I had a holiday this summer on the Isle of Wight that was blissfully relaxing except for the relentlessness consistency of the playlists. Whether it was in pubs, cafés and restaurants, at tourist attractions, in the live sets performed twice a week down the road from our holiday let, blasting out of open car windows, or through Bluetooth speakers on the beach, the vast majority of the songs were from the late seventies or eighties, interspersed with the occasional sixties tune. Even when we found an ice cream parlour by the beach that had a much more current sound world, about half the tunes in their playlist were covers or remixes of 80s tunes.
Now, I was an eighties kid, and I like a lot of this music, but it turns out that if that’s all I hear for three weeks, I start to get a bit stir crazy. I have been listening to a lot of jazz and classical music since I got home to cleanse my aural palate, and hope I will be able to re-engage with the era again in due course once I have recovered from the overindulgence.
