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

CB radio's, SM of its time

Front-loading washing machine 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.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g - In our first flat (1983) we had a second hand twin tub. All of Saturday to do a week's washing!
When we moved in 1984 we bought a front loading automatic; oh the joy! I swear I sat on the kitchen floor and watched the clothes swishing around!

@rosegoldwatcher, as students in aforesaid rented rooms, we either washed a few things in the kitchen sink and built up our arm muscles wringing them out before putting on an airer near the gas fire, or we took them round to the launderette, which was yet another reason to keep bags of coins.

Everything was made out of plastic or sugar and nothing was a natural colour.
My friends parents were hippies left over from the 60s and I used to go there to there to rest my eyes

It was very flammable. Everyone smoked, used millions of hairspray, chip pans were just big pots of hot oil waiting to burst into flames, the miner strike meant supplies of really gassy coal that used to explode out of the fire place, everything melted and gave of ridiculously large amounts of smoke.

Loads of folks dads were away working on building sites in England and Germany.

I remember Thatcher, high unemployment, strikes, poverty, social mobility grinding to a halt, race riots.

A lot of people have this rosy vision of girls in shiny puffball dresses quaffing champagne in Annabels. Actually, it was a decade where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. For all the nostalgia about the music, fashion etc, it was a fairly bleak time for many.

Oh and the ridiculously relaxed drink driving laws! Me and my friends would routinely drive to a country pub for a lunchtime drink and crisps and would have been over the limit, but were never stopped and breathalysed

Regarding twin tubs my ex said early in our marriage we’ll get a twin tub I told him fuck no way are spending Saturday washing after a weeks works this was 1990, so they were just still available.

Yes drink driving and not wearing a seatbelt was widespread. They had to introduce government adverts to educate people on that.

Weren't the drink-drive laws introduced in the 60s? Did people just ignore them?

'Have a drink, have a drive, go out and see what you can find...'

I don't ever remember drink driving being accepted, and I'm 45 so not young. But as for seatbelts, when I was a child it was only the fancy cars that even had them in the back seats. My dad got his first car with seatbelts front and back when I was about 10 or so, and it was quite fancy, none of my friends parents had seatbelts in the back of their cars. The car before that had slits in the seats for where the seatbelts would go, but they were an added extra that you had to pay for and most people didn't bother, I suppose because it just wasn't understood what a huge difference they made to safety.

I started work in a bank at 18 in 1982 in a city.
Everyone smoked, fashion was ludicrous... padded shoulders, masses of make-up and there was so much drunkenness.

Thatcher ruled and poor people were told to 'get on your bike' to somewhere else that didn't have a job or move to London where the pavements were paved with gold... yuppies, gold-diggers and wannabes reigned supreme.
Old mining towns, steel making towns, ship building areas were left to wrack and ruin.

But the music was good! OMD, Dire Straits, Simple Minds ( who I got to see!) , the list is endless.
Women still did the teas and coffees. Mum was a drudge , my dad ruled the roost.

So glad that we've , sort of, moved on.

I remember I sometimes had three layers of shoulder pads - shirt, shit jacket and coat.
Remember when I started taking shoulder pads out of things with sharp scissors - era was shifting !

Oops suit jacket (may also have been ‘shit’).

I remember my dad being an outlier because he limited himself to two pints when we drove to a family occasion. Drink driving was fairly normal in the early 80s round our way.

My Dad had a work van we'd go to the local social club he was involved in the football he'd spend the day drinking while we had lemonade and crisps there was lots of DC there then drive us home without seatbelts in a van.
It was normal behaviour, awful but normal.

@HeronLanyon

Oops suit jacket (may also have been ‘shit’).

Given that we're talking about the 80s, I'd assumed it wasn't a typo...

@Weaveron it was the year Seven and the Ragged Tiger came out so 83/84. I wore my Panama hat so I could be like John. I'm convinced he waved at me to this day and all I remember was us screaming hysterically through most of the concert But the worst bit was I fainted on the tube coming home and my friend's dad having to pull me up off the floor. He'd spent the entire evening in the pub waiting for us, I think. We were 14!

I was 18 in 1980 so this was my decade.

I remember getting my first duvet, wearing blue mascara, getting ready to go out with my pals with one bottle of wine between us (as nowadays it's a bottle each).

