Review: 80s LIVE!, Adelphi Theatre

Finding a spot somewhere between those Music For Pleasure LPs you found in Woollies (you know, dolly bird on the cover, hits re-recorded not by original artists) and Now That's What I Call Music discs in HMV, 80s Live! barrels into town for A PARTY! To be honest, you wouldn't pick an old school West End theatre like the Adelphi as the ideal venue (were there no school halls available?), but there's a band, there are singers and soon, an audience, creaking a little, on their feet like it's Top Of The Pops with David "Kid" Jensen.

Vegas is full of shows like this one and who doesn't enjoy a boogie to the songs we grew up with, prosecco in one hand and emergency ibuprofen in the other? If the singing is a bit short of your Madonnas, your Tears For Fears, your Culture Clubs and you wonder where that saxophone sound is coming from, you've missed the point a little. The costumes suggest the iconic looks of the time, the vocals suggest the singers who were never cushioned by autotune and the instruments are a little synthesised, but atmosphere, memories and release from the outside world is all.

Sid Sims, Bryan Humphrey, Wayne Smith, Karin Latham and Rachel Johnson belt out the songs, never going into impersonations, but close enough when they need to be. The results are variable, the best Humphrey's beautiful version of Erasure's "A Little Respect" and one does wonder why that level of precision isn't applied to more songs. The band David Waller, Stuart Darling, Rory Padfield get their individual moments in the spotlight and there's video projections every bit as eye-bleeding as they always were back then. We're only a step or two away from the old chicken-in-the-basket circuit, maybe nothing is really top drawer, but it doesn't really need to be. It's fun!

There's an irony in the fact that some of the most disposable pop of an age when the only topic of conversation in the school playground on a Friday morning was last night's Toppy, has endured in the collective consciousness longer than many of the concept albums and the likes that were earnestly discussed in the NME and by, well, kids like me. Glasto proves this year-in, year-out. But you're only young once.

Unless you go to 80s Live! and you can be young again.  

80s Live! is on tour

To post a comment, you must register and login.