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Nine Memorable 1980s Pop Parodies

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The HeeBee GeeBees

One adjective you couldn’t use about 1980s pop is ‘boring’. The music had way too much character and the artists too much physical presence for that.

But 1980s music culture was easy to lampoon. And there was so much mainstream TV to do the lampooning, from ‘Not The Nine O’Clock News’ and ‘The Goodies’ to ‘The Kenny Everett Video Show’ and ‘Spitting Image’.

And across the pond, of course, there was ‘Saturday Night Live’. Then there were the radio spoofs and specially-constructed ‘bands’ like The Hee Bee Gee Bees. All in all it was a golden era for satire.

So here we round up some classic spoofs of 1980s music, with a few recurring subjects…

9. Not The Nine O’Clock News: ‘Happy Crappy Nappy Song’
Inane pop pretenders or joyous post-punk tunesmiths? If you thought Altered Images were the former, Pamela Stephenson and pals pretty much nailed the Glaswegian band’s shtick right here.

8. Stevie Nicks: ‘What The Hell Is She Saying?’
Who the hell is responsible for this classic?

 

7. Not The Nine O’Clock News: ‘Nice Video, Shame About The Song’
It’s the naughty gang again, this time brilliantly skewering early ‘80s pop videos, particularly the work of pioneers Russell ‘Vienna’ Mulcahy and David ‘Ashes To Ashes’ Mallet.

 

6. The Hee Bee Gee Bees: ‘Quite Ahead Of My Time’
Angus Deayton, Phil Pope and Michael Fenton Stevens brilliantly lampoon David Bowie’s 1976-1980 era, with nods to ‘Golden Years’, ‘Ashes To Ashes’, ‘African Night Flight’, ‘Fashion’, ‘It’s No Game’ and even ‘The Secret Life Of Arabia’. There’s also a touch of Eno and Bowie’s ‘point to some chord signs with a baton and get the band to play them’ Berlin-era modus operandi about the music here.

 

5. Spitting Image: ‘We’re Scared Of Bob’
Lyrically and musically spot-on, and also highlights the use of minor celebs in ‘We Are The World’ and ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’.

 

4. The Kenny Everett Video Show: The Bee Gees
Ten years before Clive Anderson’s disastrous TV interview, Kenny nails the inescapable naffness of the Brothers Gibb.

 

3. The Hee Bee Gee Bees: ‘Too Depressed To Commit Suicide’
The first of two Police pastiches, Messrs. Deayton, Pope and Fenton Stevens (apparently with amusing lyrical input by Richard Curtis too) offer a great distillation of their sound, somewhere between ‘Walking On The Moon’ and ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’. Also check out the delicious piss-taking of Stewart Copeland’s penchant for adding ‘delays’ (echoes) to his drums.

 

2. Weird Al Yankovic: ‘Velvet Elvis’
Not as good as the previous track – his voice is pretty poor – but musically it’s pretty damn sharp.

 

1. Saturday Night Live: Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder
Just a timeless classic…

Any classic ’80s parodies missing here? Leave a comment below.

Sinead O’Connor: Nothing Compares

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It’s easy to forget just how massive Sinead O’Connor was back in the early 1990s. Her remarkable voice, forthright views, striking looks and of course THAT ‘Nothing Compares To U’ video made her a household name on both sides of the Atlantic.

But there’s also no doubt she was one of the most provocative and outspoken pop stars of her generation, then virtually ‘cancelled’ due to her very public stance on the Catholic Church. ‘Nothing Compares’, a superb new documentary from director Kathryn Ferguson, reinstates O’Connor to her rightful place as important artist and fearless trailblazer.

Ferguson nods to Julien Temple’s classic Sex Pistols doc ‘The Filth & The Fury’ by relying on O’Connor and her friends/collaborators to narrate her story off-screen, while using a huge collection of archive material and home movies – much of it previously unseen – to drive the narrative.

There are troubling details about her childhood shot through with some remarkable footage from the Magdalene Laundries. O’Connor escapes Ireland as soon as possible and we cut to the exciting London live music scene of the mid-to-late 1980s with spellbinding archive of her in her pomp, an artist who absolutely has to make music.

Then there’s a fair deal about her early dealings with the industry, and a lot of it isn’t pretty – to say that the male record-company paymasters do not come out of this period well would be a huge understatement. Interview footage of the time shows her to be softly-spoken, polite and intelligent, even during a Gay Byrne chat show in the presence of her parents.

And then we revisit the 18 months or so when O’Connor was virtually persona non grata in the USA, courtesy of her extraordinary appearances on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and the Bob Dylan tribute concert. If you haven’t seen these moments, I won’t spoil them for you, suffice it to say that if Pussy Riot carried them out today they’d be seen as cutting-edge protest/performance art.

A minor criticism of ‘Nothing Compares’ would be that it ends very abruptly – we don’t hear much about O’Connor’s life and career post-1995, but no matter: it leaves recent docs about Bowie and Leonard Cohen in the dust. It’s moving, exciting, important and a must-see.