To ask you to tell me about the '80s?

[Trulyatraditionalman]

I was born in Dec '89. I absolutely love '80s music, and the way it is depicted in films and TV makes it seem like it was the most amazing decade.

I'd like to experience the '80s through your memories

@shouldreallynamechangemore

OMG Virginia Andrews!!! Dodgy AF but utterly compelling.

Yeah I know read it avidly as a teen, but now.. erm would I read it again? I actually still have them as I can't throw books away, but I don't know as I have children of my own

Anyone remember the song "Hey Matthew" ? For some reason, it sums up the 80s for me.

I suppose Matthew must be about 40 now. I wonder what he sees now...

Definitely the weather. Real snowy winters. I remember huge icicles hanging from the corrugated garage roofs. Hot summers that went on forever. I was 10 in 1980 so all my teen years were in the 1980's. Spending every Saturday in town with mates. We all wore the same clothes, pencil skirts, white sling backs, batwing tops, shimmery eye shadow, white cotton baggy jackets. Sundays spent with my bff, down the park, chatting to squaddies and going back to hers for tea. Roller disco Friday and Saturday nights and my friend's dad taking 4 of us to see Duran Duran at Wembley arena on the train. Left home at 17 as it was awful and moved in with my student boyfriend and felt so grown up

@Fourandtwentymilliondoors

No duvets, shivering under sheets, no showers so the weekly hair wash was done using mums largest mixing bowl to rinse my hair in the bath 😄

Being dressed head to toe in whatever Clockhouse was selling. Watching Top of the Pops religiously on Thursday evenings and recording the top 40 each Sunday - fingers hovering over the record button on the cassette player to make sure you got every second of your favourite song!

Teachers smoking in the staff room at school. Spending my pocket money in Tammy Girl, rocking out to Bananarama and choosing the latest videos from Blockbusters on a Saturday.

Bloody loved the 80’s!

Exactly this.

Smoke was everywhere. Many young trendy young men carried enormous stereos on their shoulders. We hung around shopping centres all day Saturday. Good times.

Oh I remember lugging my enormous double cassette playing stereo to my university year abroad- why on earth it needed two cassette players I was unsure of even then.

@Adiscoveryofbitches

Being into Duran Duran before they made it big. Painting my brother’s face to look like Adam Ant.

I saw them live in 1982. I am still overcome.

@Sootybear DD at Wembley??! What year was this? I'm not sure whether to be monstrously jealous, or to be glad that I saw them in a flea-pit. My parents were very cross about it, because my BFF's dad said he was going to take us - then decided to go to the pub instead, so we went in on our own. We were 11.

I was born in 1981. 99 Red Balloons was number 1. I played outdoors til dark. I wore culottes first time round. I had fluorescent clothes and shoe laces. I climbed trees. I fell 20 ft off a climbing frame onto concrete and lived. I went to the cinema on the bus on my own aged 8. I looked after younger cousins aged 10. I wore NAFF CO 54 T-SHIRTS. I wore T shirts that changed colour with heat. I had Nicks Trainers. I swam in a reservoir. I rode my bike to school. Life was sweet.

@Tanith

Anyone remember the song "Hey Matthew" ? For some reason, it sums up the 80s for me.

I suppose Matthew must be about 40 now. I wonder what he sees now...

Oh God, I remember that song. So random. Wasn't it about a rise in violence on TV programmes and films? There seemed to be a lot of that in the 80's.

I think Hey Matthew was on Now That's What I Call Music 8. It was the track before something that I really liked (although I can't remember what that was) and I remember always being glad when it's twinkly chirpy wee keyboard solo was coming to and end because it meant something good was coming next.

Hmm, maybe not. It's NTWICM 10 and the next track was Crockets Theme from Miami Vice

Watching Top of the Pops
Listening to Top 40 on a Sunday night and recording it with a cassette player
Leg warmers
Fingerless gloves
Mohair jumpers
Hair perms
Plastic jewellery
Stone washed jeans, denim jackets, skin tight jeans.
Shopping in Chelsea Girl
Dolces for shoes
Dynasty
Dallas "who shot JR"
Watching the show Neighbours after school
Saturday morning TV shows
Getting off the sofa to switch over TV
Only having 4 tv channels to watch
Using a payphone
Phoning friends after school and my dad moaning get off phone its going to cost a fortune
Going to the cinema watching films like Top Gun, Back to the Future, Desperately seeking Susan, etc etc. Going to the pub no one asked for ID as no one had it, getting any drink you wanted. No social media so no horrendous photos

I was 13 in 1980 and what's stood out for me is:

A huge mortgage interest hike at the start of the decade that affected m parents but not us.

Incredibly sexist male friends - we were like objects but were conditioned to accept it as banter.
No high street fashion - we bought tiny designer capsule wardrobes in spring/summer and autumn/winter from London boutiques as there was no alternative (mainly Browns on South Molton Street)
The amazing Indie scene - our city alone had so many great guitar bands.
The start of the rave scene and Madchester in 1989 was such a game-changer culturally.
Heroin was a middle class drug (but never touched it).
Grammars changing to comprehensives was really soul destroying.
Everyone was a couple - there were hardly any young single people.
Everyone bought property as a couple (but then there was the Miras scandal, but that's a whole other thread...)
Everyone seemed to have so much more money (property was still cheap) so we were out in pubs and clubs about four times a week
Jukeboxes in pubs!
NO ONE was overweight!
Vinyl albums and particularly 12 inch dance remixes. They made the ultimate sound and have all now sadly disappeared (ie not on Spotify).
The video revolution! My crowd spent a month or so watching the movie Fame on video after the pub at the one friend’s house that had a VCR, just for the thrill of being able to do it on demand!
No one had central heating (we had storage heaters and my parents still have them). So you had to sleep in thermal pyjamas!
My family weren’t short of money but resisted getting a washing machine until 1985. Until then we all did our own washing late afternoon on Sundays - washing it in the bath, then rolling it all up in towels and stamping the water out before hanging it up. It never seemed like a major chore!

