Mix Cover: Band of Susan’s ‘Love Agenda’ album cover. Released by Blast First in 1989
Banner Image: The Cramps.

This mix was originally put together in January 2003, together with Mix #1 – Top 20 Albums of the 80’s (UK). The idea of making mixes was back with a bang, some 15 years after the thrill of trading cassettes in high school. Digital was now entrenched in everything I did, so the time had come to rip all the cds and convert them to mp3s so I could feed the chunky Archos AV mp3 player station. Experimenting with Audacity and realising it featured crossover and fade in/out commands was the ticket to creating this and the #2 mix.

My fascination for the albums featured in these Top20’s haven’t changed. These are still the bands and the albums that I consider to be the most significant during these forming years. Most of them are among the very first records I ever heard and/or owned. They all relate to special moments during my growing pains, the unique 80’s, the parties and gigs, the girls, wanting to form a band, to influence others. This is why they are special, they were lived, experienced in the whole meaning of the word.

Growing Up in the 80’s

I was born in the 1970’s and spent my teen years in the 80’s, which I regard as the most revolutionary decade in music. Living through the 80’s is very different to learning about the 80’s. Early on I was exposed to a clear divide consisting of three very different stylistic factions: those who were into the past and weren’t adventurous at all, the scene supporting UK’s punk/post-punk and NYC’s no-wave, and those who preferred progressive rock and US radio rock/hard-rock/glam. I would give them all a chance, on the back of my youngest uncle Manuel’s love for 60’s spirited rock which influenced my early music taste. In the early 80’s, in Portugal… still oblivious to what was going on in the UK, I was delving in his records and discovering The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd, The Beatles and David Bowie… and then, clear as today, I listened to The Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and my world changed.

My preferences manifested from listening to these revolutionary 6 minutes of music: I was instantly attracted to a darker and more experimental side of music and I didn’t know yet but my first contact with Joy Division, a significant turning point in my life, was just around the corner.

Back in 1985 I changed schools and met a bunch of kids that were in bands and had all these new records from bands I never knew existed. By the time I first listened to Sex Pistols, Joy Division and Bauhaus – the holy trinity of my new music baptism – all of them had disbanded. Sid Vicious was dead. So was Ian Curtis. My most recent teen idol was dead before I got to know him… It was the strangest feeling: what was effectively new and exciting for me was either defunct or had transformed into something else so quickly that it was difficult to grasp at the newness when so much of the ‘old’ was still so fresh and relevant for teens growing up in rural northern Portugal, of all places. Thats the process of quick change in anything revolutionary right?

Discovering new bands and tape trading became an obsession. I would spend entire nights recording my favourite tracks to tape on my father’s trusty Pioneer hi-fi separates. I remember selling my ZX Spectrum console to buy records (I was never into games), a friend of mine crashed my Yamaha trial bike into a ditch and I channeled the money my parents gave me for the repair onto records, booze and drugs. My biggest issue then was to find ways to get as much as new music as possible for trading with the other guys. Whoever got the best tapes playing on a Friday night party was the coolest, and back then you were cool for dressing black, having an attitude and good taste in music, not for showing off the latest Nike sneakers or whatever a dime a dozen influencers on social media tell you. Looking back, this flourishing of the punk and post-punk movement, with its extraordinary influence on everything from fashion to politics had no parallel in the decades that followed and no subsequent, stubborn revivals of this phenomenon barely touched its true significance to those who lived it, then and there.

Already in my late teens I attend my first concert at the Tivoli in Porto, in December 1988. It’s Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Another magic moment in my life. I don’t remember the set list but a quick search online informs that the first song was ‘From Her to Eternity’ and the last was ‘Saint Huck’, my favourite songs from Nick at the time together with ‘The Carny’ from 1986 ‘Your Funeral… My Trial’ which they didn’t play. I have vivid memories of that day. It was July but it was raining, the small stage, Nick and Blixa antics during the show and the excitement of the crowd.

This gig was also fresh on the heels of the movie ‘Wings of Desire’ directed by German director Wim Wenders. The monochrome movie had been released early that year and had garnered cult status, no less because it shows the band playing two songs in a Berlin’s music venue basement (The Carny and From Her to Eternity). The band also makes a cameo appearance. It all aligned in a fantastic way that night. I was living the scene, ‘Wings of Desire’ style…, Nick’s slender figure, dishevelled black hair and black and white attire a reminder of how to look cool. Nick was the coolest guy in music those days (not Adam Ant) and even almost 40 years on, Nick still gets the love from his crowds as I witnessed a couple of years ago at the Primavera Sound Porto festival. Some of the most celebrated bands of the time would come to play in Portugal in the years that followed and I was lucky to experience unique performances from The Cure, P.I.L, The Sisters of Mercy, Echo & The Bunnymen and Killing Joke (opening for Pixies!) to name a few. Public Image Limited was a highlight, as I was very much into their sound around the release of Album in 1986 and it’s a memorable moment to any fan to witness a legend like John Lydon live.

It’s obvious that early on I was a sucker for the darker side in a flagrant contrast to the garage rock sound of the Buzzcocks, The Clash, and the like. As already mentioned, It took me a while to absorb all this new music and as I progressed with getting to know and listen to more bands my taste had already fall victim to everything that would resemble Joy Division and The Cure.

I preferred English bands but not of the immediate punk-rock type, I always admired the histrionics of post-punk and (some) goth bands for their fashion and theatricals, avant-garde sensibilities and non-rock influences. Being attracted to the Nouvelle Vague of French Cinema has had a great influence on that early path. Monochromatic cinema, a gloomy tapestry of emotional outbursts of misrepresented youth. It all had to align perfectly, image was everything. I’ll admit Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys and The Cramps only make this list because they were inside the first 10 albums I ever owned so their impact is of paramount importance (there was also some partying and beer guzzling not only moody, pensive strides in foggy forests). For the sake of coherence I would never mix punk-ish with Bauhaus or Cocteau Twins but this mix serves a different purpose.

On the theme of first ever purchases, there is this undeniable special character to these releases. I kind of learned to love these albums then because they were mine, I chose to buy them and I dissected every single track, the music, the lyrics, the themes behind the lyrics, then the inlay cards, the thanks list, the subliminal, often coded messages. All of this has now disappeared. It doesn’t make any sense to my kids. It is a shame.

By 1988-89 the music landscape had changed tremendously. I was pretty much done with post-punk, the scene was full of wannabes with bauhaus t’s and copycat bands still going were delivering terrible music. Production values had changed and a new crop of bands were experimenting, crossing over the boundaries of genre and delivering albums that are still seen as classics today. Some of the highlights come from bands such as the Stone Roses, Pale Saints, Spacemen 3, Coil, The Legendary Pink Dots… I was still fully committed to music coming from the UK but it was impossible to look away from what was coming from the US.

01/May/2020