When you’re young the concerns of your parents, teachers and any other authorities you come across seem trivial … how are you going to earn a living, avoid dying in some stupid motorcycle accident or be accepted into a university? No … Not worth thinking about. Far more important is the question of whether your hair should stick up or lie flat on your head.
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The music of your teenage years probably stays with you for the rest of your life. I think music is deeply connected with memory because of the emotions it evokes. People say that the year you first fall in love becomes the year with your favourite pop music. It’s the year that becomes the “good old days” when you look back. Music also helps to mark time because of the way the fashions and stars of pop culture come and go. The clothes and hairstyles the stars had at certain points are often enough for us to give an exact date to photographs, and I certainly associate some summers with particular records that came out while I was on holiday. But what’s really the best way to record your youth? Your favourite song, or a picture of the singer?
In my teenage years, one of the special things about Britain was the huge amount of information about music. There were 3 weekly newspapers about music: Sounds, Melody Maker and the New Musical Express. Buying records was expensive and it also meant making a choice – maybe the most significant choice known to the teenage mind. So it was wise to read about music instead, and in some ways, it was actually better as well. It was possible for a group to get onto the front cover of one of the music papers without even having made any records – but they absolutely needed things to say for the journalists to write about. In fact, the best pop stars of the 1980s were people whose main talent was exactly that. They weren’t great musicians or singers and they weren’t especially good looking, but they had a certain eccentricity and a nice way with clever phrases. They were ideal for filling music papers.
When The Face magazine first came out in May 1980 it was meant to be a rock magazine. I have given away or sold all the records I bought as a teenager, but I think my old copies of The Face will stay with me for ever. Although it started out as a source of information about music, the writers quickly realised that it wasn’t really the music that was important – it was the way people spoke and acted, and, above all, the way they looked.
The December 1980 edition began with an apology from the publishers for putting the price up from 60 to 65p, and they also used the title “The world’s best dressed magazine” for the first time. There were big photographs of some not very beautiful singers (Ian Dury and Paul Weller). There was an article about fans of David Bowie in Manchester and their favourite nightclubs. The fashion photographs had clothes made by the same people who were wearing them in the pictures, and who had their own stall in Kensington market “the team at Phrantik Psycho”. The stars, their fans and the people who made clothes and organised nightclubs were not so different from each other. In those days anyone with a bit of style and originality could start their own little trend. Being a well-dressed nightclubber was like being a star on a small scale…well that’s how I remember my “good old days.”
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Ojong Gerrald writes “The Face – 1980s Style Bible – is perfectly balanced. Not least because it incorporates the musical aspect, of which I am deeply in love as well, irrespective of genre, but the formulae used by some individuals in becoming what they wanted to be. Apart from the writer’s avidity towards music and being informed, there’s an ultimate quest for stardom.”
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Wikipedia: youth culture
BBC: Blast
BBC: Teens
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