THE BIG BANG
It was when I was whisked past the queue at Area, one warm but windy Manhattan night in 1985, that I finally understood how much louder and larger the eighties were than the preceding decades. I was on a journalistic assignment with the group ABC — who by then had ditched their early eighties pomp in favour of an edgier and far less successful iteration as a garish, LinnDrum-tastic disco troupe, complete with cartoon avatars — and our cachet (and accents) meant we were spared the line, not to mention the daunting $15 entrance fee, and granted V.I.P. entrance to a place that, as The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote, “was less a dance club than a sanctum; to get inside was to be baptised, consecrated, canonised”.
Area, along with other nightlife meccas like Paradise Garage, Danceteria and the Limelight, epitomised the new energy of New York, a city that had hauled itself back from the brink of bankruptcy at the start of the decade and was now partying hard, fuelled by stimulants both established and novel (cocaine was everywhere, ecstasy was just making its arms-aloft presence felt), but also by new money. Various Big Bangs set the eighties pace — there was the deregulation of the City of London in 1986, driven by Margaret Thatcher, which produced a free-for-all as brokers, jobbers and the City’s traditional merchant banks merged and/or were acquired by much bigger U.S., European and Japanese banks (and which created the bonus culture, along with an estimated 1,500 millionaires), while in the U.S. there was Reaganomics, President Reagan’s heady cocktail of laissez-faire economics and whopping corporate tax cuts. , as Pet Shop Boys put it in their paean to the new rapaciousness, 1988’s . And there, in the heart of Area, momentarily distracted from
