
17 fantastic photos that prove the 80s were the best decade in which to be alive
But it was an exciting time to be alive, and it is little wonder many people look back upon the 80s as the best decade in living memory.
This retro picture gallery helps make that case, showcasing our favourite things about the 80s, from fashion and film to music and TV - like a mix tape, only in photo form.
What were your favourite things about the 80s, and how do you think they compared to the 60s, 70s, 90s and noughties?
Do you have any retro pictures or nostalgic memories to share with us? Send them online via YourWorld at www.yourworld.net/submit. It's free to use and, once checked, your story or picture will appear on our website and, space allowing, in our newspapers.
1 . The Walkman
Long before Spotify, smartphones and AirPods, the Walkman was the way to listen to music on the go. It was a truly liberating device for music fans in the 80s, when people could be seen listening to one everywhere you went. | YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP via Getty Images Photo: YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP via Getty Images Photo Sales
2 . Video games
The 80s were a golden age for the video game, with classics like Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros, and Donkey Kong among the best-loved titles we all enjoyed playing back then. |Photo:Photo Sales
3 . Big hair
You could hardly move for all the hair in the 80s, when big hair was bigger than ever. The singer and actor Cher is pictured here in 1985 while promoting the film Mask. | Getty Images Photo: Keystone/Getty Images Photo Sales
4 . The music
Duran Duran are pictured here in 1981, rocking some excellent 80s stylings. The Birmingham band were among the leading proponents of new wave music during a decade which gave us some brilliant tunes, from the likes of Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson and many more. | Getty Images Photo:Photo Sales
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


New Statesman
32 minutes ago
- New Statesman
Whither the whitebait?
Photo by Debby Lewis-Harrison / Getty Images It's off to the Regency again, Brighton's venerable fish and seafood restaurant, for the second time in a week. The first time was with the editor of a local mag for whom I write an occasional column, and the reason it is occasional is because I don't get paid for it because they don't have any money, and sometimes I am busy, and sometimes I am uninspired, and there is something about a cheque for £0.00 that fails to make the synapses dance, so what I try to do is get this editor to buy me lunch or at least a pint, for goodness' sake. Unfortunately, now he has retired from his full-time job as a lecturer, he doesn't have any money either. But he is a very lovely person, and so I found myself paying 50 per cent of the bill and that's my finances blown for the next week or so. This time, today, it was on someone else's dime: the licence-fee payer's actually – ie yours – for I am lunching with a radio producer who happens to be in town for the day. 'Hope you've got ideas!' messages a friend I mention this to. (This friend is one of those strange people who doesn't like being named in this column, so I will keep his or her identity secret except to say we are finally going through our divorce settlement, with, I hasten to add, unusual amicability.) Ideas? Oh God, I had forgotten about the ideas. There is something about being asked for an idea that makes the brain seize up and the jaw open slackly. There are times, of course, when one absolutely fizzes with them, but it's never when someone has just asked you for some. In my case, my ideas most often come at about two in the morning and I have learned not to try to write them down in ink because for some reason they never look exactly legible in the morning, however full I was of the divine fire when they occurred to me. I decide in the end to wing it. And anyway, all I can think about at the moment is whitebait. Let me explain why. A few weeks ago, I still had some funds in my account and, as is my habit, strolled down the hill to the seafront for a plate of whitebait and a glass of the house Pinot Grigio. If you ever want to see me drinking white wine in the wild, this will be one of your rare opportunities. There is something about a crisp, cold, cheap but tolerable white wine that sets off the Regency's whitebait, which are dipped in breadcrumbs and deep fried, but are never in the tiniest bit greasy: they're like the most exquisite fish fingers you've ever had, except, you know, fish. And then the food arrived, and it seemed to me that the world had turned upside down. For instead of the little crunchy animals from heaven, I found instead a plate of small nude fish dusted in what was probably paprika. While I am a fan of paprika, it is not in my view an acceptable substitute for breadcrumbs. Totally different textures. I had a few mouthfuls and gave up. 