EDMONTON -- Oh, God, I forgot about Crying Over You. Now I can't get it out of my head.
Neither, I suspect, can the hundreds of people who turned up for the Red's Retro Party on Saturday night to see Platinum Blonde and A Flock of Seagulls.
"I ain't gonna be your fool no more, 'cause I ain't crying, crying over you, ooh, ooh, yeah."
From Crying Over You, it's a short slide to the defining Bon Jovi lyric of the '80s: "shot through the heart and you're to blame/you give love a bad name," and from there a descent into madness as unlocked memories from that benighted decade come flooding back. Baywatch. Gee, your hair smells terrific. Feathered roach clips. Missile Command. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Tootie, Tattoo and Mr. T. A babble of once-repressed images dredged up by one song. Therapists should look into this.
Opening your eyes only increased the sense of temporal dislocation. There were people at the show singing along to songs older than they were. The front rows were occupied by folks who looked, as one wag put it, "Like a Miami Vice casting call 15 years too late." Both mullets and fullets were spotted. Platinum Blonde and a Flock of Seagulls may have sounded like they did in the '80s, more or less, but sure didn't look the part. The big hair was gone. Spandex was eschewed. Platinum Blonde was neither platinum nor blonde. The Seagull hair had flown the coop.
Nostalgia is starting to pile up. During a well-deserved encore, Platinum Blonde played Strawberry Fields Forever - an '80s band covering a '60s song in the '00s. My mind must be playing tricks on me. Wasn't Platinum Blonde one of the cheesiest, most embarrassing poodle-haired pop bands of them all? It certainly couldn't have been the smart, high-powered trio that tore the roof off on Saturday night. With energy and precision, the band delivered slick, updated versions of hits that affected the crowd like mass hypnosis. Mark Holmes's vocals were amazing. Even the new songs sounded good. These guys could open for Suede or Pulp or Oasis any day. Given the focus on the more horrible aspects of the David Hasselhoff decade, it's important to remember that not everything from the '80s sucked. Just most of it.
Which brings us to a Flock of Seagulls. The only excitement in an otherwise dull set occurred during not one, but two versions of I Ran. I can't for the life of me remember any of the band's other songs, even after hearing them two days ago. They might have been new. Hard to tell. It all had the "Seagull sound," distinguished by great, moist clouds of analogue synthesizer. Almost everything but the big hit went over like a lead balloon. The less the crowd reacted, the better Singer Michael Score performed, oddly. He sang a mangled rendition of I Ran almost out of spite, and ended the set with the proper version and a bevy of guest dancers from the audience. Score, who once possessed the most ridiculous hair of the 20th century, now looks like Brian Wilson. Too much! Make it stop!
Both Platinum Blonde and a Flock of Seagulls are threatening to release new albums this spring.
You know what they say: If you remember the '70s, you weren't there.
If you remember the '80s, you're doomed to repeat them.
