DON'T YOU WANT ME, EIGHTIES?

1980s REVISITED:NEW ROMANTIC: The infectious tunes and plastic pop from the likes of The Human League, ABC and Heaven 17 has aged surprisingly well, but its real importance was in acting as an antidote to the dour realities of the early 1980s

TO MISQUOTE Noel Coward, it's extraordinary how potent cheap synthesisers can be. Next weekend, three Sheffield pop groups whose heyday was more than a quarter of a century ago come to Dublin to shake a few euros out of the nostalgia tree. The Human League, ABC and Heaven 17 may have held onto their hair better than some of their contemporaries (including this writer), but their frothy synth-pop confections about waitresses in cocktail bars shooting poisoned arrows through your heart lack the enduring quality of such heavyweights as Dylan and Cohen, or so the received wisdom would have it. Not so, I say. Forget those croaky voices and menopausal lyrics and take a walk on the new romantic side of the street, where dandy highwaymen, girly boys and lamé-suited crooners sing bittersweet songs about modern love.

"Do you really want to hurt me
Do you really want to make me cry"
Do You Really Want To Hurt Me, Culture Club, 1982

As anyone of a certain age who's heard/endured a "Classic '80s" three-in-a-row on the radio will know, there's something strangely compelling about the plastic pop of the early 1980s. Is this just a Pavlovian reaction to certain noises we associate with the lost innocence of youth? Or is it due to the fact that half the music around right now sounds as if it was produced sometime between Ronald Reagan's first and second election victories? Add in the fact that everyone's talking about the current recession in terms of going Back to the Future (itself a quintessential 1980s product), and I'm finding myself transported back to a time when real men wore eyeliner and blusher in order to pose behind dinky little keyboards, their floppy fringes making it impossible for them to see what they were doing.

"It means nothing to me
This means nothing to me Oh Vienna"
Vienna, Ultravox, 1981

Once a given decade is out of the way, a secret cabal apparently meets to decide on a small number of banal pop artefacts which will represent that decade in the minds of generations to come. For the 1970s, the list includes glam rock, hideous wallpaper and very wide lapels. The 1980s got shoulder pads, mullets and loadsamoney. Of course, the list is vastly oversimplified, but it's particularly useless when it comes to the fractured, fractious 1980s. From rude boys to ravers, Madonna to Madchester, Public Image to Public Enemy, it was a febrile decade for popular culture, and damnably difficult to pin down.

Take the moment earlier this year when the BBC broadcast Ashes to Ashes, its 1980s-set time-travelling cop show spin-off from the hit Life on Mars. Where Life on Mars's evocation of 1970s Manchester - all sideburns, Sweeney-esque cops and Slade stompers - was almost universally applauded, nobody much cared for Ashes to Ashes' recreation of early 1980s London - all chrome and black interiors. It just didn't ring true. The 1980s were more . . . complicated.

"This town, is coming like a ghost town
Why must the youth fight against themselves?
Government leaving the youth on the shelf
This place, is coming like a ghost town
No job to be found in this country
Can't go on no more
The people getting angry"
Ghost Town, The Specials, 1981

The lines above from The Specials' Ghost Town epitomise the angry strain of anti-Thatcher British pop of the early 1980s. But they would do nicely as a national anthem for this country for most of the decade. Ireland was a place of low expectations, deep cynicism and stagnation. To say that life was lived in black and white would be unfair to black and white; my memories are of sludgy browns, dereliction, random violence and aesthetic collapse. Even the buses on Dublin's streets were painted the colour of excrement. The banknotes looked like joke money. And it was always cold, dark, and raining. Honestly.

The madder-than-mad political events that characterised the start of the decade - hunger strikes, multiple elections, Gubu, phone tapping, etc, might give the impression that this was a time of turbulence, excitement and change, and for some it may have been. But tribal politics, moral hypocrisy and nihilistic violence all contributed to a sense of gloomy paralysis.

Most of this stuff didn't necessarily impinge on daily lives. If you lived in Dublin, you could get access to contraception and you could choose to make your own decisions about personal morality (up to a point, admittedly, and not if you were gay). You could watch the BBC. You could go to see films that would be banned by the censor if they had ever been shown to him. But the sense that life was passing you by inevitably led to thoughts of leaving.

The outflow of young emigrants wouldn't reach its peak for several more years, but you could always emigrate in your head. Real life took place somewhere else. This was a period of major international events: the revived Cold War between the US and the USSR, dirty wars in Central America, the battle between resurgent Conservatism and trade unionism in the UK. There was no internet, and you had to queue in the rain to make a phone call, but you could still get a hold of the ideas that were changing other societies, for better or for worse: post-modernism; magic realism; hip-hop; privatisation. They just didn't seem to have much bearing on the endless dialogues of the deaf between conservatism and liberalism, republicanism and revisionism, that were going on here.

