Music and Me – 1980

Being indoors even more than I usually am, and seeing the never ending throwback posts on social media, and with it being the VE day anniversary stuff going on, it caused me to have a think back to what I listened to in the past. I specifically thought about 1980, forty years ago, a nice round number and how you’d like to remember things is often different to how it actually was.

It’s not unknown that I have quite a large collection of music, thousands of records, hundreds of thousands of mp3s, from all kinds of eras and styles. I’ve made hundreds of playlists based on these, including lists of what I consider to be the best tracks of each year since 1955. So my starting point was to look at the tracks I had chosen for my 1980 playlist. The playlist is as below.

• Detroit Spinners – Working My Way Back To You
• Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Geno
• Diana Ross – Upside Down
• Earth, Wind & Fire – Fantasy
• Human League – Being Boiled
• The Jam – Going Underground
• The Jam – Start
• Jona Lewie – Stop The Cavalry
• Kenny Rogers – Coward Of The County
• Lambrettas – Poison Ivy
• Lipps Inc – Funkytown
• Madness – Baggy Trousers
• Martha and the Muffins – Echo Beach
• Motorhead – Ace Of Spades
• Olivia Newton John & ELO – Xanadu
• OMD – Enola Gay
• The Piranhas – Tom Hark
• Prince – Dirty Mind
• Secret Affair – My World
• The Specials – Too Much Too Young
• Stacy Lattisaw – Jump To The Beat
• Stevie Wonder – Masterblaster
• The Vapours – Turning Japanese

I think it’s a good mix of rock, cool bands, late disco, Motown greats, mod revival and even country. It would be great to think that as a nine and ten year old that is the kind of thing that I would have been listening to, and owning at the time.

However, as I cast my mind back there are only two on that list that I would have been actively listening to at the time. There are some on there that I wouldn’t have even heard the song until some years later, and that I wouldn’t have known who the artist was at the time.

The Piranhas’ Tom Hark was a seven inch single I did have at the time and I would have played it to death. I knew all the words off by heart and would quite happily sing it (badly) on my way to and from primary school. The other one on the list would have been Kenny Rogers’ Coward of the County. This was on some random “hits” cassette compilation. The kind put out by K-Tel, Ronco, or Pickwick. I’m not even sure if it would have even had the original artists singing them. I have tried to find the compilation to find what it was called using Discogs. I knew what some of the other tracks on the cassette were (Blondie – Atomic and Jefferson Starship – Jane for certain, possibly Queen and The Police), but I’ve not been able to find it.

Back in 1980 most of what was being played on the record player was of an older vintage. Most of them were my mum’s old seven inch singles, or a handful of more recent ones. A couple of her albums were played as well, and perhaps even something from the handful of records my dad had.

There was a lot of music played in the house. It was in the days before breakfast TV hit our screens, so the radio would be on when we got up in the morning. It was Radio Two; we weren’t a Radio One household. We would watch Top Of The Pops most weeks, but memories of that is hazy. Most of what was played was on the record player, or an occasional cassette.

Even though there was a lot of music played, my obsession with music and records wouldn’t really kick in until 1983. I was given the Guinness Book of Number One Singles book, which I pretty much learnt by heart. Dates, artists, songs, record labels, writers, everything. Then for my birthday I got money to get myself a personal stereo. I got a bulky Binatone version of a Walkman, and from then on headphones went everywhere with me. I got caught listening to the radio at school, and the punishment was to write the top ten out from the chart update I was listening to. I got a bug to do that every week. From there I started backfilling, getting records with pocket money. But in 1980 I wasn’t in that space.

It was mainly about the box of seven inch singles in the meter cupboard in the front room. The record player was one of those old ones where you could stick a pile of singles on it, and it would work through them one by one, like your olde worlde version of a playlist. Or you could set it so that it would just repeat playing the same single over and over. This functionality was used a lot. And I’m sure it would have been as annoying as hell.

Of the singles we played there was nothing from the 1980 apart from the aforementioned Piranhas song. There were a few from the late seventies, Elkie Brooks, Racey, Billy Joel, Showaddywaddy (the big local band at the time), Don Williams, Rod Stewart, Barbra Streisand, Barron Knights (the precursor to my obsession with / love of Weird Al Yankovic), Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow. Most were from the late fifties / early sixties, and I got to know every word (or as I realised later, made up some of them) of songs by Pat Boone, Connie Francis, Curtis Lee, Elvis, Lonnie Donegan, Del Shannon, Dion, Peter Sellers & Sophia Loren, Neil Sedaka, Bobby Vee, Roger Miller, Ricky Valence, Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, Tom Jones, Len Barry, Englebert Humperdinck, Adam Faith and Eden Kane.

As well as the singles there were a handful of albums that got played over and over again, Elvis’s G.I. Blues, Well Respected Kinks, Dawn’s Greatest Hits, Darts’s Double Top and The Glenn Miller Story.

From all of these a lot of these songs made it on to the playlists I’d made for other years. To go alongside my “best of 1980” playlist I made a playlist from my memories of what I would have actually been playing forty years ago. The most difficult thing about that wasn’t finding all the songs, it was whittling the vast list down to the “most played” that would fit on the playing time of a normal CD – my standard set up when making playlists; one hour and twenty minutes as an absolute maximum.

This is what I ended up with.

            It isn’t as cool as the previous list, but it is accurate, and in reality, it would be rare to find a nine or ten year old where what they were listening to at the time wasn’t influenced by the rest of their family, and didn’t resemble what they would choose from the time in retrospect forty years later.