Eighties 12” singles. I’ve been obsessed withthemfor as long as I can remember. They’re the one part of my record collection that passes the house fire test. If my house was burning down and there was only time to save one shelf of records, it would be my eighties 12”s.
How did this journey begin? I remember it quite vividly. March 1984 and I went into a branch of an indie chain store, Music Market. Saturday morning and I had money in my pocket ready to spend on new music. Before I even got there, I’d narrowed my purchase down to one of two cutting-edge (or so they seemed at the time) pop albums on cassette. I was going for either Nik Kershaw’s Human Racing, or Howard Jones’ Human’s Lib.