What was life like in the 80s?

[Strangerthanadeadting]

As a recent fan of Stranger Things and having only been four years old at the end of the eighties, I'm fascinated to know what life was like for teens & adults back then.

It's depicted as being so much fun on TV. So colourful, the music is brilliant, the fashion so vivid. It was a time before the Internet, social media, plastic surgery, the Kardashians.

I'm fascinated. I'd love to hear what life was like. What people did for fun, what they ate, how different a working day was, if it really was as glamorous as it looks, if the hairstyles took forever, what people thought the future would be like? Was it a better life? A better time?

The 80s hold special memories for me growing up - I was 12 in 1980 & loved the music, totp, swapping cassettes, recording compilations.

Films were great, borrowing vhs, going to the cinema.

Loved the 80s

What a brilliant thread OP!! Well, I was 16 in 1980!

The thing that really stood out for me was the sense of community, that I think has maybe disappeared in the digital age. From about aged 20 me and my BF would go to various local pubs about four times a week and there would be about 15 people we knew in each place. At weekends we always went clubbing and there was always an after party at someone's house afterwards (clubs closed at 3am).

This may be outing but I lived in Brighton at the time. Such an amazing place to grow up. It was teeming with wealthy gangsters on the one hand plus loaded young Iranian men fresh from the Ayatollah taking over who'd fled with their family's money (both of whom who we avoided). It gave the city a real edge.

It's all gentrified now and the crime has all but disappeared and house prices have gone through the roof as Londoners have swarmed in. It's made it a nice place though bring up children though!

Anyone remember the US teen series 'Wizz Kids'? Must have been early mid eighty's, about a bunch of crime solving teens that were wizzes on computers

Graduated from TOTPs to the much cooler Tube in the eighty's, Paula Yates and Jools Holland

Great films, The Breakfast Club, St Elmo's Fire, Pretty in Pink... yes I had a thing for Andrew McCarthy

One day in the late 80s i woke up on a sunny day and just did not feel like going to school . So i didnt Had a lie in and around 11am stuck a tape in my tape player. Years later i was trying to remember what this tape was that i had But i couldnt All i could remember was the first track was Burn It Up Also Superfly Guy Dont Make Me Wait and I Love My Radio. This past weekend i got a little help elsewhere online.

It was this.

www.discogs.com/Various-Beat-This-The-Hits-Of-Rhythm-King/release/388828

Eighties

How did i get so old so quickly

I was 14 in 1980, went to the local comprehensive, there wasn't all this choosing which secondary school you went to, you went where you were sent. We didn't have uniform, we went to school in what we wanted. Most of the teachers were rubbish, they didn't want to be there any more than the kids did, there were one or two good ones, I can remember one teacher sending me to the shop for his cigarettes & another that if you got him in an afternoon you knew he would have been in the pub all lunchtime & just let us do what we wanted as long as we left him alone. I left school in 1982, on the last day we were all herded in the dining hall & basically told to f off & don't come back, the only careers advice I got was to be told how to sign on the dole. I left school at 10.30 on a Friday morning & I signed on at the dole office at 11.30, I got £15.50 a week & when I was 18 it went up to £22.50 a week, I thought I was rich, I gave my mum £5 a week for my board & the rest was mine. I got a job at the Inland Revenue when I was 18 as a clerical assistant, I was only supposed to be a temp for 7 weeks but ended up staying 27 years. When I first started we didn't have computers, everything was done by hand on paper, everything was kept in big files, we wrote out all the tax returns & notices of coding, packed them all in envelopes, some times of the year you could be spending all day every day just copying details from record cards on to forms to be sent out. All post was sorted by hand & any letters were dictated to go to the typing pool to be typed. Twice a day the clerical assistants had to go round the whole office, collecting mugs to make tea & coffee, we had to boil up a big urn for the tea & a massive pan of milk for the coffee, it was unheard of for higher grades to make their own drinks. Temps got paid every week on a friday, we actually got cash in a brown envelope, my first wage was £64.50, when I got made permanent I went on to monthly paid, I got £216 a month after tax & national insurance.

My first proper boyfriend used to get a wage packet in a brown envelope too! This was early 90,s though, i.was asking dh how he got paid in various jobs ,some where cash ,some cheque and some by bank transfer he's 18 months younger than me so this would have been 90,s too ,I have only ever been paid by bank transfer but I worked first in a nursing home , and than in the NHS for 20+ years .

I remember helping Dad count out the wages for all the farm workers - he had all the brown envelopes across the desk, wage slips on top, then lay out the notes and coins from the biggest denominations to the smallest, till each one had the right amount and was put into its envelope and sealed. Before he got to that pint, he'd done all the calculations and deductions on the wage slips. By the end of the '80s, most of them were on BACS, and there were far fewer farm workers anyway (mechanisation,) and I stopped helping as I gained homework, but probably more of an understanding of what wages really meant and the notes and so on were more meaningful than just untold riches (because farm workers don't actually get paid riches at all.)

At the age of 13/14 I was really into aerobics. My sister got a Jane Fonda vhs for xmas. The entire family watched it after xmas dinner instead of the BBC xmas film.

I was totally hooked, I used my Christmas money to go to m&S and brought some shiny aerobics wear. I had two all in one lyrca body suits, got some leg warmers and a pair of trainers from Freeman Hardy Willis and I was all set.

Every day after school i would do at least an hour of aerobics, months later I discovered a Kathy Smith vhs in WH Smith and spent twenty pounds on that.

My parents used to shout upstairs "bloody hell is that a herd of hippos in your room" 😂😂

Imagine if you lost your wage packet of had it stolen ! Must have been awful.

I remember my Dad coming home on a Friday in the early 80s with his brown wage envelope and handing it straight to my mum to do all the ‘housekeeping’.

