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

This makes me sound ancient but it was the norm for bands to actually play their own instruments and often even write their own songs.

I had a Frankie says relax white vest and thought I was the bees knees 😂.
I love the 80's music, we had a great 80's Christmas party - I was Madonna and was desperately seeking Susan!

[quote Trulyatraditionalman]@sparklingbrook This sounds hilarious, do you have a link to the video at all?[/quote]
Which bit?

the 80's makeup pics online never have the bright blue mascara that everyone wore.

'Electric blue' was what it used to be called.

@Beebumble2

Busy having my children in the 80s. But houses were cheap, we bought a 4 bed wreck in inner London for £40,000. Did it up and sold it 5 years later to move out of the city. Not a good financial move but great for the family.

£40,000 was still too much for me as a teacher in London in the late 80s. I had to move North to buy a house and then the interest rate was crippling.

I was 20 in 1980, and still at university. For me the early 80s were all about discos (clubs now), cocktails, big hair and punk music. Work dungarees as casual wear, flares out and skinny jeans in. Later 80s more about massive interest rates, and hatred of Maggie Thatcher. And The Royal Wedding (Charles and Diana, I was a bit freaked out she was younger than me tbh).

I got married in the 80s too, big dresses, big hair too. Then the massive interest rates of the late decade, at one point we were paying 19% on a business loan (2% above base rate). A happy time for me, I met my husband, bought our first house and it was a generally happy time.

And the standard of education was truly truly shocking.
Cuts, strikes, when I was 12 as teachers left they weren't replaced.
We got "dispersed". So, if we were scheduled to do history and the teacher left, we got sent in pairs or 3s to each class in the school with a worksheet and if lucky a book between us and expected to get on with it without disturbing the maths class etc we were sent to.

I was 15 in 1980 and 24 at the end of the decade. I left school at 16 and got a job easily enough in the civil service. People smoked at their desks, took a 2 hour lunch break on a Friday and got pissed at the subsidised staff bar before going back to their desks in the afternoon and doing b*gger all for the rest of the day! Got married in 1986 and bought a brand new 2 bedroom house with garage for £39k in west Sussex. Sold it 18 months later for £65k! House prices and interest rates were rocketing in the late 80s.

I was a youngish adult in the 80s.some of the music was fantastic (living in Sheffield I had the joy of sitting next to Phil Oakey in the hairdressers, dancing with the saxophonist from ABC, Jarvis Cocker once admired my skirt), bus fares were so cheap, 10p into town. But, unemployment was crazy, signing on was grim. Our first flat was cold and damp. The winter we lived there all my shoes went green with mould. I got pneumonia from living there. We bought our house for £18k, zero interest, 3 times my dhs salary and my student grant counted in. Student grants! Think I got 2 grand for the year and I could sign on in the holidays. Loads of ex miners and steelworkers were there in my year. Student politics were wild, though they kept well away, I think amused at the children pontificating.
Doctors were crap, I went undiagnosed with coeliac disease for almost a year, my mum waited almost two years for a hip replacement.
City centres were full of shops, big ones little ones, markets. I used to go with my mum to town on Saturday, start at one end of town, get the bus home at the other end.

Back then, if you wore any nail varnish that wasn't in the red/pink spectrum it would mark you out as 'alternative'. Blues/greens/greys/golds were not mainstream at all, but could sometimes be found on market stalls - 'Constance Carrol' was a popular 80s 'market stall' make-up brand.

Blokes wearing more makeup than the women. Going to a club with smoke, cold ice, strobe lights and lights that made you look like you are dancing in slow motion. Music really loud, coming home on the night train with buzzing ears and clothes and hair wreaking of smoke.... in fact smoke everywhere , cinema, top of the bus ugh!

No such thing as being I'd for pubs. Went to them at 14 😂

Had no idea that nuclear war was such a threat

It was truly terrifying. The threat was there, in the background, all the time. Sometimes if I got woken up by a plane going over in the early morning, I'd snap awake panicking, with a racing heart, convinced that this was it. And then there was Chernobyl, which was also terrifying. Contaminated dust drifted over to the UK, and there was a real worry about it.

But aside from those horrors ... one thing I remember is how long punk survived as a fashion. There were still lots of punks around in the early 80s. In my town, they used to hang around in front of the library, styling each other's hair: extreme bright pink, green or orange mohicans.

And Yes to the pp's comment about having to work hard for music. Everyone used to swap records, in order to tape them. When CDs came in, a CD-rental business opened in my town, and it kept going for several years.

I was born in 1981. I remember worrying about the IRA. Cordless phones were new and very odd. We had a normal phone you had to twirl all the numbers around on and we were always fiddling with the curly cable. There was a powercut every time there was a storm until they burried the power cables. It snowed a lot.

If you wanted to watch something on the tv later you had to ask someone who was going to be in to record it on a VHS cassette. We were always recording over things other people had wanted to save.

Music was on cassettes. I didn’t see a CD until about 1995.

