My 80s Trenchcoat Cassette

I grew up in the shadows of bands who didn’t just play music, they carved shapes into the way I saw the world. The Cure’s angular lines, Joy Division’s black scars, Depeche Mode’s leather-bound electronics, Siouxsie Sioux’s scalpel eyes, Echo and the Bunnymen’s crooning beneath a killing-field moon. Those weren’t just shows, they were lessons in how to be, how to feel, how to survive with style in a world collapsing around me, or so it felt.

“My 80s Trenchcoat Cassette” is me paying my respects and also admitting that I never left that place. The sound, the winter fog, the trenchcoat, they’re still stitched into who I am. This song isn’t parody, it isn’t pastiche. It’s bleak, but it’s fun. Dark, but it smiles crookedly. I wanted to capture that strange joy of dressing in black, living in the Melbourne underground, knowing you belonged to something outsiders never quite understood.

The hook, “I love you when you look so bad… I think you’re nearly here with me in my low”, is my way of saying there’s beauty in decay. The same beauty I first found when those bands turned their pain and style into something lasting. It’s where I still live, and where I invite you to join me.

“My 80s Trenchcoat Cassette” is my mixtape to the ghosts of that underground. A cassette that never really stopped playing.

Find it at BANDCAMP

September 23 addition

I’ve added a B-side to my Bandcamp single 'My 80s Trenchcoat Cassette". The new track 'I Wanna Be a Teenager 1981' is one I recently rediscovered having recorded it in 2020 after the death of my wife, Irene.

Where 'My 80s Trenchcoat Cassette' name-checks the bands and moments that shaped a particular kind of late-night adolescence, 'I Wanna Be a Teenager 1981' steps inside that adolescent head, now much aged and in despondent reflection.

Its lines are rather unpolished and honest “i was a nervous teenager / love didn't come so easy”, and the repetition becomes a pulse: the ache of wanting to be seen, the flat despair that turns into ritual chant. It’s synth pop and gloom pop folded together and minimal European coldwave synth.

Musically the two songs talk to one another. The trenchcoat song is exterior, the streets, the culture, the collage of names and images. The B-side is interior: long coats, shadows, the monkey on my/your back, the small combustions of love and failure. Put them together and you get the scene and the person inside the scene.

If you’re listening for detail: let the lyrics sit. The repeated “on and on and on and on it goes” is deliberate. It’s the feeling of time folding back on itself, of youth as a loop you can’t quite escape. The final section, “she made it all so easy / she made it all seem easy / in fact everything made sense / when she left, just let me die” — is the blunt, human conclusion of that loop. In this instance, "she" is Irene.

People who purchased the original release receive 'I Wanna Be a Teenager 1981' automatically.

~George