On face value S&D was/is a great visceral pop song. Marco (Pirroni) once told me there are something like 17 guitar tracks, an 80′s wall of sound. Perhaps people who dont “get it” might try playing it just once more with the volume up to 11. You’ll hear something a little different to Lady Gaga. You’ll hopefully see what thousands of 40+ yr olds *still* see in the music!

“w/Gaga, La Roux and Adam Ant especially, you feel that it’s all dependent on the heavily-signposted “craziness””

Adam was nothing like them. He never dressed up to be ‘wacky’, and everything he wore came straight from history (part of his appeal), unlike the impractical clothes of the “Look at me” artists you mentioned. By lumping them together I’m really not sure you’re getting him.

This – Lex # 84:

“Actually I just realised what ‘Stand & Deliver’ ACTUALLY reminds me of – it’s Kate Bush’s ‘Sat In Your Lap’ if it was somehow made really terrible and clumsy, and performed by an idiot instead of a genius.”

Except that S&D predates SIYL, and the drumming on the latter was clearly influenced by Adam and the Ants who were the breakout group of the day. And there is nothing else similar about the songs at all. In fact, I don’t really think the drums are all that similar; S&D has heavier more rhythmic drumming to the more clear-cut off-kilter drums of SIYL.

- small girl
- squeaky little boy with flared nostrils and midland accent
- lardy football fan
- specky
- distinguishing-featureless ur-weetaskin

looked most like Swellsy?

my sister broke it (i forget if accidentally or by way of art critique)

If we’re talking about lack of perspective however from a similar milieu Stuart Maconie takes some beating.In the pile of shite that is ‘Pies and Prejudice’ (my excuse for reading it being that my Lancastrian girlfriend bought it me to wind me up!)he portrays himself as this member of the North Western proletariat adrift in a sea of insufferable South-Eastern avocado scoffing snobs. Seemingly failing to comprehend that its the age old influx of ‘apirational’ newly middle-class people (including media-types like him) that give London and the south-east just the demographic he spends the whole book getting worked up about…

And failing to see that (going on there being approximately 20 million people in the south-east)that at least 10 million of these people would see a university educated, broadsheet-reading media-type like Maconie as “a fahkin posh bastard” Wigan origins or not…

*This is quite common in the self-made, who like to credit sheer hard work rather than luck or skill as being the difference between themselves and those left behind, but you might expect something different in an LSE grad with intellectual interests.

I thought the ‘Hard Times’ concept was pretty laughable though and his intoning of bad poetry before early Spandau Ballet concerts although in the latter case when I heard it on a CD it was so laughable it made me genuinely laugh!

The key bit in the Hard Times piece runs “Youth Culture now represents not a rebellion but a tradition, or rather a serious of traditions that date back to the advent of the teenager… How can you rebel against the generation of Coltrane or Brando or MacInnes? What we have is a heritage you can draw succour and inspiration from.”

(Sorry Bunny)

I’ve just dug out some copies of The Face magazine from 1982 and PLSC is right at #80 about how wide open the debate was about what was going to be the next dominant story.
In the September 82 issue Robert Elms tries to stake a claim for what he labelled a ‘Hard Times’ ,back-to-basics, aesthetic that abandoned the excess of the New Romantics and the zoot-suited followers of Kid Creole and others. Levi jeans and t-shirts are the preferred clothing and the musical roots cited are Gil Scott-Heron, John Coltrane, Fela Kuti and Curtis Mayfield.
The same issue features Imagination adopting a hit-the-gym look, Kevin Rowland in Gypsy mode, Culture Club and Bananarama in bold prints and ABC in tweeds.

Musicians have always dressed up – some more bizarrely than others – but Adam foregrounded the process as a call-to-arms to encourage his audience to leave their drab lives behind.
And, as I think I mentioned earlier I’m pretty sure Prince nicked the regency look of the Purple Rain era from Adam.

*But srsly ’82 was a strange and eventful year for lil me for v bad and wrong reasons including nearly dying in a house fire plus parents divorce. Perhaps subconsciously that all made the memory of AA’s theatrical tomfoolery an aspirational beacon (and one of the earliest of many).

*You do know that almost everyone else ever finds Tori Amos inherently ridiculous, don’t you Lex?

**As it happens, I am broadly in favour of most men having a go at dressing like Miles in 1958, but a) can see the cultural dangers of such a restrictive approach and b) it normally goes horribly wrong, as it did in the late ’80s, and you had 17 year olds heading out to clubs looking like estate agents.

what i mean is that, every now and then, a self-identified “generation” reaches a liminal collective age where it’s useful and instructive and fun to annoy their elders and contemporaries by being excited by things that remind them of the things they liked BEFORE they became grumpy horny teenagers

there’s a lot of stuff in mid-60s pop which exhibits tot-value — then a lull, really, till the early 80s

in-between there are peaks of the fetishisation of suave adulthood (which are often equally brittle and shortlived)

er yes, except THERE ARE NO CYCLES IN POP, so er