This week I listened to Mishal Husain searching for the word ‘Dewberry’ on the Today Programme and then the mellifluous tones of Steve Wright as we were reminded of what an entertaining DJ he was following the news of his death. The Body Shop and Steve Wright in the afternoon on Radio 1: a couple of the lynchpins of my teen years during the eighties. A time when Bananarama sang about a cruel summer and Robert de Niro whilst looking they’d just been pulled out of the nearest hedge, and boy bands wore make up without us batting a frosted blue eyelid. How we wanted to run our hands through their gel-solidified hair!
The Body Shop’s ‘Dewberry’ and ‘White Musk’ didn’t really draw me, probably because I was already committed to Impulses’s Musk in its slim gold aerosol. This would be applied liberally whilst listening to Wham. Before long I graduated to a more sophisticated iteration: Yves St. Laurent’s Rive Gauche. I can still picture its blue, black and silver striped container, containing the promise of escape from the West Midlands.
No, what drew me in The Body Shop was their peppermint foot lotion. Perhaps it was because this was the era when foot spas were a big thing. I don’t know why I thought a foot spa was de rigueur, but mine was what you might call in the ‘basics’ line i.e. it was a spare plastic washing up bowl filled with warm water and Fairy Liquid. After sitting for an age watching Wonder Woman or The Fall Guy, allowing the prunification of my feet, I would then slather them in gloopy pink peppermint lotion. This resulted in either skating along the kitchen tiles or collecting fluff off the carpet.
There was also the cucumber eye gel too which, although refreshing, left me with tacky skin and itchy eyes. This was as nothing compared to the Clinique phase where I discovered that a day in the sun (I am of the generation where a light oiling of Hawaiian Tropic Factor 5 was deemed protective) followed by drenching my face in their clarifying lotion had a paint stripper effect. I met a friend for a drink and could feel my face burning, then met my reflection with horror under the harsh strip lighting of the ladies’ loos. I was aglow, but not in a good way; an intense angry red.
There’s what I call a ‘taupefication’ going on now. Whether it’s clothes and dressing like a caramel latte (which is rather lovely) or babies being stuck in beige rooms wearing beige clothes, playing with beige toys to fit in with their parents’ aesthetic (imagine them being shown Elmer - their tiny minds would go into meltdown). The eighties were brash and bold. It was clashification.
I have a photo from my first school trip to Belgium. My friends and I looked like we’d escaped from a life-sized packet of M&Ms. I’m wearing a neon-yellow oversized shirt, sleeves rolled up (thank you, Duran Duran’s John Taylor) with a low slung belt over the top, a turquoise pencil skirt and a huge necklace that looks like some sort of fossil that has been unearthed. Just to keep things balanced, the make up is equally as loud: electric blue mascara teamed with a vivid purple iridescent lipstick. Absolute class. It would probably now be accompanied by some trigger warning for the stylistically sensitive.
Anyone remember the Miners brand of make up? I had their yellow eyeshadow. Yellow! Obviously I was going for the jaundiced or faintly bruised look. Undeterred by the yellow phase of experimentation, I also had some red eyeshadow that just made me look like I had a really bad cold or a severe rash. White lipstick too! The effect of that was to take your teeth to a sickly shade of yellow and erase your lips completely, or make you look like a fast bowler. Who can forget the unctuous cherry lipgloss sold in Boots, in a glass rollerball, guaranteed to attract your hair like iron filings and make you feel slightly nauseous as you ended up ingesting most of it. Yes, we looked like a fright as if we’d been to an orgy in Tony Hart’s art studio, but we did look distinctive from one another in our own amateur way. We weren’t plumped and contoured looking like a walking AI bot. Our zits still shone through the sparkly blusher.
While we were painting our nails white (not always with Tippex) or rainbow shimmer, we were listening to Steve Wright on Radio 1. When I texted my husband to tell him of Wright’s death he replied, ‘Oh no! That’s the voice of my Radio 1 childhood.’ It was for so many when we listened to and watched things at the same time as a collective source of reference. Classroom banter would often centre around impressions of Mr. Angry and we all coveted our own posse as Wright had his. His unmistakeable voice wove its way into our teen DNA somehow. The show was fun, chaotic, but always there. Many A level revision afternoons were lifted by his show as I left the world of Bronte and Hardy to take an afternoon bath (the decadence) listening to Wrighty laying down the eighties bangers.
The outpouring of love there has been on X has been wonderful to see, and, as is often the case with these things, you can only hope that the person knew how much they were loved and appreciated when they were alive. The beautiful segment devoted to him at the end of Newsnight really brought home what a positive influence he had.
So, I imagine a significant cohort of us have been transported back to the smells and sounds of the eighties this week, to the time when we were finding out who we were, even if we did look gloriously godawful while doing so.
Ha! No problems ‘taking up space’ with those shoulder pads and thank goodness I didn’t get near a candle with that pink shirt!
Love the 80’s fashion pics!
I think I looked almost exactly the same! 😂😂😂