1980 - JR, Fred Housego, Our Tune, Yes Minister, Bad Manners, New Romantics, Metal Mickey, Baggy Trousers, the First Nudist Beach and "Walkies!"

The Rubik's Cube was released in May 1980 but did not arrive in England until just before Christmas. It was declared Toy of the Year by the British Association of Toy Retailers, but was in short supply until the spring of 1981. 
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Unemployment topped two million; the '70s hard times continued - not a Yuppie in sight. In December, John Lennon was shot and killed, sending his many fans into mourning. Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory to become President of the United States. The 1980s as we know them would never have happened without him.

Suddenly, just about everybody had the right to buy their council houses. Groan! But these were not the first council house sales. Council houses had been being flogged off for yonks.

Sales rose in the early 1970s with 46,000 dwellings sold in England and Wales in 1972 and 34,000 in 1973.

Before 1980, council house sales were discretionary. Councils which sold houses most actively were Conservative-controlled.

I lived in an area where council house sales were rampant back in the early 1970s. For more on this, see my 1970s blog here.
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The 1980 legislation introduced a higher discount rate and made the right to buy more universally available to tenants. 
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The BBC launched Children In Need. 

The Ecover company, makers of ecologically sound cleaning products, was founded in a small cottage in a rural town in Belgium in 1980. In 1989, Ecover products finally appeared on supermarket shelves and became enormously popular in England. 
 
England's first nudist beach opened on the 1st of April - in Brighton, where else? 
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The newly named and manufactured Rubik's Cube trademark was registered here on the 7th of May, but stocks did not start arriving until just before Christmas. It still made Toy of the Year.  
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Space Invaders, first exhibited at a London trade show in 1979, were beginning to make their presence felt.

We were a breadline family, living in a breadline area, and it was no use pretending that the 1970s had been a feast of fun. They had been a time of recession, strikes and rampant inflation. I hadn't even set eyes on "Pong" until the Christmas 1979 episode of George & Mildred. It was one of Tristram's pressies. Mind you, I had better-off friends and none of them had Pong either.

Computers were for boffins, Dr Who and making mistakes on utility bills as the 1980s began. It's amazing to look back on the way they've evolved since those days.

In 1980, just 5% of households in the UK had video recorders.

Trousers were trouble for many comp. school kids in 1979 and 1980. For years, we'd worn flares. Never questioned it. They'd been around since the hippie years of the 1960s and somehow got stuck. We didn't wear them because we were hippies - we regarded hippies as a '60s thing, and anybody calling us that would have got a mouthful - or worse. No, we wore flares simply because they "woz" fashion. And woe betide any kid who didn't wear them. There was a strong pack instinct on the council estate where I lived and you had to fit in. Or get picked on. 
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But, towards the end of the 1970s, fashion decided enough was enough, and so we moved into straight trousers. Or at least we did when we could afford it. The recession bit deep and it was a slow transition. There were still a lot of flares around in 1980. 
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The trouble was that in 1979 and 1980 whatever we boys wore in the way of trousers drew jeers from girlies smugly attired in skirts or dresses. If we wore flares it would be: "Flaredypops! Come on, pop pickers!" They had suddenly been relegated to the distant past. If we wore straights, there would be a sneered: "Ooh, I like your straights! Very fetching!" You couldn't win!

The Ska revival tightened its grip, with the film Rude Boy, and hits like the Beat's Mirror In The Bathroom and Stand down Margaret, the Selecter's Missing Words and the Specials' Too Much Too Young. The Ska look was so in and those Rude Boys were everywhere. 
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It was a golden year for Madness, which included several of their best-loved songs - Baggy Trousers amongst them. Oops Upside Your Head had us all doing the rowing thing down on the floor. The Nolans had a great year; Sheena Easton, Liquid Gold, Kelly Marie, the Cure, Adam And The Ants and Spandau Ballet all made their first chart appearances; David Bowie's Ashes To Ashes video was a New Romantic trailblazer; robotic dancing was increasingly popular. 
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Sheena Easton, Kelly Marie and a few others helped advance the notion of colourful boiler suits as fashion. Some called them jump suits, others called them flying suits. Kelly called hers a "cat suit". 
 
Er, no, that famous 1960s garment was rather tighter-fitting!

Of course, the bravest animals in the land were Captain Beaky And His Band, and the Korgis informed us that Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime. Still sends shivers down my spine, that song. 
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Buster Bloodvessel and Bad Manners were absolutely brilliant.

