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Ticket To The World: My 80s Story - Martin Kemp

Fri, October 07, 2022

Ticket To The World: My 80s Story - Martin Kemp - Out November 10th.

Pre-order now @ www.harpercollins.co.uk/pages/ticket-to-the-world

I still think of the New Romantics as the last great pop culture, even now. It’s a cliché to say that we were in the right place at the right time. We were, but I don’t think that paints the full picture. It says nothing of our attitude. We embodied the prevailing mindset of that era. It wasn’t greed that drove us, but a sense of self. Of individuality. Of learning early that we were one-in-a-trillion life forces with endless possibilities at the edge of our fingertips if we’d only just tip forward and make a grab for it.

We were a vision of hope. A vision of ambition. We were brighter than the cameras of our day could capture and we left a hell of a legacy.

80s pop culture changed the world – artistically, technologically, politically, socially. So when you think back and laugh at your backcombed hair, your smeared turquoise eye shadow, your shoulder pads, and your puffy taffeta dress, you should know that it was more than just some weird fashion. However you engaged with it, you were part of the future.

It might feel a lifetime ago now – for some of you, it possibly was – but there’s a reason Gen-Z are obsessing over Kate Bush and the sounds of Running Up That Hill in the 2020s. There’s a reason TikTok is overrun with 80s aesthetic challenges, Soundcloud is filled with synthpop and YouTube is filled with Rick Astley. They are plundering it in much the same way that the New Romantics plundered everything and anything that had gone before them – to take it and make it their own.

The 1980s made me. I can go pound for pound with anyone who wants to highlight awful outfits, ridiculous hair and pretentious poses. I have crates of photos I’d be happy to leave locked in a vault until 3030. But I loved the 1980s and I want you to love them too.

So here, between these covers, is my attempt to record the decade as I lived it. If you were there, I want you to recall it. To reach out, touch it.
If you weren’t, I hope I can do it justice. The lessons the era taught me are the ones I have strived to pass on to my own kids as a father now. To be open, to explore, to welcome everything as it comes to you. To love life as it is but to always push forward onto greater things.

Whether that’s just for you, or whether it’s for the world at large, the lesson of the 80s is simple: it’s all there – and it’s all there for you.

Out on 10th November come on the journey with me to retrace my (and our steps), one by one, through the 80s.

Love Martin,
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