To me, they were a fun bad with a novelty image doing catchy, singalongs. I had no idea they were covering old songs from the 1950s and early Sixties until it was pointed out by mum, but I did recognise the whole drape coat Teddy Boy image as being from that decade, and of course the Fifties were very much still raging in the Seventies weren't they?
Happy Days, American Graffiti, Mud, Peter Blake's Pepsi ads, Darts, Laverne & Shirley,That'll Be The Day, etc., not to mention half the entertainers still on TV had been around since then. There was an enormous amount of nostalgia for those days by people who'd been lucky enough to enjoy being the first proper teenagers but who were now adults with children. (It was the 20-year cycle thing of course, though I've yet to see any Nineties nostalgia breaking through into whatever we're calling this decade, but I'm supposing it's only a matter of time).
It all filtered down. So the Fifites were on my radar. Both my parents grew up in that time, doing all the things teenagers did and listening to all the appropriate music, often heard on the radio and often heard in our house specifically in my bedroom. While downstairs they'd been replaced by Motown Chartbusters and the Carpenters, upstairs I was discovering Bill Haley and Buddy Holly through brittle 78s (which I still have) having my own nostalgia party.
Funny though, as the whole decade really did pervade the Seventies like no other nostalgia has done since. Though we can now look fondly at the Eighties and have done since the end of the Ninties, I don't remember an awful lot of Sixtiesness infecting the Eighties, apart from through the indie music scene. Or perhaps I missed it.
While we ponder why this is - and why it was the US Fifties rather than our own drab decade that really took off, let's enjoy some Showaddywaddy. Love the hair. Like Chachi.