Disco had fallen victim to the "Disco Sucks" campaign in America in the late 70s, but over here we had no issues with it as the 80s began. The classic Let's Go Round Again and Stomp both charted, and we loved 'em.

In September, Ottawan gave us D.I.S.C.O.

Chas and Dave couldn't be described as disco by any stretch of the imagination, but in December they were very popular with Rabbit.
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Splodgenessabounds requested Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps Please. Did that poor bloke ever get served?

Our Tune began on Radio One's Simon Bates Show. 
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Also, over on Radio Two, the often controversial soap opera Waggoners' Walk, which had been on air since April 1969, was last broadcast in 1980 - all part of the BBC's cutbacks. More here. 

The saga of Ambridge continued in BBC Radio 4's everyday tale of farming folk, The Archers. Doris Archer died quietly in her armchair as actress Gwen Berryman was too unwell to continue in the role she had played since 1951.
 
Something called the Sony Stowaway crept into the country in 1980. In 1981 it would be patented here under its original name - Sony Walkman.

The number of illegal breakers swelled enormously in 1980 and a mass rally in London demanded the legalisation of CB radio - although some model aircraft users were worried that it would interefere with their frequencies.

CB radio was invented by American Al Gross in the 1940s and has been in use in the USA since the 1950s.

The Adventure Game began - green cheese rolls with Uncle the teapot on Planet Arg. Bliss. Yes Minister debuted and the pilot episode of Hi-De-Hi was screened - all three shows were treats from the BBC.

Hart To Hart first appeared here on ITV on January 27th. TV was more of an event in those days, with only three channels, and most of us looked forward to the first feature-length episode. Max, the Hart's friend and manservant, had the famous catchphrase "'Cos when they met it was murder!", spoken over the opening credits, but in the first series he said "I look after both of them which ain't easy - 'cos their hobby is murder". The better known version arrived later.

More about Hart To Hart here.

The Dukes of Hazzard, first shown by the BBC in 1979, which was also the year they debuted in America, moved to their legendary Saturday tea time slot in 1980.

In late 1979, a series listed in the TV Times as The Minder, starring George Cole and Dennis Waterman, began on ITV.

The show (which was, of course, simply Minder) was not an immediate hit. The format was tweaked over the next year or two, and the comedy element was increased (in fact, judging by a comment in a mid-1980s TV Times, the show's comic content was still on the increase then).

Read more about Minder here. 
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Not The Nine O'Clock News had begun in late 1979, but the first series had slipped by virtually unnoticed. The original team consisted of Pamela Stephenson, Mel Smith, Rowan Atkinson and Chris Langham. It was felt that Chris wasn't quite right for the show and so, for the 1980 series, he was replaced by Griff Rhys Jones.

Not... had arrived. 
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Blankety Blank was in its second year and 321 in its third. Both were extremely popular with viewers.

Monkey, shown on BBC2 on Friday evenings since 1979, was becoming a cult.

Family Fortunes and Play Your Cards Right began, as did Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World. In these programmes, Mr Clarke examined various mysteries of the world, usually ending by debunking them. "Do people really burst into flames for no reason? I don't think so." Well, that was a relief!

Juliet Bravo and The Gentle Touch began, flying the flag for England's female cops.

Ena Sharples made her last appearance in Coronation Street in April. Actress Violet Carson had had several long absences from the programme in the 1970s, due to ill health, and this was supposed to be another break. Consequently, there was no big send off for Ena. As Ena bowed out and left our television screens for the last time, Metal Mickey bowed in. Was this progress?!

London cabbie Fred Housego won Mastermind and became a national folk hero. Barbara Woodhouse was out for a "walkies". 
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David Hunter was shot in Crossroads and JR Ewing in Dallas. The latter sparked huge interest and "I SHOT JR" and "WHO SHOT JR?" T-shirts, stetsons, car stickers and badges abounded.

See here for more.

And what about Dallas spin-off, Knots Landing - which told the tale of alcoholic Ewing brother Gary and his wife Valene, as they attempted to find happiness away from Southfork? The Knots pilot episode was shown in America on 27 December 1979, with a full first season of episodes to follow early in 1980. Here, we had our first opportunity to visit the Landing in 1980. It was never going to challenge its older sibling, but it was intriguing enough.

More American pot boilers were soon to follow...

Madness

The '70s revival of the '60s scene brought about the creation of bands like the Jam, the film Quadrophenia and a revival of Mods and Rockers style. 1979 saw a ska revival bubbling up in the charts. Although Ska was a revival, the groups had a very turn-of-the '80s attitude.

