1982. The year of dance music, garish pink suits, and floppy fringes that left you with 50 per cent vision. Well, it was for me anyway. My band Modern Romance’s record Can You Move was a smash hit in US gay clubs and we were invited to tour the circuit. Quite the eye-opening experience for a straight, young working-class boy from Hackney as it turned out. Geoff Deane
I have always been rather partial to Merle Haggard’s redneck anthem Okie from Muskogee. I particularly like it when he sings the praises of “manly footwear”. Not just because it makes me laugh – which it does – but it also reminds me of a girl I used to know who really was an Okie (native of Oklahoma) from Muskogee. Her name was Cynthia Manley. Were she to have married a man named Hank Footwear, she’d have become Cynthia Manley-Footwear. But that’s by the by.