One Christmas they overspent and I remember my mum crying because they only had five pounds to get shopping in between Christmas and new year. No credit cards.

We used to go to my paternal grandparents every boxing day my uncle ( who still lived at home as he was a young thing then ,just had his 65th birthday😳)Managed to get hold of a Pirate video of ET for all the kids to watch , it was really bad you couldn't make out anything but me and my sister and all our cousins were fascinated and very impressed !

It's funny, my mum always says it was a terrible time to be a teenager. She says none of them had a hope of getting a job and they were all terrified of AIDS. She remembers those tombstone ads really clearly.

We used to have lots little bowls of peanuts, crisps nuts in shell ,s you had to crack ,dates and them sugered lemon and orange slice things lying on the mantle piece between Xmas and new year .

Oh, and she was scared of nuclear holocaust also. I just checked. 😂

Yes they terrified everyone i left school in 1990, people ( from my school.at least) either went on to college or did a YTS , s few had secured jobs but there was a soap factory and paper mill in my town that took on school leavers .

I was mid teens to early twenties in the 80's.

Music was great. I loved shoulder pads and permed hair.

I remember getting to 18 and asking my mum why mortgage lenders would lend less to women than men. I think it was something like 3.5 times annual salary for men and 2.5 for women.

My first interview for fulltime work in 1985 included the question of whether I had a boyfriend and intended to get married and leave to have babies. This was for an NHS job. But I got the job which paid £54 a week.

There was the stuff like pp's have said about no mobiles, we phoned from home. People wrote more letters.

But yeah, the music was great.

Imagine if you lost your wage packet of had it stolen ! Must have been awful.

Yes, but I think you just learned to take more care of important things. Crime is nothing new, so you took precautions. You certainly wouldn't have just put it in the back pocket of your jeans like people do with their iphones - you'd put it in an inner jacket pocket with a zip.

I remember my first wage packet - the boss used to come round just before lunch on Friday. First thing I did at lunchtime was go straight to the bank to pay most of it in, and just kept back a bit of spending money for the weekend. I was VERY aware of the risk of theft or loss so didn't carry it for any longer than I needed to.

My Mum was of the era where she had little pots of cash for all the different bills and savings. Same idea - Dad came home with his weekly pay - handed it to Mum - teatime Friday evening ritual of putting fixed amounts of cash into each pot and then "hiding" the pots in all kinds of weird places in the house in case of burglary.

One of the seismic things for me that happened in the 80s was the rave scene changing everything in the latter years.

It started off in London at a club called Shoom in 1988 and my sister used to take me when I visited. By 1989 it had spread to the provinces and it really did change our nights out.

Until then everyone used to spend a lot of time and money on outfits, there was always a set dance that everyone copied on the dance floor and men only chatted to women they hadn't arrived with if they were trying to pull them.

Then literally overnight we all started wearing baggy t-shirts and jeans and doing our own thing on the dance floor. Ecstasy tablets were a massive part of it and although I rarely took them they really made the atmosphere friendly rather than predatory.

From what I've heard recently clubbing has become like a giant orgy these days - not sure how I'd cope with that as a late teen!

Payday was always Thursdays in the places I worked. I think the the theory was that it was less likely to get spent in the pub before it was handed over.

It was recognisably similar to now, but rubbish - more bigotry/sexism/casual racism, homosexuality was largely invisible (there was experimentation with gender presentation etc but the assumption was still that everyone was straight by default), much less world food, and just less information leading to provincialism and ignorance compared to now. People's entire access to knowledge and the outside world was four channels of tv, public libraries, bookshops/book clubs through the post, and magazines/newspapers. General stuff like headline news, sport, fashion, celebrity etc were well covered in that, but specialist deeper knowledge and things from other countries/external perspectives were extremely limited.

I was too young for the real rave scene@OccidentalPurist. I was 13 in 1990. But it resonated! I listened to pirate radio and went to house parties in 89/90/91, then started clubbing in 92.

I remember doing my make up with 28 yr olds in the toilets at raves and thinking how weird it was that these old people were still raving 😆

No phones, looking back was the biggest thing for me. I was 7 to 17 in the 80s. Spent a lot of time in my push bike playing outside with my mates. In fact I was hardly home, but dossing around with friends down the 'subway'

For me the 80s were

Pushbikes
Bomber jackets
VW badges
Rap music
Rave music

Oooh what is great memory trip this thread is!

I was 11 in 1980. My family were pretty comfortably off and my parents were adventurous. We had a camper can that my dad built and used to have long European holidays in the school holidays. The early 80s consisted of ponies, dancing to Duran Duran, Nik Kershaw and the likes (my first record was Don’t You Want Me?) while wearing RaRa skirts or leg warmers. Skirts were measured at school and had to be below the knee (I’m actually glad when I look at how kids wear them now!). I taped the Top 40 off the radio, stopping the tape when Tony Blackburn spoke. I listened to Timmy on the Tranny (Timmy Mallet) on Piccadilly radio every night. My dad was a computer engineer and he designed us a games console even before they were in the shops (it only had a tennis game, but everyone played it and thought it was so cool). Because my dad was so into technology we had the first microwave oven (a salesman came to the house to tell us about it and said females shouldn’t stand near it when it was on) and also the first CD player (which would only play 10 tracks!). I did GCSEs at school. I did a YTS when I left school for two years, earning £27 a week in the first year and £35 in the second. I sneaked into clubs at 16 (god knows how as I looked so young!!). I had curly permed long hair.

I left home at 18 and went to college. Music started to go downhill in the late 80s when Stock Aiken and Waterman took hold, so I got more into indie music like The Cure and The Mission or The Wonderstuff. In 1989 I went to work abroad for the first time. With no email and very expensive phone calls (and flights) it felt like I was a million miles from home.