What is it about the eighties that we find so appealing? On the face, there’s little to venerate. Popular transatlantic culture stood in thrall to the bitter tang of Thatcher-Reagan consumerism; rarely has there been such a gap between the reality of everyday living and the counterfeit glamour of existence as painted by popular media. Musically, until the latter part of the decade when house music began to creep into our consciousness and Appetite For Destruction took an axe to poodle rock, the blandly unchallengeable homogeneity was staggering.
The eighties of course was the time in which music, TV, film, and radio began to converge, but first the conditions had to be right. Accordingly, from the beginning of the decade the various strands of post punk originality were quietly suffocated by an industry that needed more compliant and marketable faces to use on it’s new promotional vehicle: Music Television. The concept of the promotional video was hardly new, but it's transformation into artist maker was surely the biggest revolution in teenage life since the 45.
Few could argue that without the physical aesthetics of Michael Jackson, Boy George, or Simon Le Bon the comparatively soulless music they created would've achieved it's startling commercial apogee. That MTV's rise in popularity coincided with the period between 1983 and 1987 resembling one of the most barren deserts in modern creativity imaginable can surely only have been accidental. That it is a period now remembered with any kind of affection is a remarkable exercise in mass hypnosis.
Ladyhawke is the alter ego of Phillipa “Pip” Brown, born in New Zealand in the midst of the eighties and schooled on the stylised gloss and tint of it’s mainstream rock and pop output by her mother and stepfather, himself a former musician. A self confessed introvert for whom performance is a nightmare, Brown invented Ladyhawke by necessity as an unreconstructed Mizz Hyde, all shoulder pads and stilettos, a cross between Sharon Stone and Stevie Nicks. This evil twin plays the sort of music which the jiving crowd in The Terminator’s Tech Noir nightclub sipped their pina coladas to, synths interweaving above a suitably automaton rhythm section that’s almost an afterthought and with vocals floating insouciantly in a haze of neon and white powder.
Article comments