The return of the ‘80s playboys

No, of course I didn’t watch the whole of tonight’s broad­cast of The Brits. Don’t be silly. After all, not only would I com­pletely fail to recog­nise Bey­oncé or Alicia Keys if either of them sat next to me on the bus, but I’m also of the opin­ion that The Dark­ness are a sure sign that we’ve all gone so far with the know­ing irony that we’ve finally come out the other side and are now applaud­ing the plain awful.

I’m obvi­ously miss­ing out on some­thing, but frankly I don’t care. As part of my slow and grudging accept­ance that I’m due to reach the age of (oh, good grief) thirty-three at the end of July, it’s time to accept that I’m simply too old for the Brits. I am gradu­ally turn­ing into the sub­ject of that old com­edy sketch about your par­ents watch­ing Top of the Pops. These days, I’m the sort of per­son who would prob­ably tell a gang­sta rap­per that it’s actu­ally spelt ‘gang­ster’, and advise him that he would have learned to spell prop­erly if only he had stayed at school rather than hanging out in the hood with his hom­ies. Or something.

How­ever, the age factor (for want of a bet­ter term) was also the reason why I decided to keep The Brits pro­gramme on in the back­ground, at a reas­sur­ingly low volume, whilst I did other more use­ful things. Yes, you’ve guessed — it was only so I could catch the per­form­ance by Duran Duran, as they received their spe­cial award for ser­vices towards uphold­ing the glossy fairytale of the cham­pagne life­style dur­ing the 1980s. Would it — heaven for­bid — seem like the heady days of 1984 all over again?

I was never a huge Duran Duran fan, but they were an almost con­stant pres­ence on the radio and on the cover of Smash Hits dur­ing my form­at­ive years, so I wanted to see what the reunited ori­ginal line-up were like now, simply for old time’s sake. Sad, isn’t it?

And, er, I sup­pose I should also con­fess that Nick Rhodes was the focus of one of my first youth­ful pop star crushes. It was all in the way he stood so ice cool and com­posed behind his rack of key­boards, and the fact that he car­ried off wear­ing make-up far bet­ter than the rest of the band.

After watch­ing their ten-minute greatest hits set, I think I can sum up Duran Duran’s per­form­ance in one word. Ter­rible. Simon Le Bon, never the greatest pop singer, soun­ded like he was in phys­ical pain and flail­ing around to find most of the notes. Roger Taylor, the drum­mer who went off to be a farmer (it was farm­ing, wasn’t it?) looked per­man­ently shell-shocked, which is under­stand­able if he’s spent the inter­ven­ing years with only a herd of cows for com­pany. John Taylor was at least mak­ing a vali­ant attempt to pose in an ‘80s rock-star style, but it looked vaguely embar­rass­ing — and long hair doesn’t work on a man of his advan­cing years. Andy Taylor was utterly uncon­vin­cing in his bar­gain base­ment attempt at being Keith Richards. And Nick Rhodes … well, dif­fi­cult as it is for me to accept, the truth is that the formerly lovely and some­what effem­in­ate Nick appeared to be dis­guised as an aging drag queen. Oh, the horror.

Of course, it’s not all about the image and the looks (except that, in the case of this par­tic­u­lar preen­ing bunch of fops in their hey­day, it was almost entirely about the image and the looks). Even the mem­bers of Duran Duran get old. So I could have for­given them everything else if only the music had been worth listen­ing to. But it wasn’t. All I could hear was the sound of shiny, glisten­ing ‘80s pop being made over — or done over in a pub car park, to be more accur­ate — into a lum­ber­ing rawk noise.

This was the sound of middle-aged men decid­ing that squeal­ing, twiddly gui­tar solos are a sign of how much they mean it (man) and how tal­en­ted they have sup­posedly become as musi­cians, rather than the sound of mascara’d men with cheap syn­thes­isers who have just dis­covered a new pre­set that goes “wheee-oooo!” and hap­pen to know a couple of old Roxy Music riffs.

From now on, I think I shall be avoid­ing any ill-advised ‘80s band reunions if all they’re going to do is wreck my child­hood memor­ies in such a cruel and heart­less way.

Aside: Gosh, that Justin Tim­ber­lake sounds ever so camp when he speaks, doesn’t he? Who knew?

Related link: Whilst writ­ing this entry, I was des­per­ately try­ing to remem­ber the source of the hugely inap­pro­pri­ate Duran lyric about someone being as “about as easy as a nuc­lear war”. After a search in Google, I dis­covered the offend­ing item on a site that is a per­fect example of a ‘labour of love’ — the kind of web­site you never actu­ally real­ise you need until you acci­dent­ally hap­pen across it. Yes, ladies and gen­tle­men, it’s the A — Z list of Songs About Nuc­lear War from the Eighties. Hmm, how handy.