A band which had had two very brief incarnations as The North London Invaders and Morris And The Minors became Madness in 1979 and were very much part of the ska revival scene when they first charted in the September of that year.

Madness soon brought us their very own "Nutty Sound", incorporating elements of ska, fairground music and other things. The Madness logo seen above seemed to be everywhere in the early 1980s.

The band launched themselves on the brand new decade with gusto - and were the first band to appear on Top Of The Pops in 1980, performing My Girl on 3 January.

From the Daily Mirror, 6 May, 1980:

Sheer Madness! Nutty Band Drive The Fans Crazy

Madness are a crazy gang of cheerful loons who live up to their name.

Their outlandish brands of lunacy drive the fans barmy.

And that bouncy, ska-type music - the "nutty sound" they call it - has shot the odd-ball group to success.

Their album "One Step Beyond" has sold more than half-a-million copies.

The seven-man outfit from North London used to waltz on stage doing the "nutty train", a ska-type conga. Now they have a new trick - the "nutty pyramid", with all the guys hanging off each other. They've nicknamed themselves "The Flying Fellinis".

Nuttier still, says Chas Smash, was the group's Spanish version of their hit single "One Step Beyond".

"We heard a Spanish group was going to do a cover version so we thought we'd get in first. None of us can speak Spanish but we learned the words for that."

Chas, 21, was a fan who used to jump on stage and bop away.

They couldn't get rid of him - so he was drafted into the group.

Now he's the leaping, lunatic resident dancer.

Madness got together as a group two years ago.

It all started as a bit of a giggle - something to do on a Saturday night.

In those days most of the guys were musical novices.

Lead singer Suggs - real name Graham McPherson - had such a lousy voice he was kicked out of the band at one point.

Gradually they got better - and persistence paid off.

It's all got beyond a joke now. People actually take the group seriously.

They finish their current twenty-date British tour on Saturday.

Then it's off to Europe for another tour, back here for more dates, and then into the studio to record more nutty sounds.

It just shows what can happen when you take a joke seriously!

Madness did not subscribe to Pink Floyd's Another Brick In The Wall theory that school teachers were out to subdue and mould their charges. Suggs thought that his teachers had found school as much of a drag/challenge as the pupils. So, in 1980, the band came up with Baggy Trousers.

Loved it. Still love it.

All together now: "All the teachers in the pub, passing round the ready-rub, trying not to think of when that lunchtime bell will ring again!"

Talking of school days, Madness saw me through the final years of my compulsory education, and out into the world of work.

Those early '80s school days seem a very happy time. In retrospect. Rubik's Cubes and fags in the bike sheds. Young love and Adam And The Ants. And our gorgeous year tutor. She was a highly attractive and witty woman. And when I meet with old schoolmates now we're still known to drool at the memory of her.

Her wit was legendary. One hot summer's day, she requested that somebody open one of the windows in the classroom. Usually known for my sluggishness (and greasy hair and zits) I flew to do her bidding. Said Mrs B: "Good heavens, Andrew, you'll have a leg fly off behaving like that!"

On another occasion, in the fifth year, my mate Chris came in sporting a large love bite.

Said Mrs B, as she passed us in the corridor, "I'd kill that ferret of yours if I was you, Chris!"

Happy days. Lots of laughs at school. And then home for gloriously unsophisticated grub like sausages, instant mash and baked beans and then Crossroads...

Our House In The Middle Of Our Street...

From the Sun, 16 October, 1981:

Madnificent seven can't miss

By Nina Myskow

MADNESS may be nutty, but they are certainly not daft. Our Baggy Trouser boys are no red-nosed clowns.

No band can score with NINE consecutive hit singles and just be a bunch of buffoons.

Because that is exactly what the seven-man North London band have achieved.

Their single, Shut Up (Stiff), is the ninth Top Twenty hit in a row. Their new album, Madness 7 (Stiff), is perched solidly at No 5. They just cannot miss. So what next?

Lead singer Suggs, 20, says: "You just write the songs, record 'em, release 'em and they go up the charts. Failure is the only thing left!"

Their career is now taking off in another direction - into films.

On Wednesday, "Take It Or Leave It", the story of their early years, was premiered at the Gate Three Cinema in Camden Town. Their local.

The boys put up half the money for the film, £250,000.

And, after the mad movie, thee was a family knees-up in the Dublin Castle, the Camden pub where they first found fame - and shot the final scene of the film.

The boys loved every moment of the nutty nonsense.

