My father once drove down the King’s Road with Marianne Faithfull and Terence Stamp in a paisley-painted Mini to buy a velvet suit from Granny Takes A Trip while high on acid. No, not really. I was always very disappointed with my parents’ ‘what it was really like in the 1960s’ anecdotes because basically they didn’t have any.

Now my own children are having similar problems with my anecdotes about the legendary 1980s. Yes, it’s true that I did go to see Duran Duran at the height of their fame, but only to keep my little sister company in a football stadium smelling of chips and fizzy pop and filled with screaming 12-year-old girls. Yes, I did wear eyeliner and white lipstick once, but I looked a prat. Yes, I did listen to lots of fashionable synth pop, like the Human League’s Dare. But I also listened to Dire Straits, because that was how it was.

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Great decades are only really worth living through second time round through a haze of nostalgia and with a much more carefully curated soundtrack. That’s one reason I can so heartily recommend The Shards: finally the 1980s as you almost wish you had experienced them – endless sex with beautiful people, hot tubs, fast........

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