What is it with the Eighties?

I had a holiday this summer on the Isle of Wight that was blissfully relaxing except for the relentlessness consistency of the playlists. Whether it was in pubs, cafés and restaurants, at tourist attractions, in the live sets performed twice a week down the road from our holiday let, blasting out of open car windows, or through Bluetooth speakers on the beach, the vast majority of the songs were from the late seventies or eighties, interspersed with the occasional sixties tune. Even when we found an ice cream parlour by the beach that had a much more current sound world, about half the tunes in their playlist were covers or remixes of 80s tunes.

Now, I was an eighties kid, and I like a lot of this music, but it turns out that if that’s all I hear for three weeks, I start to get a bit stir crazy. I have been listening to a lot of jazz and classical music since I got home to cleanse my aural palate, and hope I will be able to re-engage with the era again in due course once I have recovered from the overindulgence.

The experience reminded me a bit of the offerings in theatres and music venues as we came out of covid. It seemed in later 2021 and 2022 that the majority of what was on offer was either a musical about a 60s/70s/80s artist, a musical concocted out of 60s/70s/80s tunes around some random story, a tribute act of a 60s/70s/80s band or singer, or – if you wanted to buy the pricey tickets at the big venues – an actual 60s/70s/80s artist on tour.

At the time I figured that this was a commercial decision: targeting people in their 50s and 60s as the most likely to have disposable income to spend on entertainment at a time when the performing arts, along with many other economic sectors, had been under severe financial pressure. And I’m happy to say that whilst we still see some of this stuff on offer, we are back to a world in which you can hear a healthy variety of live music round our city.

I had put the influx of eighties tunes into the world of contest barbershop over the past 10 to 15 years down to a similar dynamic of middle-aged nostalgia. Barbershop as we know it today was after built on the dewy-eyed recollection of pre-WWI music in the later 1930s. When I arrived in the subculture in the later 1990s, it was music from the swing era that was coming in as the daringly new happening thing, and by the turn of the millennium, people were starting to get excited about Beatles tunes. So a lag of about 40 years seems to be standard within the genre. You can arrange stuff that has come out more recently (as indeed I do with some frequency), but you’ll still be seen as validly up-to-date as a 20-something barbershopper performing music that dates from your parents’ youth.

There was also a strong preponderance of 80s pop in the repertoire shared by LGBT+ choirs at the Various Voices festival in Brussells this summer. I wondered whether this is in part because the 70s and 80s was the first time LGBT+ folk had the cultural presence to claim mainstream music as gay anthems; homosexuality had after all been illegal in the UK up until 1967.

But the fixation with the music of the late seventies and eighties goes beyond the particular meanings it accrues in specific subcultures, as my holiday experience goes to show. The world of music distribution has changed hugely in the last few decades, so whereas we used to have soundworlds delivered to us in clearly defined categories (so, current pop, golden oldies – i.e. popular music from your parents’ and grandparents’ youth, classical + token jazz for the three main BBC radio stations), we can now access the full gamut of recorded music from the past century, sliced and diced into distinctive playlists with varying degrees of imagination and/or automation. BBC Radio 6 is often quite wonderfully curated to exploit these possibilities.

This changing technological landscape is what allows music from 40 years ago to persist in our auditory environment. But why such a focus on this era in particular? Why was I not pursued around the Isle of Wight by the Beach Boys, or Ella Fitzgerald, or Daft Punk, or Taylor Swift? It can’t just be an age thing: the chap dancing to his Bluetooth speaker on the beach can’t have been more than in his mid-twenties.

I had hoped that by the time I had spent some time spelling out the question to myself I might have generated some ideas to contribute to an answer, but apparently I am to be disappointed about that. Anyway, if you have thoughts as to what’s going on here, I’d be interested to hear them. Or you can just keep me company in my bafflement.