Suggs said: "A year ago, we got a bit tired of all the silliness. People expected us to behave like idiots, sort of on-tap loonies. We struggled against it, but in the end we realised that people must take us as they find us."

I find them smashing. They haven't changed a bit from the day I first met them almost two years ago.

Lee Thompson, for instance, is unlike the average wealthy star.

Not for him the flashy Rolls-Royce. Instead, a pushbike.

Thompson says: "I could get a maid to do my washing and that, but I don't want it. You could get lazy like that. I like to wash my own socks."

Suggs says: "The film is based on fact. It has been exaggerated and dramatised a bit. but that's how it was. The only slight problem was that only a certain number of non-Equity members were allowed to act. Some of our Mums and Dads and friends are played by actors and actresses, which is a shame.

"Our work is fun. We love it - as long as the music goes on getting better and better."

And as long as they go on having fun they'll keep on going. The Magnificent, MADnificent Seven.

There was a trend in the early-to-mid 1980s for covering jacket lapels with badges - tiny button badges were particularly popular. Favourite subjects were pop groups (I was a Madness freak), Rubik's Cubes, CND, Greenpeace and slogans like "The Only Good Tory Is A Lavatory".

Our brilliant Nutty Boys simply couldn't help churning out classics. House of Fun, that wacky tale of an attempt to make an important first purchase at the chemist's, was Number One in the pop charts when I left school in 1982. Years later, Suggs described Madness as "The Fagins of the schoolyard," and certainly the band was extremely popular with me and the other lads down at the local comp. We continued to follow its glorious pottiness avidly after we left, too.

In 1982, I walked through the school gates for the last time and out into the big wide world. Memories of the time are surrounded by a strange fairground-type aura, probably courtesy of Madness being at Number One, and their lyrics being on everyones' lips, and deelyboppers, which arrived at the same time!

Deelyboppers - bonkers fashion for 1982! 

Thoughts of Madness bring back happy memories. And their lyrics weren't always simply nutty. Remember Embarrassment?

If you're a Madness fan, you probably find that their lyrics can pop into your head at any moment. I do. Only last week, I managed to make several pretty large errors at work. My colleagues frowned. My colleagues scowled.

And for the rest of the morning I was singing to myself: "Now pass the blame and don't blame me..."

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 07/08/2009. UPDATED 18/8/12

Buster Bloodvessel And Bad Manners

I loved Buster Bloodvessel and Bad Manners - one of the best things to ever happen to our pop charts. This is the Special Brew picture disc - cheers, Buster!

Here, Buster demonstrates posh nosh for the 1980s on Tiswas - pork pie broken up into a jar of pickled onions and swigged down straight from the jar. Yum!

The Sun, 8 July 1981 - and Buster Bloodvessel and Bad Manners are kicking up their Doc Martens for their version of The Can Can. Bliss. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...

FRILLY BUSTER

Can-can your eyes believe it?

Big, bald, beefy Buster Bloodvessel, the lead singer of Bad Manners, as a can-can girl?

If you saw last week's Top Of The Pops they certainly can-can!

Buster, 22, is notorious in the pop world for looking outrageous.

But this time he has really done it. He turned himself into an ooh-la-la lovely to celebrate Bad Manners' sixth hit single, Can Can, which shot to No 3 in just ten days.

I was invited to Buster's final fitting of the bouncy, frilly frock.

There was our pin up-in all his glory. A lurid, yellow, shiny frock festooned with petticoats and ghastly black lace.

And poking out from under it all, his massive Doc Marten boots.

It took dressmaker Roz Tosh about twenty minutes to get round him. At 5ft 9in he measures 46-42½-45.

Our hero grinned and flexed his muscles.

Buster said: "I've always fancied the Can Can dancers - very ooh-la-la - but it wasn't until I heard the original version that I realised we should do it.

"Orpheus In The Underworld it is, actually.

"It came on the car radio one day when I was driving to a mate's home. It just blew my ears off.

"The others were as knocked out by it as I was."

Bad Manners have hardly put a foot wrong since.

The nine-man North London band have had little bovver when it comes to hits.

Buster (or Doug as his friends call him) is a nice, cheerful, friendly, fun bloke.

"Of course I'm happy," he said. "Of course I'm jokey. You have to be when you walk down the street and can hear people shouting 'Look at that fat bloke with the bald head'."

Buster lives at home with his mum in Stoke Newington, North London.

"We are all on £60 a week, so there's no way we can be flash on that," he said. "But I'm not complaining.

"I couldn't be happier. I couldn't give THIS for money."

