THE BIG hair, shoulder pads, splashy videos and tinny recordings were hard to escape at the time. But where are the pop stars of the 1980s now? At an arena near you, most probably. Though the waists are thicker and the hair is thinner, the singers and their songs are recognisably the same. In their own minds, they are still big stars. It was the music business that got small.
No sub-genre of pop is so lamentable that it cannot be resold to the nostalgic. Might such marketing magic also be applied to Japan’s stockmarket? In the 1980s asset prices in Japan reached a level of excess that made the cocaine-addled pop stars of the era seem like choirboys. By 1990 the Nikkei index of stocks was trading at 60 times company earnings. Then came the fall. But after a long time in rehab, Japanese stocks are creeping back into the spotlight.
Like other mooted revivals, this one attracts plenty of scorn….
