The Automatik

Imagine the scene: You’re sitting in a bar, sometime during the mid-’90s, and lamenting the crappy music on the jukebox and the room full of bad Marilyn Manson clones. Then, miraculously, you suddenly overhear the following conversation, a sarcastic, yet clearly besotted nostalgia trip through ’80s fashion icons in the world of pop music. It might go something like this:

Girl No. 1: Let’s talk about Midge Ure (from Ultravox and Visage)

Girl No. 2: The thing about Midge Ure, the style he was going for was very, well not exactly ’20s/’30s British aristocracy. The family of the character he was going for was blue-blooded definitely, but they were like, purged from the clan, because of some scandal like incest or something. He’s not quite like that.

Girl No. 1: Right.

Girl No. 2: But he’s not totally cosmopolitan, Euro, Nouveau Riche – that type of thing. It’s more like he’s worldly but rugged. You know he’s Scottish.

Girl No. 1: Yeah, and that’s where the ruggedness comes in. A typical outfit: he might wear a nice sweater, but it would be frayed at the cuffs.

Girl No. 2: Or a bomber jacket, like he was some kind of ace fighter pilot in WWI.

Girl No. 1: He’d have jodhpurs with a dirt smudge on the knee.

Girl No. 2: And when he did show up, years later at a familial occasion, he would be all tough and quiet, and everyone would be scared of him. Except of course, a young cousin girl, whom he’d wind up seducing and the cycle would just repeat itself. So that’s Midge Ure, or rather the character he was trying to be.

Girl No. 1: Now for John Crawford from Berlin. He’s got this hair that he thinks is this big, coiffy, wavy ‘do, but really it’s just puffy.

Girl No. 2: It’s just greasy and moussed.

Girl No. 1: Oh, and isn’t there a guy in Berlin that parted his hair down the middle and slicked it back?

Girl No. 2: Probably.

Girl No. 1: On that picture on the inside of Pleasure Victim, Terri Nunn has on her mink and nothing else.

Girl No. 2: And a strand of pearls.

Girl No. 1: And he’s got a wine glass or a martini glass, and somebody’s got a cigarette. And they’re trying to have this Euro image. Like, “We’re so continental, yet decadent.” Like, maybe there’s bisexuality, maybe there’s opium involved. But they’re just these poor Americans, so they wouldn’t even be able to afford this jet-set lifestyle that they try to live.

Girl No. 2: I can see Diane Lane in the ’80s portraying a character like Terri Nunn tries to be. But later, when their other album came out –

Girl No. 1: With “No More Words” –

Girl No. 2: They went for that whole –

Both: Bonnie and Clyde!

Girl No. 1: With her hair.

Girl No. 2: And his pinstripe suits, skinny white ties, and fedoras.

Girl No. 1: And he tried to wear eyeliner.

Girl No. 2: Yeah, but like, real Europeans knew how to do their makeup, and they generally had better skin. They had years of historical influence to draw from, too, but most American bands who did that where the cheap, cheesy knock-off version. Their oldest influence was like, early ’80s Michael Des Barres!

Girl No. 1: So along the same lines as the fey, quietly erotic was Steve Strange from Visage. Cos he was the pretty boy, and he tried to promote the dark side of himself.

Girl No. 2: Don’t forget that Midge Ure was in Visage, too. And you can tell from where they both wound up why Midge left to form Ultravox. He had to be the Indiana Jones/Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient hybrid.

Girl No. 1: And Steve Strange would never be caught dead in a rugged coat.

Girl No. 2: When he was in the video for “Ashes to Ashes,” by David Bowie, Steve was too weird and Vogue –

Girl No. 1: Kind of proto-Goth.

Girl No. 2: But more glamorous, and I don’t mean Glam. Like the ’80s Vogue version of Goth, with some purple thrown in somewhere.

Girl No. 1: But the real cosmopolitan, Euro-thing going on in the ’80s was Japan.

Girl No. 2: Oh, yeah. Definitely. And I could speak for hours on David Sylvian. I don’t really want to talk about where he is now, because that’s irrelevant, but back then, Duran Duran – especially Nick Rhodes – SO wanted to be David Sylvian. He was beautiful. His makeup was perfect! He didn’t wear makeup like a guy wearing makeup, he wore it like a woman, accenting the features, the way you are supposed to wear makeup.

Girl No. 1: Exactly.

Girl No. 2: Okay, at the beginning, they were a little bit trashy, but after they got out of that, and finally became who they had always wanted to be. David Sylvian just had too much class and style. He was so suave and debonair, but not in a Bryan Ferry way. It was more like a dark, mysterious, tragic, quiet sort of way.

