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…
