This was great fun to do but arduous - as a staff writer, you had to do your Herculean bit for these big package features - there's about 40 or so micro-essays from me here, super-distilled little takes on phenomena, figures, fads of the '80s - some of my favoritest scenes and sounds, and some of my least favoritest scenes and sounds.
I'm not sure if any research as such was done - where could you go to do it in those days? There was no internet, there might have been some old magazines lying round the house, but no reference works on the '80s as such. So it mostly was all pulled from my memory, sharper then, and dealing with quite recent stuff - but still, no doubt some errors crept in there on the factual front.
Talking of errors - as they're non-bylined, and this is over thirty years ago, I'm like 97% certain these are all by me, but apologies if I've accidentally trawled in something by Stubbsy or the Studs.
Of course other writers got to do things I would have liked to cover, so it's not a total Zeitgeist-scan according to Moi, but .... not that far off, actually.
It's how I saw things precisely then - the winter of '89 - and not always necessarily how I see them today, or indeed how I saw them within a year or two of writing.
Come on - you made up Arsequake!
ReplyDeleteStubbs claimed it was him. I claim it was me. On this we will never agree.
ReplyDeleteAn English guy who appeared in the 3rd or 4th season of MTV's The Real World - the one set in London - said that his band played "progressive arsequake". Nearly fell off the sofa in surprise. This is about 1995 - long as we'd stopped using the term - and this limited currency felt like a belated triumph. Later in the series a drunken heckler at one of this chap's gigs got into a melee with the singer, who responded by French kissing him - only to get his tongue badly bitten by the drunken oaf. Nearly severed it was. That is some Gibby Haynes / GG Allin / Alan Vega type hardcore commitment to performance.