Everything 80's

Yeah that Young Ones episode was brilliant-Rik, Mike, Vyvyan and Neil go into a pub(where Vyvyan discovers his loudmouth mother is working) and they are playing a tune. Rik goes up to Suggs and says "Do you know Summer Holiday by Cliff Richard?" to which Suggs replies "You hum it, and I'll smash your face in!" and then a throwaway line(missed by the audience) by Ade(Vyvyan) "It's a complete embarrassment"(or something like that) I think they appeared in two episodes.

How many of you remember the MIX-TAPE? That piece of plastic with tape in it that held all your favourite tunes recorded from your records, tapes and in some cases from off the radio. I used to record my favourite records onto tape calling them SUMMER SOUNDS which will give you some idea as to when I would play them-either by Walkman or in the car, forcing my father to actually listen to 'the rubbish' I listened to-well it certainly beat the umpteenth playing of Frank Sinatra or a speeded up version of a Harry James trumpet tune(which I absolutely hated with a vengeance) which he used to swerve the car to-it's a wonder we survived a journey at all.

Anyway to get back to the Mix tape. It was great to take this little piece of plastic pleasure around with you and if you had it in your pocket you would also take it to your mates' house to listen on his stereo system. Speaking of making things yourself my friend and I used to record a tape each Christmas - a diary of what we had got up to that year backed by appropriate music and sound effects(I had 3 albums of sound effects and tv themes) and then we would send it to Australia to our old schoolfriend.

Did you make one? Where did you play it? Which were your favourite records to put on them?

The mix tapes I made at the end of the 80s were all metal bands,the usual suspects I've mentioned before but with some slightly more obscure stuff added like Taurus and a great band called Oracle.
I got a fantastic Sony walkman with two headphone ports for Christmas '88 which I still have to this day and still works.I recall that my tapes used to chew,the reason being that I put too many songs on each side of a 90 minute tape.

My older sisters were very much into 80s pop,they had stuff from Erasure,Eurythmics,Yazoo and most of the other big chart acts of the time on their tapes,they always played them in their cars if they drove me anywhere which was awful as I couldn't escape.

Yes, I remember doing this also. There was a group of us that would try to out do the other by creating the best compilation tape but it was a bloody nightmare when they would chew up in the machine. I'd be scrambling like mad trying to stop it from going any further and it was even worse when it was my only copy but it was great fun.
Later on I did the same thing but using the free cd you'd get with Kerrang magazine and Metal Hammer as some of the tracks were awesome and some not so good so I'd make a compilation of those on tape aswell.

My friend, mentioned earlier, used to test me out on 80's tunes by recording 20 openings of songs and I would have to name each one from the intro. I used to get about 18/20 incidentally.

Watching reruns of Top of the Pops on BBC Four it struck me that even with all the technology that existed back then they still insisted on acts miming- for instance you had Five Star singing 'Can't Wait Another Minute' and dancing about and singing at the same time, which is not easy to do. At one point it was obvious they were miming but you were distracted by the moves. They were compared to the Jackson Five and at one point I think were invited to meet with Michael Jackson. The five were: Doris, Delroy, Denise, Lorraine and Steadman.

Those TOTP repeats are terrible,just a bunch of crap acts miming badly to crap songs.Makes me sick.
I remember Five Star appearing on Going Live and participating in one of those phone ins with Sarah Green.Some young chap called in and shouted “Why are you so fucking shit" or words to that affect before being cut off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_of_the_Pops#Miming

(16-01-2019 13:52 )rpj316 Wrote:  Those TOTP repeats are terrible,just a bunch of crap acts miming badly to crap songs.Makes me sick.
I remember Five Star appearing on Going Live and participating in one of those phone ins with Sarah Green.Some young chap called in and shouted “Why are you so fucking shit" or words to that affect before being cut off.

Yup his name was 'Elliot' and he had a dog with him. However it was worse much later on in the 90's with Saturday Superstore with Mike Reid(Reed?) and the group Matt Bianco came in for abuse as well.

When watching the re-runs I didn't realise that you could watch BBC Four on non-HD channel because all the channels on Sky moved about last year, so when watching I get the HD version with a screen size that we used to have and it is quite a lot smaller than I remembered it but then the screen fitted the picture back then. This happens with anything on any HD channel that was before the late 90's when widescreen was introduced.