Flame academy

Listen up you young pups. The 1980s, The Decade That Taste Forgot etc, wasn’t just about SAW and stonewashed denim and pedal-pushers and hairsprayed men in pixie boots and big girls’ blouses. Cracks of light infiltrated the culture bunker. Not just canonical stuff like The Smiths or The Pogues either, but some great pop music.

London duo La Roux – singer and public face Elly Jackson and backroom dude Ben Langmaid – have certainly flirted big time with pastel pop on singles like ‘Bulletproof’ and ‘In For The Kill’, but claim their aesthetic is informed as much by Eurythmics, Prince, Bowie, Madonna and the late Michael J as Yazoo.
“The economic climate then wasn’t so great,” Elly says, “and obviously there are similarities with times now. Music is always something that gets people out of feeling shit, I guess. Like in the war you had marching bands or whatever and it would lift people out of themselves. I’d like to think people are using music to feel better about times now, but maybe that’s a slightly idealistic view. I think the people who are having the hardest time of it have the least money and only listen to the radio, so they’re not being given a variety of emotive music to bring them out of how they feel.”
She’s not just talking off-the-rack R’n’B, but what she acidly refers to as skinny-fit boys who pretend they’re Johnny Thunders but sound like third-rate generic indie and live with their mothers. By contrast, La Roux’s style, sound and sensibility is every bit Clockwork Orange art deco as it is TOTP circa 1983.
“That’s more what we’re aiming for,” she says, “but so many people hear synths and go, ‘1980s’. The videos are, I’m not gonna try and deny that, but I think if you look at the styling and the stage clothes, it’s not OTT, I’m not wearing leg-warmers and stuff, I’m wearing tailored clothes. Some of my favourite people are David Bowie and Prince and stuff like that, but I think it can be even a bit Tudor at times. More New Romantic than electronic ‘80s.”
Which was a conscious throwback to the 18th century decadents via Weimar. Plus, that decade also birthed steam- and cyberpunk in the form of Blade Runner and Neuromancer, and Elly’s year of birth, 1988, was the breakthrough age of Manga animations. Speaking of Japan, the best song on La Roux’s eponymous debut album, ‘Cover My Eyes’, evokes Tin Drum, Sylvian’s solo stuff and Bowie’s work with Ryuichi Sakamoto.
“Yeah, it really reminds me of China Crisis,” Elly concedes. “You know that song ‘Christian’? And ‘Sign Your Name’ by Terence Trent D’Arby, I love that song.”
Which, like Prince’s finest, is sparse but arty. Far from where she was reared, mind. Young Ms Jackson’s bio says she was weaned on her father’s Neil Young and Nick Drake records, but get her talking and she reveals roots that go back even further.
“A lot of early rock ‘n’ roll and doo-wop and boogie-woogie and ragtime and blues,” she recalls, “and then going into folk and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and all that stuff. If I hadn’t had my dad to tell me about music, all I would’ve discovered is Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls and bands my sister told me about, which is all that’s marketed to you. My teens were a very grey area musically, I don’t really remember what I liked or even what was in the charts then. I guess this was about seven or eight years ago.”
Come to think of it, it’s a blank period for this old dog too, a millennial black hole that defied youthquake-trackers’ numerological theories of recurring eleven-year gyres: 1955 (Elvis, Jerry Lee), 1966 (Beatles, Stones, Dylan), 1977 (Pistols, Clash), 1988 (Acid House, Roses, Mondays). 1999 gave us… Limp Bizkit. Jesus H.
“Yeah, really bad. What happened then? It was like Britney and Destiny’s Child and the Black-Eyed Peas and that’s kind of all I remember. There hasn’t been anything half decent since the ‘80s apart from Blur. Obviously I’m generalising but there was a massive hole. Justin Timberlake’s was a brilliant pop album, but there was nothing else. That was when the whole indie thing stared again, about five years ago, with Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand, it was a bit more interesting, but then everybody got very, very bored of indie music and here we are back in the ‘80s.”
Yup. Pop will eat itself. Again.

La Roux is out now on Polydor