And with an almighty effort he whooshed his right Doc Marten boot up in a kick as high as his head.

Roz said: "I'm thinking of offering his dress to Lady Di when Buster's finished with it."

It could always double as the marquee for her wedding reception!

The Sun again, October 23, 1981:

O Buster!

A Superman hit means he's quids down!

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's... Buster Bloodvessel!

Pop's loveable bruiser donned his Superman suit this week after losing a £10 bet over Laurie Anderson's smash hit O Superman.

Bad Manners lead singer Buster, 23, says: "I went round to a mate's house a couple of weeks ago and he was playing this weird record called O Superman.

"He was jumping up and down, saying, 'Listen to this. It's going to be a big hit.'

"With great wisdom I said, 'Pull the other one.'

"It's a smashing record, but I never thought it would be a hit. So I bet him a tenner.

"Now it's at Number Two, and it looks like it'll soon be Number One!"

But Buster - real name Doug Trendle - is taking his losses lightly.

This week, Bad Manners notch up their fifth Top Twenty hit with Walkin' In The Sunshine (Magnet), and their new album Gosh It's Bad Manners has hurtled in at number 26.

What's more pop's unlikeliest pin-up looks set for a lucrative career in advertising.

He says: "I have to shove my head every morning. And I figured that since I use so much shaving foam and razor blades I might as well get paid for publicising it. Makes sense, dunnit?

"So I wrote off to a couple of companies and, would you believe it, they're interested.

And he is writing to the Milk Marketing Board (he drinks pints of it) and to every beer company (he drinks gallons of that, too). But his greatest ambition is to promote picked onions. He says: "Pickled onions are unbeatable. My trick is to open the jar, eat half the onions, then stick a pork pie in and shake it about a bit before swallowing the whole lot down. Lovely!"

British audiences will be seeing a lot more of Buster and the boys on stage. The nine-man band kicked off a marathon British tour last night in Birmingham.

They are playing 23 gigs in as many days and Buster does not deny that even his legendary energy will be sapped.

The boys drink "a few crates" before each performance and Buster downs six pints afterwards.

"Otherwise," he says, "I would be in danger of losing my figure." Beefy Buster has never considered his rippling 18 stones to be a problem.

He says: "I never used to think about my size until people started saying I was fat.

"But I don't care. My Beauty is part of my irresistible charm to women."

The Sun's Gossip Column revealed exclusively this week that Buster has been asked to pose in the all-together by a woman's magazine.

Buster still lives with his parents in Stoke Newington, North London. He would love to buy a place of his own, but he is in no rush to marry.

He says: "I'm a young lad yet with women dropping at my feet - literally.

"I might be big and bald and beautiful, but it's my boots they go for!"

"Shall I Take You To A Restaurant That's Got Glass Tables..."

The piccy shows a 1980 sew-on patch. Why don't we ever hear the likes of Mirror In The Bathroom on the radio these days?

"I'll Spread Manure In Your Bed Of Roses...

FANTASTIC!!

Oi - Rude Boy - don't forget yer titfer!

1980 was a seriously Ska'd year.

The 70s interest in the 60s scene brought about the creation of bands like the Jam, the film Quadrophenia and a revival of Mods and Rockers style. 1979 saw a ska revival bubbling up in the charts. Although Ska was a revival, the groups had a very turn-of-the 80s attitude.

Madness were very much part of the scene when they first charted in September 1979, but soon brought us their very own "Nutty Sound", incorporating elements of Ska, fairground music and other things. The Madness logo seen above seemed to be everywhere in the early 1980s.

"Government Leaving The Youth On The Shelf..."

We'd had over a million unemployed in Britain since the early 1970s. Rising to around one-and-half million by 1979. Now, in 1981, it was over two million and rapidly rising and the government did not appear, to many, to give a damn. All the Tories cared about was bringing inflation down. Inflation itself was in a dire state several years before Thatcher came to power, of course. 

The brilliant Ghost Town by the Specials, on the famous Two Tone label, captured the mood of frustration and decay - and Lefty 'paint the mood as grim as possible' wordings tried to convince you to vote Labour next time around. But the 'Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?' lyrics struck hollow. We'd never danced and sung in a 'boomtown' in the financially dire 1970s, whichever party was in power. However, in the 1980s, Thatcher appeared to be to blame for everything. And the blame was often deserved. But the lyrics didn't always make sense. When the '80s boom happened a few years on, the Lefties denounced boom towns as being disgusting. Flipping heck, what a conundrum the 1980s were...