Girl No. 1: The thing about Japan that was so cool was that they had that whole Euro thing, but they also had that Asian thing – which was so exotic!

Girl No. 2: And their music complemented their fashion sense so well, I’m sure that’s why they were so huge in England, but nobody in America grasped that because they didn’t have that desire for Anglo-worldly-continentalness.

Girl No. 1: Right, unlike the few American bands that tried to do it – that aspect that they were trying to achieve was completely unnoticed. Like, Berlin. So let’s talk about less worldly, but still sort of glamorous, other bands.

Girl No. 2: Okay, like Dr. Robert from the Blow Monkeys!

Girl No. 1: Oh my God! He totally tried to have that David Bowie thing going. The Thin White Duke phase.

Girl No. 2: But he had that cheeky quality where you couldn’t quite take him for a classy David Sylvian type, but it wasn’t as cheesy as some American things. His tongue was in his cheek and he did it really well.

Girl No. 1: And they had sort of a glam thing going. Like sort of a T. Rex thing, which was really weird in the ’80s.

Girl No. 2: Yeah, but Mickey Finn actually played on that album – I think.

Girl No. 1: What about Nik Kershaw? He was such an anomaly.

Girl No. 2: Yeah. I don’t know. He was British. He had this sort of Howard Jones thing.

Girl No. 1: A Howard Jones, Level 42, techno, white boy British funk thing. He was everyone that Kajagoogoo wanted to be, but that Kaja would end up becoming.

Girl No. 2: Now Kajagoogoo, there you go. I loved them when Limahl was in the band, and I loved them after he left. But they were definitely two different bands.

Girl No. 1: And there was that weird Christian slant that they had in a couple of their songs.

Girl No. 2: Well, I had always heard that they kicked Limahl out because he was Hindu and they were Christian.

Girl No. 1: I don’t think I ever knew about that.

Girl No. 2: Yeah, well, Nick Beggs, now he teaches at the Guitar Institute of Technology which is so funny.

Girl No. 1: But their clothes. I like, full-on aspired to date a boy who wore the kind of clothes that Kaja wore. The thing is, there’d be linen, but there’d be synthetic material, too.

Girl No. 2: And weirdly placed zippers.

Girl No. 1: And patches and mesh parts.

Girl No. 2: And jazz shoes! And remember those little fold-down ankle boots?

Girl No. 1: Ewww!

Girl No. 2: But where did they get the idea for their weird hairdos? Nick and his cornrows! And Limahl with his bleached and black, but not-quite-a-mullet. Nobody had a hairdo like Limahl’s before or after, although Nik Kershaw tried.

Girl No. 1: It was sort of the ’80s version of Rod Stewart! And here’s another thing. These guys that would wear baggy pants and sashes – they would be these skinny little guys in tank tops! And a long sash thing tied around their heads! You could never get away with that now.

Girl No. 2: True, but they were the New Romantics, and if you think about Byron and Shelley, and how they dressed, you can actually understand where they were coming from, no matter how skewed their perception was.

Girl No. 1: Goth people come about the closest to that type of thing these days, but not quite.

Girl No. 2: Scritti Politti and Ebn Ozn.

Girl No. 1: Oh my God! Scritti Politti is the weirdest band, cos it’s really just that guy Green –

Girl No. 2: Gartside!

Girl No. 1: Who was really cute, and had a really cute voice, and I liked his music, but wasn’t he like some Prince sort of prodigy who played all his own instruments? Another thing that was kind of related to the Kajagoogoo thing was the Thompson Twins. They were like –

Girl No. 2: Pre-World Beat.

Girl No. 1: Yes! Oh my God! Totally!

Girl No. 2: Not the music, but the image. They had to have the black guy with dreads, and the ultra white girl – with no eyebrows and shaved head sides who was a total freak – and the cute one.

Girl No. 1: Tom Bailey with his red hair and his tail. And they would wear these big, baggy clothes. Wasn’t there some later video where he was wearing a floral satin shirt buttoned all the way up with a vest and pearls?

Girl No. 2: Yes. So Gary Numan is the biggest enigma of ’80s British music. Well, there’s worse, I suppose, but I’m talking well-known here. What? Did he think he was an alien?

Girl No. 1: Think about songs like “I Nearly Married a Human.”

Girl No. 2: “Down in the Park” – you can watch the humans trying to run. What is he? Not a human?

Girl No. 1: He was so weird.

