The possible return of Hard Times chic?

In the early eighties, as the full weight of the Thatcher economic model came to be felt on the young of the country, it brought about a change in attitude towards the simple process of making and consuming pop music.

While it was fun for a few months primping and preening along with the likes of Spandau and Duran, Visage and Adam and being new and romantic it suddenly seemed rather vague and empty when faced with a real [no] future of no job, no money, no prospects, no fun.

The New Romantics had been a reaction to the uniform sterility and blankness of many of the post-1977 "punk bands". The more intelligent and astute had already sparked off in other directions and the mainstream was left void. This was quickly filled by the self-elected beautiful people with their surface sheen and shine and their well produced but ultimately unresiliant electro-power pop.

If you were young but broke then the option of a new peacock suit for a night out at Blitz was unreasonable. You needed something cheap, cheerful and quick with which to register your membership of the newly emerging sub-cult of the hopeless but unbowed.

And suddenly boom! there it was. The magazines "The Face" and "ID", which then carried an absurd amount of clout among the young, fashionable and impressionable, hit on the idea of "Hard Times".

Jeans were back in, preferably as ripped and distressed as possible. T-shirts were fine, although a vest was better. Feet were to be shod in workboots or the cheapest available deck shoe or similar.

The impact was immediate. Have a look at videos from 1983/4 by the likes of JoBoxers or Bananarama (faking it in designer dungarees). It was probably the inspiration behind the "Too Rye Aye" era Dexy's "raggle taggle gypsies" look.

Dressing down was the new dressing up.

The ultimate example being Jeremy Healey and Kate Garner's shooting star of a pop band Haysi Fantaysi. All jumble sale rags and throw back Dickensiania. They looked like impossibly glamorous street urchins from an adaptation of Dickens's "Hard Times" directed by Ken Russell.

What was more interesting than all the dressing down/up fun to be had was the music that started to emerge.

The then rampant Human League focused more attention with a song/tune called (ha!) "Hard Times", a largely wordless dancefloor groove that seemed to be the anthem of the moment, especially in it's extended whirl of a remix by Martin Rushent.

And, as the punks had found soul mates in the dreads of Kingston, so the Hard Timers looked to the ghettos of the US for their spiritual soul mates. Being funky became the definition of being cool. Bands like A Certain Ratio were pushed nearer to the mainstream. The New Romantic peacocks were now to be seen in Army surplus shorts and forage caps haunting second hand record shops for Parliament and Funkadelic sides or discarded Brass Construction albums.

The white socked jazz funkateers and the urban soul smooth boys were destined for the Cortina of history as dance spaces realigned themselves to the new trend. Funk Nights became all the rage and, as time moved on, these same nights would come to embrace the wonderfully exotic techno coming out of Detroit and Chicago's minimalist,brutal new house sound.

Hip hop and rap import 12"s were also becoming a must for the DJ desperate to retain their street cool.

Records were being made in bedrooms with the cheapest available new electronic equipment.

As the new lords of pop (Spandau, Duran, The Police etc.) forgot the lessons of the pre-punk dinosaurs and disappeared off into unattainable stratosphere, at street level things started to get interesting.

Something that had started as an anti-fashion fashion set in motion a chain of events that introduced house, techno and hip-hop to the mainframe of UK pop and sparked a massive and ongoing transformation on the dancefloor and the charts.


So, the question is : with a UK (possibly global) recession seemingly inevitable, will Hard Times have anything like the same effect a second time?

The obvious starting point is : what Hard Times? Unemployment is still low and the ever tightening claims procedure makes it near impossible for the would-be pop star to view unemployment as an option while waiting for his big break.

And yet there are definite signs of a change in spending patterns beginning to emerge, at least in the UK, even before any putative recession is even official.

Discount grocers such as Aldi and Lidl are reporting an upward trend in sales, Domino's (the pizza delivery business) and McDonalds have both announced expansion and job creation plans this week.

