The Point Of No Return

At what point in one's life do embarrassing songs simply stop being embarrassing? And why? When we were children we would happily bop about to pretty much anything with a beat (how else to explain the constant popularity of inane dross like the Tweenies, Take 5, Sportacus, etc etc...). And then puberty struck, and everything reduced us to paroxysms of squirming, particularly if our parents liked it. In fact, as I remember, you were only allowed to admit you liked songs/bands of almost proscriptive obscurity - if you'd caught the name late at night on John Peel and nobody else had even heard of them yet, that made it all the cooler. And if they ever got into the charts, you had to stop liking them immediately and whine about how they'd sold out. In my day it was tantamount to social suicide to admit you liked anything that could even vaguely be categorised as "disco" (ie anything poppy with a beat), which led to a huge crisis at parties - in the event that you did anything as uncool as dancing, rather than sneering in eyeliner from the edge of the room, there was very little you could actually dance to. Gothy posturing to Joy Division hardly counts, as it's more in the ballpark of "I will now portray Anomie And Social Despair through the medium of modern dance".
So - when was it that the disco rot started creeping in? I have a memory of a distinct turning point in my second year at college, when I shared a huge house with (among others) a girl who would unashamedly start a Saturday night off with "Never Too Much" by Luther Vandross. It was all downhill from there. And once you've conceded that Abba are possibly the finest popsters in the world, and you stand up to be counted, admitting with barely a blush that you know all the words to "When I Kissed The Teacher", well, the primrose path to Shameless Musical Leanings beckons. Rapidly you find you actually know the dance to Bucks Fizz's "Making Your Mind Up". You play the Nolan Sisters at parties. And songs such as the one below are greeted with whoops of delight rather than the general slinking off in shame that they deserve. Go on, admit when Marks and Spencer used it in an advert you were actually pleased to hear it again...

That old devil called 80s nostalgia

Obviously like most people my age (99 years old as per my Profile, oh yes - get them celebratory telegrams ready for later this month when I turn 100), I can be reduced to weedy girly tears by a song I haven't heard for ages - and nowhere is this more apparent than in the new BBC series "Ashes to Ashes". No, the BBC is NOT paying me for plugging it, or I'd be doing this blog from a cosy Eames chair in a 10th floor corner office at Broadcasting House rather than perched on a rickety Ikea barstool out the back of a bookshop. AAAAAAAnyway. As is de rigueur (that's yer actual french) for anything set in the 80s, the soundtrack is BRILLIANT and so far has hit every single button - I can only assume someone My Age has sat there rubbing their tiny hands with glee and going "The Clash? Check. The Associates? Check. Bowie? Huh, read the title, divvy." HOWEVER. And this is where you realise you're driven by Nostalgia rather than Taste. It's when you hear the first 2 seconds of a song and feel the tears well up, and start frantically texting your dearest mates (all of whom are also watching due to an inexplicable but hormone-heavy crush on the sexist dinosaur that is Gene Hunt) going "Jon & Vangelis! I HATE this song!!!" despite your, by now, frankly snot-ridden sniffs of emotion. Yes, it is a truly awful song, the worst and laziest of New Age saddo music for Euro-weenies to seduce beyootiful laydies to, but having not heard it for (thankfully) a billion years, I found myself actually WHISKED back to 1981 (or nearest offer) and scrabbling around frantically for my electric-blue batwing-sleeved jumper, hair waffleriser, and pixie boots. I have mixed feelings about watching the rest of the series now (those of you reading this from abroad, i.e. not the UK, Google it - it's fabulous and will shortly be remade very badly in many other countries.) - I am no longer even pretending to follow the plot, I'm simply cruising hypnotically from one musical nostalgia trip to the next.