I can’t remember where I first heard it from, I think it might have been the great Scottish philosopher, Brian Limond, who pointed out that the current nostalgic aesthetics for the 80s, all purring neon and synthwave sheen, never really happened. My memories of the time involve a lot of brown rooms, brown pubs and carveries, brown shops, brown kitchens, even the first McDonalds in my home town was brown. It was only the virtual worlds of cartoons, pop music, comic books and video games exuded that day-glo fluorescence that has become the rote aeshetic for nostalgia for the 80s we sought to escape from. The browner the space, the more it felt like violence might erupt from it, be it a clipped ear or a glass to the temple. Sundays were the worst because the only things on telly were politics, God, football or the Smurfs. When the TV beamed less brightly then the brownness of the room seemed to take over like an invasive species of moss. We all felt an urge to escape the space because we had no way of conceiving that we were trying to escape the time. Maybe that’s why Back to the Future hit like it did – how it became possible to climb into a car that perfectly illustrated the hubris of the decade and blast off into a 50s with mild, PG racism or a perfect future where Jaws 19 played at the cinema, a future I still feel cheated of. Sometimes I find myself stranded in a place that the brownness never left like an orbital boozer or community centre, and every joint in my body is poised for escape back into another genre of Thatcherite dystopia – into a world that is almost the same in many ways but everybody carries their own synthwave day-glo utopia in their pockets or palms. Where we are bovine creatures blinkered with distraction rather than a product of our immediate environment.
5/8/2025