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While Liverpool bands such as Echo And The Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes ran with the 'new psychedelia' tag, their source of inspiration was as much the music of the 60s as mind-altering intoxicants. Then legal – up to a point – mushrooms could easily be found in any number of municipal parks, golf courses and fields up and down the country and their effects proved to be far more satisfying to those seeking an alternative to a night in a down at heel town centre boozer that usually culminated in a punch up outside a kebab house come closing time.Īnd then, of course, there was the music. Along with The Velvet Underground, a band whose stock rose sharply during the early years of the 80s, were The Doors, whose musical excursions proved alluring to some young and questioning minds.Ĭoming in from another angle to create a perfect musical storm was the annual autumn resurgent abundance of magic mushrooms and the appeal of pot for those living outside of metropolitan areas. Yet despite the Year Zero mantra that had accompanied punk and supposedly eschewed all that had gone before, influences from that maligned era trickled through to influence a new generation of musicians either too young to have fully embraced the punk aesthetic or those who could cherry pick from both to forge ahead. Factor in those pop cultural references of fops in eyeliner, mullets, synthpop and the emergence of the video age that forever permeate the stock footage that's guaranteed to crop up of any nostalgia show purporting to cover the era and you'd be forgiven for thinking that the early part of that decade had anything left of the lineage started in the 1960s.

Given the enduring media images of social and political unrest, the so-called managed decline of so many of Britain's inner cities and the devastating riots that exploded within them, the shocking scenes of violence and suffering endured by many during the miners' strike, and the jingoistic flagwaving of the Falklands conflict, it's all too easy to forget – or even know – just how psychedelic the first half of the 1980s really was.