Girl No. 2: Well, you know my theory about Numan. They just dropped the apostrophe. Originally it was N’uman. It stands for Not Human!

Girl No. 1: And that’s when aliens weren’t trendy. He was alien before alien was cool!

Girl No. 2: Or maybe he was an android. I think he might have been.

Girl No. 1: I think he still is.

Girl No. 2: No, I think they gave him his aging chip ‘cos now he looks so old and ugly.

Girl No. 1: Here’s a good topic: people who wore T-shirts with suit jackets.

Girl No. 2: John Waite!

Girl No. 1: John Waite, everybody in Duran Duran, Miami Vice – who got their whole image from the Duran Duran “Rio” video. The Cars, like Rik Ocasek.

Girl No. 2: Tom Petty started the whole thing, he did.

Girl No. 1: With the white tennis shoes which he got from –

Girl No. 2: Squeeze!

Girl No. 1: —from Robin Zander. (laughs) Yeah, Squeeze did it.

Girl No. 2: Rick Nielsen still does it.

Girl No. 1: Oh! Hall and Oates.

Girl No. 2: Totally Hall and Oates!

Girl No. 1: But not so much Oates, but Hall.

Girl No. 2: But Hall before they got to be mid-’80s, but in the late ’70s when he wore makeup? What a freak!

Girl No. 1: I totally forgot about that. There were all these rumors that they were gay.

Girl No. 2: Well, I liked in the early ’80s when guys would wear long, straight skirts. That was my favorite.

Girl No. 1: But people in bands didn’t really do it. Here’s an oldie but a goodie: King!

Girl No. 2: Okay, what was his deal?

Girl No. 1: He had almost a rap kind of feel. With the shouting and the spray paint. It was like a weird British gang.

Girl No. 2: And that hairdo that has only otherwise been seen on Geddy Lee.

Girl No. 1: But even Geddy Lee didn’t have bangs!

Girl No. 2: And then there’s one of our favourites, and certainly totally unknown: Bang Bang! Who wanted to be Duran Duran so bad. But they were so L.A.! They were like pre-Melrose Place.

Girl No. 1: And the lettering on their album, with the lines through it and all the paint splatters on the back on drop cloths where they are standing.

Girl No. 2: And they had such bad hair.

Girl No. 1: That was the L.A .part.

Girl No. 2: But of course when I was little, I couldn’t get enough of them. Who knows what happened to them? But the one guy went on the TV theme song fame and wrote the theme for Full House! Bennett Salvay!

Girl No. 1: They were so wimpy, but then they had songs like “No Dependencies” – no church, no God. Like, oooh, they were gonna cause such scandal. As if anyone even heard that damn album.

Girl No. 2: Except for us! And I’d like to give an award to anyone who would admit they know that album well.

Girl No. 1: And then there was Wang Chung.

Girl No. 2: I would file them away with Scritti Politti almost.

Girl No. 1: And there’s always Aha. They were Norwegian. They wore, like, weird leather wrist straps.

Girl No. 2: Well, I guess sort of, they dressed like Corey Hart or something.

Girl No. 1: Oh Corey Hart, let’s talk about him.

Girl No. 2: Well, you talk about him since you love him so much.

Girl No. 1: He was so cool – that pouty image with the spiked hair and the earring. Like a tough little boy who’s been hurt. “I’m sensitive inside, but I have a tough shell.”

Girl No. 2: And then he had to go looking so much like David Duchovny.

Girl No. 1: And the video for “Sunglasses at Night.” Talk about trying to be Euro! It’s all like, the Autobahn, or the way that Berlin tried to do the video for “The Metro.” Like some communist country, underground railroad, bad German movie from the late ’70s. But it was so NOT scary. Everyone was just standing around with their sunglasses looking really malicious and then there’s some girl standing there with her dad. I’m really scared.

Girl No. 2: What about Missing Persons, Falco and the guy that same the “Chess” video?

Girl No. 1: Murray Head! That song was SO ’80s. “One Night in Bangkok.”

Girl No. 2: And the other “Der Kommissar” people. After the Fire! They were into all that, too. That video, it was reminiscent of Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers” video and that Ratt video.

Girl No. 1: Everything tried to be SO Euro!

Suddenly, the bartender bellows, “LAST CALL!” You try to make it across the bar, to thank these two ladies for making your night. But they’re not there anymore! All that’s left is a lipstick stained napkin and a two glasses filled with half-melted ice cubes. An Adam and the Ants song wafts from the jukebox. You wonder if you’ve imagined the whole thing . . .

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