Domestic holidays are increasingly popular (although a vague notion of "greeness" may be impacting on the more guilt ridden middle income earners when it comes to flying).

It seems that consumers aren't yet ready to stop consuming, which is what fuelled the worst of the seventies and eighties recession years, but they are interested in downsizing their expenditure. Instead of Tesco we'll use Lidl for our basic shopping. Instead of going out to eat we'll order in or grab a takeaway. Instead of Tuscany why not Torquay?

In the fizzy and flighty world of pop I can see two direct results of this collective downsizing and scaling back.

Firstly, the major record companies (with one eye on their stockholder's dividends) will start scaling back their rosters. In the eighties Hard Times many of the punk and post-punk bands that had been snapped up in the trawlnets of the likes of EMI and Phonogram suddenly found their deals terminated as they were tossed back into the pop ocean.

The global entities, aka The Big Five, that is : EMI, Sony, Warner, Univeral and BMG are multi-taskers with fingers in any number of pies. If sales of TV sets, holidays and longhaul flights to theme parks start to dwindle then the axe is going to fall in "soft" areas of the portfolio.

Which means music. It's a given that contracts will be scrutinised and under performers will be jettisoned. In fact, just this week BMG have announced that they are step aside from their deal with Sony and stop any investment in new acts, preferring to concentrate on "exploiting the value of our back catalogue" (i.e. an infinite number of reissues and compilations)

EMI have already started the process of fine toothcombing their roster. Acts are being (very quietly) dropped, new signings are next to none. The A&R man who signed Robbie to that long term multi-million dollar contract is long since gone.

The next thing will be to start to question the long term viability of recent signings. The Kaiser Chiefs are quite right to question the validity of "so many faceless identikit indie bands" being signed and heavily promoted (as they did this week, seemingly with no sense of irony).

But, if the Hard Times come then so, equally, will King Harvest surely come.

The second effect is going to be consumer driven. If money is (increasingly) too tight to mention people's spending habits are going to change. The impulse purchase of a CD while shopping in the supermarket will be the first to go; followed by the expressly good times purchase of a "Best Of" or "Greatest Hits" of a band or artist that you either a) already own everything by or b) sort of like but only for couple or three songs really.

So as new signings fall and catalogue exploitation becomes less profitable the major record companies could find themselves in the same position that they were in during the mid-seventies oil crisis of having to decide who their favourite sons and daughters are and disowning the rest.

Yes, the likes of KT Tunstall and The Editors will still have their recording sessions, production costs, distribution and publicity funded by a big name company; but at the first sign of failure they'll be out the door without a goodbye.

And they'll be much less likely to take a gamble on the likes of Sandi Thom or (even) The Editors in the first place.

Which means that the essential task of finding the new music will fall once again to the independent labels who run such tight ships that any economic wrongly placed foot could lead to extinction.

The likes of Rough Trade and Mute will be once more overwhelmed by acts desperate for a deal. The majors are no longer interested in the untried plus there's the fall-out of bands released from their big money contract.

Rough Trade played this brilliantly during the early and mid eighties; finding and developing some astonishing talent. Some they kept for themselves other they sold on as fully formed commercial entities to the big labels. The Smiths, themselves the very summation of Hard Times chic, are the paradigm here.


The other thing that will happen will be that consumers will once again seek out authenticity in their music. Where the punk/reggae thing is well documented and we've already touched on the link between eighties hard times and ghetto funk, this time round buyers might favour acts with green credentials or perhaps African or Asian influences will be required.

If buyers suddenly find their disposable income diminished they are certainly going to seek out albums that they can cherish and love for years to come rather than the instantly disposable interchangeable Dido/Blunt-alikes and flash-in-the-pan r&b acts that they have so meekly swallowed (and then disposed of) in recent years.

What I do know is that an economic downturn may well be beneficial in the long term to the UK pop scene; it's just possible that straightened circumstances might lead to a return to a more selective approach to signing by the big names and provide an opportunity for a musical revolution as vibrant and overwhelming as the arrival of black urban dance music once was.