I’m in Dixons Currys.digital, buying a new computer keyboard. What sounds like a competent cover version of Starship’s We Built This City is playing. For a moment I wonder if it’s the start of one of those godawful trance retreads of 80s guitar hits. You know the sort of thing: Owner Of A Lonely Heart/Max Graham versus Yes, Proper Education/Eric Prydz versus Pink Floyd, Boys Of Summer/DJ Sammy feat. Loona, The Majesty Of Rock/The KLF versus Spinal Tap.
It isn’t, but now I’m trying to block out a sound that I think is something originally recorded by A Flock Of Seagulls. The performance is accurate except for the vocals. These are horribly, horribly out of tune. It can’t be a recent re-recording or someone would have used pitch correction software. What is this shit? Can I endure it long enough to find a decent keyboard?
I’m replacing one old one because I’ve broken it. My main keyboard is an ancient IBM of similar vintage to A Flock Of Seagulls, rescued from a discarded original PC at the Institute of Cancer Research. I learned to touch-type on a manual typewriter so I love clackity old metal-framed IBM keyboards, which I suspect are built from obsolete Israeli tank spares and are the only ones in existence that you could apply to a human torso with fatal results—or, indeed, that I can hammer away at with my heavy fingers for more than a few months without breaking also.
I approach the counter with my soon-to-be-suffering new Logitech, but things are beginning to swim a little as the painfully bad singing continues. Luckily Go West kicks in before I pass out from intonation sickness.
“What is this playing?” I ask the guy behind the counter, “some kind of 80s compilation?”
“It’s The 80s Live,” he says, happily. “They were playing The Best Of The 60s earlier on, but I took it off ’cause it was rubbish. Go West are brilliant. Almost as good as Level 42.”
Our eyes meet and I gaze deep into his soul. He is not being ironic.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
I don’t know exactly what age he really is, but whatever it is he’s at the stage of life when you lie about being twenty-one so someone will sell you an alcoholic drink or a domestic solvent.
“Is there any music you like that was recorded in the last twenty years?” I ask him, trying to keep the mystification out of my voice.
“Has anyone recorded anything good in the last twenty years?”
I pay for my keyboard, laughing: “Kids today!”
“Thanks, granddad,” I mutter on my way out, reflecting that I was a medical school dropout, working in the library of Tamworth College of Further Education and navigating around the home keys of a cast-iron Olivetti while the sales assistant was a toddler.
I am become my dad.
I’m in my early twenties and it’s very rare that I’ll like any current music. Among my favourite bands are Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Kinks, and the Small Faces. I find there are quite a few of my peers with similar tastes, and one of my friends is a bit of an 80s fanatic (the films and the music, but not the clothes, thankfully) and he’s only 22. It’s not as unusual as you think!
“Is there any music you like that was recorded in the last twenty years?”
Yikes! That was 1987. The year of ‘Tunnel of Love’, ‘Hysteria’ and ‘Appetite For Destruction’.
Nope, I can’t think of anything much since then especially either. Nothing since has left much of a legacy that I can think of.
Its always been a bit like that. When I went to see Pink Floyd in 1989 my girlfriend brought her 12-year-old nephew along. I was worried he would be bored, but he knew the songs better than I did.
What annoys me is when people my age (lets be generously vague and say between 35 and 45) go on and on about 60s music
The great unspoken fear – Turning into our parents. There you go imagining you are a reasonably cool parent and suddenly you catch yourself sounding like a clone of your Mum or Dad.
And for some unfathomable reason our children consider us, in many repects, terminally embarrasing. “Don’t dance Dad!”, “Can you pick me up round the corner? Pleeease”, “Oh Mum your’e not wearing that to the open evening are you?”
Don’t even go there.
Yes, but when you become granddad you’re cool again. You can even dance in front of your grandkids. I and my second granddaughter (14) have similar tastes in music. We are sooo cool.
Duke Special is fantastic. Buy some now.
I’m not sure what that says about me, though, because, while he is undoubtedly brand new, his music sounds like rock’n’roll would if it had been invented in the 20s instead of the 50s.
[…] week I discovered JasonHare.com, a blog full of trivia about the sort of music that only kids in high street electrical shops will admit to liking. Hare is obsessed with 80s cheese and soft rock. There are eleven mulleted […]