My mother and my father have always supported me. Now in their eighties, they actually clamor onto the tour bus with me once or twice a year so they can watch the performances and hear the crowds. Traveling with eighty-something-year-olds on a tour bus… there has to be some sort of reality show in that.
Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.
I did feel a bit of an outsider in the Eighties. But there was a market for me out there. New Romantics were totally different.
In the late eighties, we decided to rework the 1979 hit ‘El Lute’ and name it ‘Mandela.’
There is some Eighties music that is just timeless. The melodies, the lyrics… I called it church. Church in club. You can shout and dance. The best of the Eighties was club church.
I’m a huge fan of Eighties music.
As industry’s tycoons of the Thirties got their wings clipped, labor’s leaders in the Eighties are getting their wings clipped. Not because of any class-related antagonism, but because any excess, ultimately, is its own undoing.
There’s a whole apparatus for indie bands now, but back in the eighties it was just getting built. The early people really took it on the chin.
I think music is so diverse today, and bands are so diverse. If you were a rock band in the Eighties, you kind of had to stick to one thing. Now, in this age of Coachella and European festivals and stuff, it’s kind of anything goes, so that allowed us to try different things.
I watched ‘Who’ with a mixture of affection and exasperation through the eighties, always ready to cheer on the Doctor but seldom feeling that the series was playing to its strengths. Some of the adventures, revisited on DVD, turn out to be better than I remembered – others just as infuriating.
I remember the ballads of the eighties when my mom was cleaning, sometimes I’d listen to, like, Amanda Miguel or something like that and I’ll smell the Fabulous.
I aim to be pretty – I gave up dressing to be sexy in the eighties.
In the future, people will blame the Eighties for all societal ills in the same way that people have previously blamed the Sixties. The various Thatcherite Big Bangs – monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism – have been working their way through the culture ever since.
In 1979, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered the league. I remember that. Soon after this, the story began to be repeated ad nauseam: the NBA, a tottering mess in the seventies, was saved in the eighties by these two.
Don’t contour with blush – that’s so eighties. It was an amazing trend then, but it’s not hot now. Instead, go for a neutral contour color that’s one or two shades deeper than your skin tone.
For the past 10 years, people have been making fun of the eighties. Why are we bringing them back?
And some of what we’re doing in Government even now, some of the welfare reform programs that are helping lone mothers come into work are based on things that were very new under the Labour Government in the eighties.
Being ‘ethnically ambiguous’, as I was pegged in the industry, meant I could audition for virtually any role. Morphing from Latina when I was dressed in red, to African American when in mustard yellow, my closet filled with fashionable frocks to make me look as racially varied as an Eighties Benetton poster.
I was a guy back in the Eighties who was one movie away from a huge career, which at that time didn’t happen. In the Nineties, I worked a lot, but it was kind of, ‘Get out there and dig and find things.’ Then I guess ‘The Rookie’ and ‘Far From Heaven’ were referred to as my comeback.
When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn’t exist, and we didn’t need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online.
Woody Allen movies notwithstanding, therapy, in the early eighties, was not exactly a hot conversation starter. Nor was it a favoured activity for dysfunctional couples or suffering individuals.
Yes, I would say I had quite a rough time from 1992 to 1996. After the highs of the Eighties, work became slow from around 1987 to around 1997. I was running a small recording studio in Shepherd’s Bush but wasn’t making a great deal from it.
All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don’t subscribe to any of that. It’s all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who’s to say what is and isn’t a certain type of music?
The worst bar fights I ever saw were in London. I saw a guy break a pint glass in another guy’s face in a club in the Eighties. It was a gay club, too.
If I could remake any Eighties project, it would be less an action flick than a character-driven drama with a rich story to tell.
When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.
I had been an abject fan of Robert Stone since the early eighties, when I borrowed a copy of ‘A Flag for Sunrise’ to read on a plane to Rome. I was twenty-something, with a first novel under my belt.
Like anybody who grew up in the Eighties, I cringe at the thought of these movies being remade, because of the corniness and cheesiness of the originals.
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