In her acclaimed memoir of pop stardom won and then re-assessed, Tracey Thorn, the distinctive voice of Everything But The Girl and Massive Attack's Protection, takes issue with the version of the 1980s, the decade during which she came to prominence, that is popularly portrayed on the media.
"I barely recognise 'The 1980s' as a decade in the form that it is now remembered and repackaged for glib TV programmes," she writes. "I would later see the decade reviled, and then revived, but in a manner that bore almost no relation to the years I had lived through."
She means the world of Duran Duran videos, grandiose hi-tech music production reflecting the flash of a new world of the young rich and the cult of the selfish yuppie. Many portrayals of that aspirational high life from the time were rather more ironic then than they appear now. Her world, like mine, was one of political activism in favour of nuclear disarmament and in support of the striking miners and of benefit gigs raising consciousness about Aids and Third World poverty.
Recent revelations about what was going on behind the scenes of television pop shows has made it difficult to watch teenagers dancing awkwardly in front of miming groups and smile at the naivety of it all, and if that makes it more difficult for the media to plunder the archives for a lazy version of the past it will be no bad thing, if a rather incidental benefit of an altogether more serious story. As recent history has the benefit of serious analysis in the writing of David Kynaston and others, shallow revivalism is revealed as exactly what it is, and that makes the past much more fertile ground for artists.
A new package of work by poet Paul Hullah and musician and painter Martin Metcalfe, called Scenes, attempts "a kind of imaginative re-processing", as they term it, of the 1980s in Scotland's capital, which is where I was living when the decade began.
Scenes is an artwork that contains a six-track 10" vinyl album (very 1980s in its eccentric format) at the back at a large square book of new drawings and paintings by Metcalfe and verse by Hullah. Before Metcalfe found his own fleeting pop stardom with Goodbye Mr Mackenzie (alongside Shirley Manson, who would go on to greater success in Garbage), he and Hullah were in a band called Teenage Dog Orgy and this collaboration recalls that somewhat hedonistic, but indisputably creative, time of a myriad tribes like goths and psychobillies when Edinburgh was "the Aids capital" of Europe and a fluid attitude to sexuality among the young was suddenly confronted with dangers that entailed.
Verse like Hullah's Lethe Walks and Metcalfe images like Roxy Doll, Exploited and Song To The Siren will resonate to those who were there from their titles alone. As a further selling point, Scenes has a foreword by Manson that puts the work to follow in her own, broader, context and from which much more enjoyment can be had by reading between the lines. Never mind those late night docs on BBC Four, Scenes, which is published by Edinburgh's Word Power Books, is an album of snapshots of the 1980s in Scotland as they really were.
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