shellac, which was a resin obtained from the secretions of the lac insect. Sounds disgusting if you ask me. Shellac is a natural plastic that when heated is soft and fluid, but sets hard, so was perfect for creating records. By the 1930’s the use of shellac was phased out in favour of synthetic resins.

Records were initially made to be played at 78 revolutions per minute (RPM), but this speed of rotation could lead to breakages, and it also limited the playing time of a single record, at just 5 minutes for a 12 inch disc. In 1948 technology had progressed to allow the slower 33 RPM record to be produced, allowing around 25 minutes per side. A smaller sized disc followed that played at 45 RPM which allowed the old 78 RPM records to be phased out completely, as the new format could hold the same amount of audio.

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