'Excuse me,' I said to the waitress, 'what's this? Have you changed the recipe?' But the Regency seems to hire its front of house staff on the basis of friendliness and general keenness rather than command of the language, which is fine by me, because they pick it up soon enough. But in this case it took about ten minutes of sign language and pidgin to establish that, yes, they had changed the recipe. Two days ago I asked another waiter what the whitebait situation was. Had they reverted to the original recipe, which had been pleasing the punters since the Chamberlain administration, or were they doubling down with the miserable, modern alternative? I didn't put it like that. It turned out that not only were they doubling down on the change to the recipe, but I was assured that this was by popular demand. 'It's what people want,' he said. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Excuse me? I know we are living in the worst timeline, but really? The only reason I could think of was that everyone in Brighton had suddenly gone coeliac and had said enough is enough. (Although as it turned out, the scampi were still becrumbed and there were still pasta dishes on the menu.) Now, I like to think that the press still has some influence even in these degraded times, so I here make my plea to the Regency to reconsider. If I am alone in preferring the old whitebait, then so be it. I will take defeat on the chin. But until then, here I stand, like Martin Luther, and can do no other. So I arrived for my lunch with the BBC producer and we had a perfectly pleasant conversation – until he asked me if I had any ideas. I pushed my prawns in garlic butter around my plate. Their beady eyes looked up at me in silent mockery. Had I ordered the prawns because I still wanted something crunchy on the outside yet yielding on the inside? I had found the scampi the other day only so-so. Anyway, my brain froze up again. I dabbed at the garlic butter on my chin with a napkin to buy some time. My whole future could depend on my answer. 'Whitebait?' I said. [See also: What's wrong with Sarah Vine?] Related


New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
7/7 changed life for British Muslims forever
Photo by Dylan Martinez / AFP via Getty Images In a way, it had to be a train. AJP Taylor conceived of history unfolding as inexorably as a railway timetable, a train that advanced with clockwork certainty towards its terminus. In this point of view, the history of Islamist suicide terrorism was always going to have a scheduled stop in London, with its big Muslim diaspora and contested imperial past. And so, 20 years ago, on 7 July 2005, at 8.49am, it finally arrived. When it did, it turned out to be not just a metaphorical train, signifying the advent in Britain of a certain ineluctable history, but three perilously real Underground carriages sharking through Zone 1 as they were detonated by suicide bombers. Across four bombings that day – there was also a bus whose upper deck was peeled off – 52 innocents were killed. The terror train in London was strangely delayed. Four years had passed since the strike on the World Trade Center, at the heart of the American empire; the UK, too, would become enmeshed in the attack's aftermath, in Afghanistan and Iraq. In London, the period bookended by 9/11 and 7/7 was peaceful, untroubled, and my innocent early teens were trifled away in a city that, compared to now, was a Garden of Eden. Kids like me were no more conscious of being Muslim than Adam and Eve were of their sex. Some say 9/11 had already changed that, but while there were tense times in 2001, London's multicultural innocence wasn't really lost until the 2005 attacks. Even after terror traumatised New York, the narratives that defined early-Noughties London were still Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Monica Ali's Brick Lane, both about Bangladeshi Londoners like my family and broadly optimistic about our presence here. They were among the first contemporary books I read (overrated as literary fiction; near perfect as YA novels). But after 7/7, writers could no longer envision multicultural London in that way. It had become 'Londonistan', an alleged seedbed of terror. Islamophobia soared to the point that a name for it had to be popularised. Suspicion of Muslim immigration, hysteria about Muslim birth rates, the 'Prevent' policy that pre-emptively viewed young Muslims as potential terrorists: so much that is still with us originated in 2005. The cultural mood began morphing as drastically as my pubescent mind and body. I remember wishing away those changes, craving the innocence that possessed me before I was 14, when the bombs went off – an innocence both personal and political. The odour clouding my body was as unwelcome as the spectre of suicide bombings. In Baghdad, there were as many