In her new memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen, the pop musician Tracey Thorn bristles at how the decade in which she first became famous is lazily remembered. “Scenes which I never witnessed in my life - yuppies chugging champagne in City wine bars, toffs dancing in puffball skirts to Duran Duran – have now become the universal TV shorthand used to locate and define the era,” she complains. Thorn’s book is in part an alternative history of the 1980s: one populated by political rallies, “Meat Is Murder” and “Dig Deep for the Miners” badges, benefit gigs and literate musicians with an Indie DIY aesthetic like herself worrying perpetually about not “selling out”.
A
new, publicly available digital archive just released by the University of
Sussex, Observing the 1980s, aims to give substance to this subterranean
history and helps to free the decade from the simplifications of popular
memory. Among other resources, it brings together contributions by the
volunteers who wrote about their daily lives for the Mass Observation Archive
in that decade. The attitudes of these writers seem more passionate and
polarised than we are used to today. “The Tories will get in again and if we
were ten years younger we would emigrate,”writes one Mass Observer on the eve
of the 1987 election. “The appeal to greed and self-interest, which
characterises the approach of the Tories, is disgusting bordering on the evil,”
declares another.
The
archive also includes a selection of 1980s ephemera, mostly radical pamphlets
about travellers’ rights, the Poll Tax or the “assault on the unions” created,
in the days before desktop publishing, with typewriters and Letraset. They are
a reminder that much of the radicalism of the 1960s survived into the 1980s,
alongside a brief flowering of countercultural creativity and political
activism among students (in the last age of full maintenance grants) and the
growing ranks of unemployed people.
Here,
in place of yuppyish hedonism, we find a moral and political earnestness that
is alternately funny and touching. In 1987, for instance, the alternative
newspaper the Brighton Voice gave a platform to a “men’s anti-sexist group”
with a strict code of behaviour aimed at not intimidating women in public,
including“wear bright clothing so you can be easily seen – do not creep around
in silent footwear” and “carry a paper or magazine on public transport so you
have somewhere to put your eyes”.
Thorn
recalls her own fixation on remaining politically “authentic” with a mixture of
fondness and bafflement. When asked by the teen pop magazine Smash Hits in 1985
about the last book she had read, she told them: The British in Northern
Ireland: The Case for Withdrawal. When, she wonders, did this ideological
intensity disappear and everything had to be seen instead through an “ironic
tinge”?
There
are whole books still to be written about this collective mental shift. But
Lucy Robinson, one of the historians involved in the Observing the 1980s
project, hints at one reason when she points out that this was the last decade before
the internet. The Google search gave us a way in which we could skate over the
surface of cultural and political life, slickly knowing a little about a lot of
things. Perhaps it also gave people an internal edit button as they feared
guileless or undeveloped ideas could be shot down quickly by internet flaming.
Nowadays, an unusual book choice for a teen magazine might be ridiculed in an
avalanche of Twitter retweets.
We
like to give decades a uniform character as they retreat into history, safely burying
the past by turning it into retro kitsch. The Observing the 1980s project is
valuable because it does not treat the decade like this, as a story we already
know the ending to. Instead it becomes an era of still-to-be-decided tensions
and possibilities - one in which people sincerely people that David Steel might
be prime minister (“my pin-up!” says one Mass Observer), that Margaret Thatcher
might lose an election, or that the neo-liberal economic revolution might still
be reversed. How I miss that sense of earnestness – and I mean that without a
trace of irony.
Where can I learn more about what you are doing? I was born in 1982, and have, of course, grown up with the Internet. I feel my intelligence is largely as you describe: knowing a little about a lot thanks to a quick search. Furthermore, I know next to nothing about the heart and soul of the 80's, precisely because it is often written off as a neon-washed era of excess. Tell me more.
ReplyDeleteI'm far from being an expert on the 1980s but the best book I've read about it is Alwyn Turner's Rejoice! Rejoice! if that helps.
ReplyDelete