1980s: a photo-essay
May 28, 2009
It was a late afternoon in August and they were strolling towards me along K Road and I recognised them instantly. We'd been clubbing at A Certain Bar and seen Danse Macabre in Parnell and the Screaming Blam Matic review at Mainstreet and sunk martinis at Le Bom. Except that my memories were more than twenty years old and the group of kids filling the sidewalk would have barely been born. They only looked like they were there at the time, with their RayBans and fluoro and small feet and big hair. They were perfect reproductions: they'd just dialled the look up. Mine was a disconsolate double-take. The 1980s were over. The 1980s were back.
So did we not look stupid then? Because the fashions look brilliant now and the rehashed blippy pop sound has saved the dance floor now that rap has wrapped and the oonst has run out. Miami Vice has been remade and Brideshead Revisited has been revisited. The music industry is once again threatened by copying technology (having survived, er, cassette recording). Global warming is poised to destroy the world that the nuclear arms race did not. And now, perfectly, the stock market has once again gone up like the Hindenburg. This isn't a revival of the 1980s: this is a re-enactment.
The 1980s was an era of extremes in that things were either taken too seriously or not seriously enough. Historians point to the era's tumult (Springbok tour, Queen Street riot, political correctness) but my memories are nothing but frivolous (dance mixes, nightclubs, cocktails the size of a lamp). The 1980s were up and funny because ignoring reality was the point.
There was a lot of it to be ignored here. Week nights were boring. Villas were old. City living was for eccentrics. You couldn't buy a drink on a Sunday. But for a moment the aesthetic of wealth was easily faked. Our Pacific locale was chic. Decor that cost a fortune to staple up in Trader Vic's was a bob a penny at Cook Street market. Duran Duran blew millions filming the videos for Rio actually in Rio. Sucked in: we could just hire the Spirit of Auckland. We were close to the sea and credit cards didn't need to be paid back.
I can see why kids are mad for the 1980s. They see it as a time of style, colour, brightness and energy. They are wrong, of course. We had to wait for music to be freighted in while they can download the very same tracks with a click. We queued to flick through month-old copies of the NME in Whitcoulls while they can Google articles for free. Anyone who says victory is sweeter for being harder won never had to secure a postal money order in Sterling to pay for a Rough Trade single. That's all really good music, by the way: the heavy, squarish stuff gathering dust under the bed.
A question, then, for the generation born after Return of the Jedi: will you ever experience such nostalgia? Floating on social networks, with your digital images and your social sites maintaining every moment on artificial life support, your youth has the potential to remain constantly accessible. How will you miss it if it never goes away?
My 1980s have been fading with the media I'd stored it on: Xerox photocopies and mix cassettes. The only moments that were truly preserved were the photographs, which I planned to get around to some day but never did. It was only after my brush with my not-friends shambling along the sidewalk that I realised now might be the time.
Digging out the old negatives and scanning them, I counted three formats (126, 110, 35mm) and four stages of nostalgia:
1. Thinking you were cool.
2. Realising you weren't.
3. Realising you were, kind of, but not for any of the reasons you imagined.
4. Realising it's gone.
I'm currently locked in the fourth quarter. I should be making fun of such easily mocked images but the memories they provoke are paradoxically distant and comforting and more than a little melancholy. I didn't even think I was old but I guess by definition I must be. Damn.
Much later after these images were taken the buildings we lived and partied in would be knocked down and we would peer through the gaps and see, finally, how small and crappy things really were. But that was later. Now, strolling past in the opposite direction, the 1980s look pretty good.
(Sunday magazine, 2008)
So did we not look stupid then? Because the fashions look brilliant now and the rehashed blippy pop sound has saved the dance floor now that rap has wrapped and the oonst has run out. Miami Vice has been remade and Brideshead Revisited has been revisited. The music industry is once again threatened by copying technology (having survived, er, cassette recording). Global warming is poised to destroy the world that the nuclear arms race did not. And now, perfectly, the stock market has once again gone up like the Hindenburg. This isn't a revival of the 1980s: this is a re-enactment.
The 1980s was an era of extremes in that things were either taken too seriously or not seriously enough. Historians point to the era's tumult (Springbok tour, Queen Street riot, political correctness) but my memories are nothing but frivolous (dance mixes, nightclubs, cocktails the size of a lamp). The 1980s were up and funny because ignoring reality was the point.
There was a lot of it to be ignored here. Week nights were boring. Villas were old. City living was for eccentrics. You couldn't buy a drink on a Sunday. But for a moment the aesthetic of wealth was easily faked. Our Pacific locale was chic. Decor that cost a fortune to staple up in Trader Vic's was a bob a penny at Cook Street market. Duran Duran blew millions filming the videos for Rio actually in Rio. Sucked in: we could just hire the Spirit of Auckland. We were close to the sea and credit cards didn't need to be paid back.
I can see why kids are mad for the 1980s. They see it as a time of style, colour, brightness and energy. They are wrong, of course. We had to wait for music to be freighted in while they can download the very same tracks with a click. We queued to flick through month-old copies of the NME in Whitcoulls while they can Google articles for free. Anyone who says victory is sweeter for being harder won never had to secure a postal money order in Sterling to pay for a Rough Trade single. That's all really good music, by the way: the heavy, squarish stuff gathering dust under the bed.
A question, then, for the generation born after Return of the Jedi: will you ever experience such nostalgia? Floating on social networks, with your digital images and your social sites maintaining every moment on artificial life support, your youth has the potential to remain constantly accessible. How will you miss it if it never goes away?
My 1980s have been fading with the media I'd stored it on: Xerox photocopies and mix cassettes. The only moments that were truly preserved were the photographs, which I planned to get around to some day but never did. It was only after my brush with my not-friends shambling along the sidewalk that I realised now might be the time.
Digging out the old negatives and scanning them, I counted three formats (126, 110, 35mm) and four stages of nostalgia:
1. Thinking you were cool.
2. Realising you weren't.
3. Realising you were, kind of, but not for any of the reasons you imagined.
4. Realising it's gone.
I'm currently locked in the fourth quarter. I should be making fun of such easily mocked images but the memories they provoke are paradoxically distant and comforting and more than a little melancholy. I didn't even think I was old but I guess by definition I must be. Damn.
Much later after these images were taken the buildings we lived and partied in would be knocked down and we would peer through the gaps and see, finally, how small and crappy things really were. But that was later. Now, strolling past in the opposite direction, the 1980s look pretty good.
(Sunday magazine, 2008)