as a dozen a day; I read the news, I knew this related, somehow, to my doomed religion. I prayed that the train of history, and its concomitant trail of destruction, would not reach Britain. Couldn't it just shuttle between America and Afghanistan, but somehow swerve us, leaving us to frolic in our ahistorical Eden? If only British Muslims could be like Mauritian Muslims, say, or Guyanese Muslims, serenely insulated from these momentous episodes. If only we could sit history out. The moment we learned of the bombings, my Muslim classmates and I began concocting our nervous conspiracy theories. It was the French, of course, enraged at losing out to us the day before on their bid to host the Olympics (we were British enough to recognise our true enemies). The bombers couldn't possibly have been Muslim, still less British! Alas, they were both. They were 'homegrown', a word that before 2005 denoted vegetable produce, not terror threats. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe I was no homegrown radish. Instead, I was a prospective homegrown terrorist: every British Muslim was, after 7/7 – even in the eyes of discerning writers. 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order,' Martin Amis mused a year after the attacks. 'What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation further down the road. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.' As one of those children, aged all of 16, I was scandalised. The scandal was less Islamophobia than the incoherence of liberalism. In The Second Plane – a now under-appreciated terror-themed work released a few years after 7/7 – Amis criticised Islam, in which, supposedly, 'there is no individual; there is only the ummah – the community of believers'. And yet here he was, a self-proclaimed believer in the individual, proposing collective punishment. The interview was disowned; a 'thought experiment', Amis regretted, but one with a sinister prescience. Reading the newspaper reviews in those years, I found relentless debates no longer about poetry or Proust, but suddenly about myself. This was one of the unintended effects of the train that brought Islamist suicide bombings to Britain: it transported the Muslim to the centre of cultural discourse. Every writer weighed in on the Muslim question. This was disquieting. But, I now appreciate, it also created a point of contact, however abrasive, between myself and literary life. 'If September 11 had to happen,' Amis writes in the The Second Plane, 'then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime.' I could say the same of the feverish aftermath to 7/7. It made me a journalist. Without it, I would be a suburban GP somewhere. Instead, I'm here at this magazine, privileged to have Martin Amis's old job. Tanjil Rashid will join the New Statesman as culture editor later this month [See also: Cover Story: Just raise tax!] Related


Wales Online
2 hours ago
- Wales Online
Olivia Rodrigo and Dave Grohl among stars in Royal Box at Wimbledon
Olivia Rodrigo and Dave Grohl among stars in Royal Box at Wimbledon Foo Fighters frontman Grohl was in attendance with his wife, director Jordyn Blum The pair looked relaxed as they watched courtside (Image: Getty Images ) US music stars Olivia Rodrigo and Dave Grohl were among the top celebrity names at Wimbledon on a star-studded day at the Championships. Rodrigo – fresh from her Glastonbury set and a string of London shows – sat in the Royal Box with her boyfriend, actor Louis Partridge, to watch the day three matches. Foo Fighters frontman Grohl was in attendance with his wife, director Jordyn Blum, and WWE star and actor John Cena was also in the Royal Box. England football manager Thomas Tuchel was in attendance, as was one of his predecessors, Roy Hodgson. Mamma Mia! actor Dominic Cooper turned heads in a baby blue suit, and Hollywood power couple Leslie Mann and Judd Apatow were seen chatting and laughing as they arrived at SW19. Article continues below Mann is best known for roles in Knocked Up and This Is 40, both directed by Apatow. Olympic gold medallist Tom Daley and former England footballer Graeme Le Saux were also in the stands, alongside long-time Wimbledon regular Sir Cliff Richard. With temperatures cooler than Tuesday's 34.2C peak, many guests arrived in suits and jackets, a return to the tournament's traditional formality after fans sweltered in record-breaking heat. Article continues below The celebrity guests were watching Emma Raducanu's clash with defending champion Marketa Vondrousova, followed by world number two Carlos Alcaraz against British wildcard Oscar Tarvet. On No. 1 Court, Cameron Norrie was taking on Frances Tiafoe, while Katie Boulter was facing Solana Sierra and Aryna Sabalenka was playing Marie Bouzkova. A total of 78 guests were invited to the Royal Box for day three, with other names on the list including singer Nick Jonas and his wife Priyanka Chopra.