Back in the day...

I ache so much today! I've been wandering round like an old woman, think it's due to spending all of yesterday in soaked jeans. Going to go and have another nice relaxing bath in a bit, but thought I'd do today's blog entry first. I've got Steve to thank for the inspiration for this, we were having a bit of a YouTube nostalgia-fest last night and as I know he thinks I have an appalling taste in 80s music, I thought I'd play up to it for a while. I sent him a Patrick Swayze clip from Dirty Dancing and one of the tunes listed below, but on being threatened with a "3 strikes and you're out" policy, I moved onto the 6th-form era stuff, which met with rather more approval, and inspired a musical theme for this week - I will take you through a brief journey through some of the bands which have influenced me (and, more dubiously, my fashion sense).

Makes sense, I think, to start at the beginning, so rewind back to 1984 when I was eight.

WHAM!

The first great band of my youth. We were all mad about them at school, probably after seeing this video on Top of the Pops. Everyone coveted one of those "Choose Life" T-shirts (don't worry, I never had one), and from the amount of jealous evils given to Pepsie and Shirlie, I think lots of 8-year-old gaydars were a bit under-developed. In 1985 I bought my first single (Wham's "I'm Your Man") which had a silver sleeve with a multi-coloured stripe on it, not sure what happened to it but I treasured it for ages!

Then, moving on to 1986, we reach the phenomenon that is Five Star. I think I still have the cassette of their album somewhere, and I probably should apologise to my parents for the amount of times I made them play it in the car on long journeys. Looking back at some of their videos though, I'm not convinced that identical red sequinned jumpsuits were altogether a good look? Apparently some of them are still in a pared-down version of the group, although I saw a picture of Stedman (the elder boy) a while back and he looked really creepy, I never trust a man who has thinner, tidier eyebrows than me. In fact, one of the blokes off of the groups on X-factor is going that way, but I digress. Will save my views on male grooming for some other time.

Tomorrow I will move up to senior school and 1988, any guesses who I was mad about at that time?