Back in the good old 80s when Friday evenings meant watching my girlfriends jive with each other in our school gym while I played resident DJ, I would sometimes take requests for popular "fast" songs that they could actually dance to. (Pink Floyd they just did not consider music leave alone like!) I remember playing this song that everyone liked and I remember longing for a year or at least six months to pass by quickly so that we could all forget it and move on with our lives. I never imagined I would still be listening to it over 20 years later! Someone please explain why Heaven Is A Place On Earth by Belinda Carlisle is still a hit and being included on every retro 80s album worth its salt. And Wikipedia now tells me that the music video for the song was directed by Diane Keaton! Really?

I was born in the 70s and still listen to music from that decade and the one just before it. But the 80s was when I was actually growing up so I could not escape the music, movies and the godawful big hair of the time. Not too forget the fluorescent colours for everything from earrings to leg warmers. So I do get nostalgic sometimes at the Shack or while sitting in the backseat of somebody else's car. I'm wondering what happened to people like Billy Ocean, Huey Lewis & the News, Spandau Ballet and The Bangles.

I first went to boarding school when I was 9 and they used to play these LPs in the dining hall and the gym. One of the first songs I heard on those vinyls was The Heat is On by Glenn Frey. A couple of years later when I discovered the Eagles I was like hey, I know this guy! Eye of the Tiger, Dancing in the Dark and Beat It (which my best friend back then used to scream out as Be Dead! Be Dead!) were soon to follow. There were also some fallouts from the 70s like Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive and Abba's Dancing Queen. Of course, these could only be played by order of the "big girls" or seniors. God forbid one of us lesser mortals should listen to anything over a year old! I was ridiculed for a week for listening to Boney M on my brand new two-in-one. Hey, what can I say? I really liked Ma Baker and I still do.

By 1985 my appetite for music wasn't getting any less and my tastes were definitely beginning to change. I found myself choosing Whitesnake over Wham and Billy Joel over Bananarama. My friends didn't like it too much because I was always in charge of the music and the only one who had her own "tape recorder". Then, to make matters worse, I stumbled upon this album that had actually been released the year before I was born.

Life was never the same again. I finally began to love the crazy psychedelic posters my brother used to splash all over our walls. I also started writing poems that didn't mention nature or my love for mountains in them! I dreaded waking up on those chilly mornings and dressing up for church and I couldn't stand being around my friends for over 10 minutes. They started calling me weirdo and loner but I'd spend hours writing down the lyrics of those amazing songs and listening to them over and over. It felt so right, like everything I had ever wanted to see and feel was suddenly now within my grasp.

I also started acting out at school and home. My grades started slipping, my vocabulary became very "French" and I showed scant respect for authority of any kind. But I think these changes had more to do with the fact that I was entering my teenage years than my discovery of the phenomenal sounds of Pink Floyd through the definitive album The Dark Side of the Moon! And even though the following years introduced me to even more phenomenal stuff by Pink Floyd, Dark Side remains my gateway to the human race's greatest achievements in sound. (Mozart comes a close second.)

And to think I've typed this entire post with Backstreet Boys and Air Supply playing in the background. Don't even ask why! We cannot always control the environment around us, which is why we try and engineer the one buried within us.

Show me the meaning of being lonely it seems! How does one even come up with such lyrics? How?