Miners strike was horrendous, as was the Falklands War and IRA attacks.

I met and married my DH in the eighties, my DSis had my two DNs and my life was lovely. We had a few scares, such as interest rates going up to 15% but all in all, I loved it.

The 80' s were my late teens. Half a can of hairspray on permed & back combed hair. Lumiere perfume.( You can't buy the original any more). Labyrinth with David Bowie as the sexiest Goblin King. George Michael & Lisa Stanfield back to back on Longwave Atlantic 252. Dirty Dancing & Patrick Swayse's chest. US rock bands, Take these Broken Wings', Whose gonna Drive you Home' etc. Queen's iconic set at Band Aid. Dynasty , big shoulder pads , fashion that was also about power dressing. Happy days.

I was convinced we'd all die an a nuclear holocaust. The iron curtain was still up. Germany wasn't just Germany. It was communist East Germany & capitalist West Germany, until the Berlin wall fell.
The change from an old industrial economy to a more service & banking based one was painful. Unemployment was massive in my native north east England.
To contact a friend you either rang from your landline or a phone box, or you wrote to them.
You had to rent your phone from what is now BT, until it was deregulated. Many people still rented their telly from the likes of Radio Rentals or Rediffusion. Not everyone had a colour telly.
In 1982 we got a fourth telly channel to watch and breakfast telly was invented.
The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the Falklands War. Prince Andrew was a war hero.
You could smoke in pubs & workplaces.
The clothes! I lovd my ra-ra skirt and my leg warmers. Jelly shoes and I had a bag like the one in the puck attached. I had to line it with a carrier bag so my stuff didn't fall out.
You could still be caned at school. O Levels were bloody hard!
I left school at 16 and joined a YTS (youth training scheme) earning £29.50 a week. My first proper job paid £3500 per annum.
I learned to touch type on a real typewriter with blank keys, looking at an image of a keyboard on a wall at the front of the class.
The music was brilliant! Frankie Goes To Hollywood (my first concert), Wham, Duran Duran, Whitney, Michael Jackson.

[quote Sootybear]@Weaveron it was the year Seven and the Ragged Tiger came out so 83/84. I wore my Panama hat so I could be like John. I'm convinced he waved at me to this day and all I remember was us screaming hysterically through most of the concert But the worst bit was I fainted on the tube coming home and my friend's dad having to pull me up off the floor. He'd spent the entire evening in the pub waiting for us, I think. We were 14![/quote]
OMG. I was desperate to see them when that album came out, so I am incredibly jealous. I also had a Panama hat.

I remember making a pilgrimage to the DD Fan Club in Broad Street. I came over all funny, but just managed not to faint

Also occurs to me that there wasn't a single girl in my year whose mother had a job. A couple of mothers were receptionists for the fathers' dental/GP practices, but that was as far as it went. Despite that, the school's entire focus was on us getting jobs and becoming "useful women".

They weren't 'ordinary' jobs, either. It was a highly selective school, so the expectations were all about professional jobs.

Gosh, that's very different from my school, @Weaveron. I can't remember in great detail now, but my mum was a primary school teacher and several other girls were teachers' daughters. At least one girl was the daughter of two GPs. My best friend's mum was a secretary at the university. Another friend's mum was a dinner lady at their local primary school. Some other girls were from families with their own businesses and I'd be surprised if the mothers hadn't been involved in running them in some way.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

Gosh, that's very different from my school, *@Weaveron*. I can't remember in great detail now, but my mum was a primary school teacher and several other girls were teachers' daughters. At least one girl was the daughter of two GPs. My best friend's mum was a secretary at the university. Another friend's mum was a dinner lady at their local primary school. Some other girls were from families with their own businesses and I'd be surprised if the mothers hadn't been involved in running them in some way.

That's why this thread is so fascinating. Everyone who grows up in a particular era has all kinds of things in common - but other things are dramatically different.

It was a golden age for me, but others evidently experienced it very differently.

The fathers of girls at my school were all consultants, dentists, university professors, lawyers, or ran their own businesses. I can't think of anyone who didn't fall into any of those categories.

It also shows how things have changed, in that it was possible for a middle class family with only one income to pay school fees for at least two children (I only knew of a couple of only children) and also have a big detached house in a naice area. That wouldn't be possible now.