"Like fun and money and food and love
And things you never thought of
These are the things
These are the things
The things that dreams are made of"
The Things That Dreams Are Made Of, The Human League, 1981

Movies, books, print media and, most importantly, music offered a glimpse of a different way of doing things. There was no shortage of post-punk angst around to wallow in. But it was also a time of peacock pop music, sexual ambiguity and magnificently silly hairstyles. The future was being invented by skinny boys and girls in thrift-shop fancy dress. Gay and black subcultures were seeping into the mainstream. By comparison, Ireland felt like a provincial backwater. Homosexual acts were illegal and would remain so for more than a decade, but you could still listen to the radio and wonder what exactly Frankie Goes to Hollywood were on about when they sang "Relax, don't do it, when you want to come'. And "Choose Life" was a more appealing slogan in a cheerfully silly Wham! video than on a threatening SPUC placard.

Nobody had heard of globalisation, but it was happening, and in all sorts of unexpected ways. Revolution in Iran and war in Afghanistan released a flood of heroin onto the global market, which landed in Dublin at the start of the decade, arguably the most important event in the city's social history. Drugs, alcohol abuse and violence intersected in new and different ways. It's a widely accepted truism that we now live in a more violent society, but I recall Dublin in the 1980s as a dangerous place, where kicking someone's head in was widely regarded as a legitimate form of recreation.

"If I were to say to you
'Can you keep a secret?'
Would you know just what to do
Or where to keep it?"
Poison Arrow,ABC, 1982

There was a chasm between what people knew and what they could publicly say. We knew authority was being abused, but we had none of the details that would be revealed later. The black economy was everywhere, so it was logical to presume that the big boys weren't paying their taxes either. But where was the evidence? Petty power was something to be abused. Off-duty policemen staggered out of the Garda Club on Harrington Street, fell into their cars and weaved off into the night, with no fear of ever being stopped. The same gardaí seemed to own most of the mildewed flats and bedsits that constituted the only accommodation for people who didn't own their own homes. In reality, there was a class of people who were doing quite well for themselves out of a dysfunctional system, where the most important asset to have was "pull".

Below the radar, though, something was stirring. Love them or hate them, U2 were consolidating themselves as a major international band. More importantly, they chose to remain in Ireland, and their presence helped spur the development of an infrastructure for music and film production. In Derry, Field Day were interrogating the myths and realities of Irish nationalism; in Dublin, Passion Machine and Roddy Doyle were writing plays and stories about contemporary life - the sort of stuff you hoped to see on RTÉ but never did.

In Galway, somebody had the ridiculous notion that we could import the Mediterranean tradition of street festival to the rainswept streets of Ireland, and formed Macnas. Neil Jordan had made his first film noir, Angel, here, and had been savaged for taking the few available scraps of Irish film funding away from those who believed they deserved them (a typical early 1980s story of dogs fighting over bones). But he'd gone on to make two successful films in London. Amid the dereliction and out of exile, the future was being built.

" New York, London, Paris, Munich,
Everybody talk about pop muzik"
Pop Muzik, M, 1979

As the decade progressed, people disappeared, like supporting characters in a bad horror movie. Emigration is usually presented as a kind of national tragedy, and for some it undoubtedly was. But this wasn't the 1950s; most of the people who left had better educations than had previous generations. For many, the experience of living in more open societies with real opportunities changed their sense of who they were and what they could do. And a surprisingly large proportion realised that they'd actually like to come home at some point. Even more surprisingly, many of them would end up doing exactly that.

When did the 1980s come to a close? Apart, obviously, from midnight on December 31st, 1989? Decades never start or end as neatly as that. For me, it had all begun in 1979, somewhere between the death of Sid Vicious and the election of Charles Haughey as leader of Fianna Fáil. And it ended in November 1987, when Gary Mackay scored a late goal for Scotland against Bulgaria in Sofia, sending the Irish team through to its first ever football finals.

Was that the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning? I'm not sure, but there had been signs and portents all year: I'd seen my first Dublin mobile phone, the size of a breezeblock. Haughey was back in power, and had set Ray MacSharry's knife to work on the public finances. Change was in the air. Something was going on, even if we weren't sure what that something would be. Of course, it was the 1990s. But that's another story.

HEADY DAYS

The Human League, ABC and Heaven 17 perform next Sunday, October 26th, as part of the Some Days Never End festival, taking place at Imma, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. Tickets, €44.50, from www.ticketmaster.ie and outlets nationwide.