In the summer Wimbledon was on the tv and kids tv was cancelled for 2 weeks.

Clothes were terrible, make up was awful and hair was back combed to with in an inch of it's life. Ski pants, reversible padded mickey mouse jumpers, luminous furry socks and tshirts that changed colour when you got hot. Music wasn't much better. I much preferred the 90's.

Ooh and fluorescent lights in clubs which either showed your white underwear off really brightly or if you had dandruff was just horrendous 🤣 As it shone brightly !

I preferred the 90s but was still quite young in the 80s. I do remember Hillsborough tho. (And the Maradona hand ball incident.)
Clothes were awful but we didn't know any better.
Parenting was very slack although you'd probably get smacked and grounded from time to time! We drank and had sex too much and too early in my circles.
Lots if freedom, out playing until dark from age 6 or 7 I think!
Different world.

And being interested in not being cruel to animals or even not eating them was a sign that you were a mental Animal Liberation Front member and therefore by definition a terrorist. Probably expected to be force fed meat as well, as only Muslim/Jewish children were permitted to have grated cheese instead of the pork/beef mince that got dished out at school; you were just 'being fussy'.
I was a teacher in the 80s. Vegetarian food was definitely available in London schools and not just grated cheese. The menu was much more varied in areas with higher ethnic diversity, I remember a lovely lentil dahl being served.

I was 18 in 1981, started university the following year. . Grew up in Essex, shopping trips to London could involve being evacuated from a store on Oxford Street because there had been a bomb threat. Cigarette smoke everywhere, there were smoking carriages on trains and underground where the air was blue, same on the top deck of a bus. Your clothes stank afterwards, you couldn’t wear them twice.
Low level sexual harassment, wolf whistles on the street - although that may be the same now, it’s just that I’m very middle-aged.
No mobile phones, if you were late meeting a friend they’d just have to wait. And no digital cameras, so photos were only taken on special occasions , because it cost £3 to get a film developed, and half of them would be rubbish! Music was on vinyl, which gave you cool album covers but scratched so easily, and they weren’t the heavy vinyl discs you get now, they were flimsy and often warped. CDs were a great advice but cost 4 times as much as a vinyl album at first.
The music was great, fashion too although looking back now the shoulder pads and big hair make me shudder! There was so much intolerance, racism, homophobia and sexism.
Food was much more limited than now, no ready meals, a Chinese restaurant was as exotic as it got in most small towns.
It’s a Sin is very accurate - I remember writing down my phone calls in a little book in my student flat.

Born in 65 so my uni years were during the 80s. Yes, there were bad things, a government that laid a legacy we are still paying for, strikes etc, but there was an explosion of creativity. We all had perms and wore bright colours. Danced to the new romantics. Felt we could do anything.

Loved the 80’s!
Still listen to 80’s music and watch 80’s movies now.
My friend had a MASSIVE perm, we’d make each other mixed tapes on our little stereos from the Top 40, wore pointy stilettoed shoes with a kitten heel to secondary school, remember mine being a royal blue colour 😁 ate Angel Delight and bought a quarter of cola cubes or pear drops in a white little paper bag from the corner shop. Very fond memories of the 80’s 👩‍🦱

@lapprentisorcier I remember Constance Carol nail varnish at Romford Market in the late 1990s and early 2000s!!

It may sound naive and silly now, but the song ‘Wind of Change’ really did speak for millions of young people all over Europe.

Absolutely. I think even at the time it was regarded as a bit cheesy in the UK but for young people living in previously Communist countries it was genuinely an anthem.

I still remember the Berlin Wall falling as one of the greatest times. There was such a relief, such optimism, so many endless good news stories - about siblings who'd been parted from each other by it for eg - and the scenes of people tearing it down with whatever tools they could get a hold of or even with their bare hands ... it was so so lovely.

I lived in an ex Communist country a few years later (for work) and me and my colleagues there had lots of conversations about what we'd been told during that time. It was really powerful actually, as they'd been told same as us that we were the enemy and out to get them, but there we all were working together and just being you know hopeful and moving forward. They also all wanted to to tell them lyrics of songs! Including ofc winds of change. I used to write them out - no Google in those days lol.

Oh and a boy at primary school climbed on the roof and got spanked with a slipper. That seemed normal shocking then not proper shocking.

Soft Cell, Human League, Japan.
Boys with wedge hair cuts and combs in their back pockets.
Other boys in eyeliner.
Wearing ra ra skirts and lace elbow gloves with big hair bows wanting to be Madonna or Bananarama.
Female singers who were there for their voices (Alison Moyet, Annie Lennox) not to be ornamental/sexualised.
Coal not Dole stickers on army surplus store khaki bags.
Thinking we were all going to die from The Bomb and listening to the 'surviving a nuclear attack' advisory (which i think was part of Frankie Goes to Hollywoods two tribes)
Choose life t shirts. Frankie says t shirts.
A bit of bully on a Sunday night.
3, 2, 1 and dusty bin.
Are you ready for Freddie?
Don't die of ignorance......