1980s
Peter Quantrill
Back in Margaret Thatcher’s middle England, teenagers got by somehow. Without recourse to wands or Ballardian games of extinction, we survived adolescence with the help of a story full of people we knew. People (a bit) like us. Every year I re-read Sue Townsend’s chronicles of Adrian Mole, hopeless lovestruck bard of Leicester. And each year he grew up with me, as experience uncovered the texture of Mole’s life. "Phoned Auntie Susan but she is on duty in Holloway." A line like that was simply information at first. A year or two later, it brought a smile, then a conspiratorial laugh.Laughter Read more ...
Jasper Rees
How much plotting went into GLOW? It has been gussied up by the people who brought you the jumbo Netflix hit Orange Is the New Black. Both shows are based on a true story and feature women of all ethnicities bitching and slapping in a contained environment. In Glow there’s less orange, and less black, but even more bitching and slapping.This time the perimeter wall is not a prison but the ropes of the wrestling ring. GLOW is based on the true story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling who were a cable TV hit in the late Eighties. Netflix supplies a complementary documentary all about the real Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In February 1983, New Musical Express ran a cover feature categorising what it termed “positive punk”. Bands co-opted into this ostensibly new trend were Blood & Roses, Brigandage, Danse Society, Rubella Ballet, Sex Gang Children, Southern Death Cult, The Specimen, UK Decay and The Virgin Prunes. Writer Richard North – a member of Brigandage – said the unifying factors were “mystical/metaphysical imagery”, “the sub-world of Crowleyan abyss” and personal style taking in backcombing, blue hair, long black skirts, red trousers and bootlace ties. The Doors were, he said, an influence. So were Read more ...
graham.rickson
Using Hollywood stars to prop up British crime thrillers is an ignoble tradition. Guy Ritchie’s Snatch misused Brad Pitt, but John Wayne’s execrable Brannigan is probably the worst example. So one’s hopes aren’t high for Stormy Monday, a 1987 noir starring Sean Bean and Sting, aided and abetted by, er, Melanie Griffiths and Tommy Lee Jones. Fear not – this was Mike Figgis’s feature debut, and it’s a remarkable piece of work, Figgis also responsible for the screenplay and soundtrack. The plot is disarmingly straightforward; Sting’s jazz club is threatened by dodgy developers, and the young Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Peter Perrett is one of the most underrated songwriters. If people have heard of him, it’s down to The Only Ones’ classic, “Another Girl, Another Planet”, but The Only Ones made three albums (and an odds’n’ends collection) as the Seventies turned to the Eighties, all peppered with gems. Perrett also surfaced in the mid-Nineties as The One, with another album, Woke Up Sticky. However, since then, despite multiple false starts and an Only Ones reunion (teasing fans with unreleased new song “Black Operations”), there’s been no sign of new material until now.Perrett’s career was famously derailed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Considering Shelleyan Orphan, Melody Maker said “someone’s been smearing themselves in art…were they artists or did they just wallow in shit?” While the late Eighties’ British music press often made assertions to seek attention, slagging off a band because they sought to follow their own path is, with hindsight, rich given that roughly contemporary cover stars such as Chakk and Set The Tone dealt in music so precisely fixed in the moment they now sound as dated as Sheena Easton’s efforts to get funky and U2’s lunges at the blues.Shelleyan Orphan – the duo Caroline Crawley and Jem Tayle – Read more ...
graham.rickson
Memory plays funny tricks; Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too is fondly remembered as a cheeky 80s sex comedy. It’s not. There’s a fair bit of sex, and the laughs do come thick and fast, but the film leaves the bitterest of aftertastes. And, viewed 30 years after its cinematic release, what’s alarming is how little has changed since the late 1980s (the original tagline was "Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down"). Andrea Dunbar’s screenplay, based on two plays she’d written as a teenager living on Bradford’s Buttershaw Estate, is a rambling, discursive affair, centring on the priapic Bob Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Nicholas Bullen is an artist and composer, based in Birmingham. He works across disciplines and media, including sound, installation, film, performance and text. In 1981, Bullen founded the Grindcore legends Napalm Death with Miles Ratledge. He will perform a new solo piece Universal Detention Centre at this year’s Supersonic Festival to mark the 30th anniversary of their seminal album, Scum, a disc which includes “You Suffer”, the world’s shortest song according to the Guinness Book of Records.GUY ODDY: Scum was not only a seminal album for Napalm Death but also for the grindcore movement. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the dog-eat-dog world of White Gold it’s 1983, when greed was about to become good and (as the show’s creator Damon Beesley puts it) “a time when having double-glazed patio doors installed meant you were winning at life”. The streets were full of sludge-coloured cars from British Leyland, and Duran Duran and Bonnie Tyler ruled the charts.Beesley (of Flight of the Conchords and The Inbetweeners fame) served time as an Essex Man in his youth, and this pungently-flavoured opener dripped with closely-observed ambition and ruthless one-upmanship. Our protagonist and narrator Vincent Swan ( Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is a very welcome 4K digital restoration of Juzo Itami's extremely tasty Japanese comedy from 1985. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Tampopo ("dandelion" in Japanese), a widowed café owner with a small son. She dishes up bowls of ramen noodles to local trade but business is not good. A passing trucker (Ken Watanabe in Clint Eastwood mode) takes pity on her and rounds up a gang of misfits to help her perfect the recipe. Interspersed with their slapstick adventures – breaking into kitchens, rummaging through rival establishments’ bins, tracking down gourmets living in a hobo jungle – there are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A strong candidate for reissue of the year, World Spirituality Classics, Volume 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is a rarity amongst archive collections as it does what is always hoped for but seldom accomplished. A new story is told, the music is unfamiliar but wonderful, and it has been put together conscientiously.The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda collects tracks – eight on the CD edition, 10 on the vinyl set – recorded between 1987 and 1995 which initially had limited circulation. The original releases drawn from were issued by the Avatar Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"We live past hope," or so remarks the AIDS-afflicted drag queen-turned-prophet, Prior Walter (Andrew Garfield), late in Angels in America. But surely not even Tony Kushner, author of the eight-hour theatrical landmark that some while ago entered the canon of contemporary classics, could have hoped for lightning to strike twice when it comes to the National Theatre and his play.Twenty-five years ago, this same address launched Kushner as a major name on the back of Declan Donnellan's flinty British premiere of the diptych's first and more immediately accessible half, Millennium Approaches, Read more ...