There’s something about the 1980s that refuses to die.
The perms have gone, the music’s been remixed a thousand times, and the clothes — mercifully — have stayed buried in lofts across Britain. Yet here we are, still watching Stranger Things, still arguing about who was the better Bond, and still getting misty-eyed over things that, if we’re honest, were mostly crap.
Yes, there was magic in that decade — but it wasn’t all neon lights and shoulder pads. It was the last gasp of innocence before everything became complicated. You couldn’t text your mates, so you actually had to knock on their door. You couldn’t Photoshop your spots out of school photos. And you couldn’t just Google how to fix your Commodore 64 — you had to sit there, staring at a blue screen, pretending you knew what “syntax error” meant.
The 80s were beautifully imperfect. You taped songs off the radio, complete with the DJ talking over the intro. You wore whatever your mum bought you from C&A. You waited an entire week to find out who shot JR. It was slower, clunkier, but somehow more real.
And maybe that’s the root of the obsession — the world back then didn’t need curating. Life wasn’t being broadcast, so it didn’t matter if it looked messy. It just was.
When I wrote The ’86 Fix, it wasn’t just a time-travel story. It was a love letter to a decade that shaped us — the generation who grew up half-analogue, half-digital. We remember the 80s not because it was perfect, but because it was the last time we didn’t know what was coming next.
So yes, maybe nostalgia is a liar. But it’s a charming one — and in a world that feels increasingly synthetic, a little reminder of how things used to be isn’t the worst kind of lie to believe.