Also having a Sony Walkman for Christmas

Watching Grange Hill on TV
No one was overweight we had one overweight kid in high school.

I was quite young. But it was a tense time and my parents were always worried about money. Lots of racism.

This thread has been so good. So much nostalgia

Can we have one for the 90s too?

I was born in 1990 and just finished It’s a Sin. Really enjoyed this thread, thank you for starting!

I was 2-12 in the 80s. My local town had a Wimpey and small chain of awful coffee shops and nowhere else to eat out. I didn't eat Thai or sushi until I went to university. The big excitements at home were when we got: a VHS recorder, a CD player, a microwave, a word processor, a Spectrum ZX. We had Angel Delight for pudding at weekends. We listened to The Top 40 on a Sunday night on radio 1. I remember the first ever episode of Eastenders. Everyone smoked.

@Fireflylane

Watching Grange Hill on TV No one was overweight we had one overweight kid in high school.

Apart from Roland Browning, Pogo Patterson, Alan thingy (Tucker's mate) and Tracey wotsit (in same year as Stewpot, Duane, Claire and Gripper)

@rookiemere
The double deck was so that you could borrow your mate’s music cassette, record it and not buy the music or to make your own mixes. I had a double cassette deck and didn’t buy much music. Dh still has all his cassettes. Perhaps 5% are shop bought.

Someone brought round a pirate video cassette of ET before it came out in the U.K. for us to watch. Some bright American spark, who worked in a cinema somewhere must have set that one up as it was filmed on a camera inside a cinema. It was incredibly snowy, a couple of sections indecipherable, pretty much reduced to black and white due or the poor quality and the sound awful... clearly a copy of a copy of a copy but I was one of the first to see it over here. Meanwhile everyone in the U.K. was going crazy waiting for the film to be released and I’d already seen it. My parents were, of course disgusted at bringing something illegal into our home. Being of a different generation, I really didn’t get the issue. There was a lot of pirating around, such as pirate radio channels, it was just so normal.

Oh and I don’t think anyone has mentioned CB radios. Truckers had them in the 60’s and 70’s and then some people had them for fun. Some kid lent me theirs for a while in about 1980. I can remember 1-4, 1-4 for a copy. 10-10 til we do it again. And we all had handles. I don’t remember mine but I used to speak to a kid calling themselves Hissing Sid.

I too went to an independent school. Mine was not so progressive. Still very academic but needlework, home economics and art were the 3 softer subjects. I wanted to go to the local secondary modern as I wasn’t academic and I wanted to do plumbing and woodwork or hairdressing but my mother said no and I would thank her when I was older. (I never did)
We were expected to go to university and become teachers or doctors or work in a bank. Or go into nursing or be a secretary if you weren’t bright. Typing and shorthand was a subject you could take.
My mother pushed me into the academic classes but I failed everything. I somehow got a job in a bank for 6 weeks then left and found I could have earned more as a shorthand typist.
Then I moved to London and it was like night and day. Even though it was the early 80s you could feel that the world was starting to buzz

There is a great book called:

No such thing as society - travel through the 80's.

Well worth a read.

I was in my 20s in the 80s so the peak time of my life.

I remember (in no particualar order):

Watching Spitting Image in the common room in my halls at university (no TVs in each room then!) . It was always packed for this every week with everyone laughing and generally messing around

The miners strike protests on TV
Greenham common
CND ( Campaign for nuclear disarmament)
HIV/ADS public information films (I also vividly remember a watching panorama programme early in the early 80s abut a strange new illness affecting mostly gay young men and being really mystified and confused as to what it could be)

Public information films that put the fear of God into you . Some of the ones of the national archive website that I remember include
Rabies
Iconic AIDS one that I vividly remember
Drink driving one
anti smoking one'

The ones I remember most though are actually from the 70s

protect and survive,
Lonely Water
Tufty and the ice cream van
rabies outbreak

My parents had central heating installed in the mid 70s. My mum had recently gone back to work full-time after years of occasional part-time work and it transformed our finances. As well as the heating, we got a colour TV and shortly afterwards they extended the mortgage and got a new kitchen fitted. Can't remember if that was the point we moved from having a fridge with just an ice box big enough for a small packet of Wall's Neapolitan, an ice cube tray and a packet of peas to having a fridge freezer, or whether that happened earlier. Microwave followed in the 1980s. Front-loading washing maching also arrived at some point in the 70s and was an enormous improvement on the old twin tub which still necessitated a huge amount of work to get the weekly wash done.

No duvets for many years afterwards, though, as there was still plenty of wear left in the blankets they'd been given as wedding presents in 1960.

In our student renting years, we always had to keep change of various denominations so we could feed the gas and electricity meters, and of course for the phone box.