You’ve really got to be able to see the irony.

Throughout the Nineteen-Eighties, there culminated a kind of witch- hunt conducted by the so-called ‘Christian Right’ on the insidious hazards of listening to rock ‘n roll.

Elvis was okay by now, The King having proved himself a patriot to his country by being deputised as an honorary drug enforcement agent, then dying on the throne as a junkie.

But it was a few years on, toward the end of the Cold War. America had become the quintessential ideal of what all of the free west should look like. A certain hysteria pervaded, born out of that age old problem — freedom’s a great thing but when people have freedom, then where does it actually stop? Especially when they’re doing something that you don’t like?

The moral majority became concerned that the American way of life was under a new threat surpassing communism, namely, something that had become the American way of life. Rock ‘n' roll.

Being a little conservative myself, I can’t express seriously enough just how much that apostrophe 'n' chills my blood. Our precious children are like hot bowls of alphabet soup that Satan himself has blown upon, cooling any fervour for correct grammar. It’s that apostrophe n that signifies rebellion that manifests like hell’s minions whenever the voodoo beat starts to pound.

The four letter names of hair metal bands were construed as sinister acronyms. And why not? The group that called themselves ‘WASP’ were not exactly gender specific, so why would anyone jump to conclusions and assume that it stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants? Nothing was as it seemed and so everything seemed evil. I couldn’t tell any of the members from Arthur or Martha but if there’s one thing I knew at the time, it was that WASP stood for We Are Satan’s Perverts. And Kiss were Knights In Satan’s Service, make no mistake about it. AC/DC — Anti-Christ/Devils Children. The scaly hand of prime evil was constantly, still is, subliminally groping at our minds.

Because we feared and still fear its cleverness. Evil is presented as cunning and crafty and conniving and sexy. Or in the case of hair metal bands — sexless.

Good is a limp-wristed word in its popular, domestic context. We can conceive of it in deeds, like helping old ladies across the street or getting cats down out of trees, but as an entity outside of ourselves, it’s all a bit hazy. No offence to the Ghandis, the Mandellas and the Geldofs, but goodness is foreign to our humanity and that’s why it only comes in little spurts of charity. That’s why those guys come out looking like they’re bursting with goodness. We can’t gauge the quality but we can gauge the quantity in time and money.

I don’t feel bad about saying that because if Sir Bob could read this then he would forgive me just because I mentioned his name in the same breath as the other two guys.

Old time religion, as opposed to spiritual life, has drawn God and the devil as cartoons that don’t exist outside of frames and don’t talk outside of speech bubbles. It’s tried to keep Jesus on the cross. Angels are little, fat kids with wings. And the devil- well, we’ve all seen him. He desires more than the fifteen minutes of fame that us ordinary mortals are apportioned because when he seems to be stronger than our own will, then we start to believe that morality has nothing to do with personal incentive and fear is nothing more than a condition of living.

We start to believe that he has the ability to access our world through black vinyl portals that are encrypted with backward messages that urge us to do naughtier things when they’re played forward. That’s why CD’s were invented. To stop us from playing the accursed things backwards. Because when you’re playing it backwards, you’re really playing the message forwards. Unless you’re playing it forwards, in which case the backward message is being heard forwards in the back of your mind.

That devil is one cunning dude.

Because all this rock ‘n roll rebellion surely has nothing to do with the erratic hormonal activity in teenagers. In the Eighties it had everything to do with the poisoned honey of spandex and hairspray. Judas Priest showed us that it was these two things that seduced the youth of the Teflon age into miming their favourite rock songs into the barrels of loaded shotguns instead of hairbrushes. It’s like the progression from marijuana to harder stuff. Hairspray teases the hair well but you should see what a shotgun can do.

And so it was with grown men painting their faces into a likeness of Queen Victoria, enhancing their leather-clad crotches with the ‘ol cucumber codpiece, and singing in a register that would make an alto sound like Barry White, that the downfall of Western civilization and its Christian values were threatened. Don’t laugh- it’s a threat that changes its appearance according to the shape-shifting entity that is fashion, but it’s a threat that is none the less ever-present.

The thing is, fashion is an entity with a finite amount of shapes that it can shift into, that’s why it goes around and around and around. It hasn’t been that long and the Eighties are threatening to come back again. Actually, I think they might already be here.

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