DJJD Retro 80's Volume 1

Created By:  Jonathan Dysart (DJJD)

Original Creation Year:  2001

Year of Re-master:  2010

Song Listing

Side A

1.    Come On Eileen:  Dexy's Midnight Runners 

2.    After The Fire:  After the Fire

3.    Video Killed The Radio Star:  The Buggles

4.    I Ran (So Far Away):  A Flock of Seagulls
5.   Electric Avenue:  Eddy Grant

Side B

6.    Our House:  Madness

7.    Puttin' on the Ritz:  Taco

8.    (Keep Feeling) Fascination:  Human League 

9.   She Blinded Me With Science:  Thomas Dolby    
10.  Head Over Heels:  The Go-Go's  

Side C

11.  Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This):  Eurythmics

12. One Night in Bangkok:  Murray Head     

13. Safety Dance:  Men Without Hats   

14. Rock Me Amadeus:  Falco 
15. Whip It:  DEVO

Side D

16. Rock Lobster:  The B-52's

17. Take On Me:  A-Ha

18. Come Dancing:  The Kinks

19. 99 Luftballons:  Nena
20. Major Tom:  Peter Schilling

  

Origin of the Album

            This album was originally created on cassette prior to the creation of DJJD Volume 1.  This was done for two major reasons.  First, my TIME LIFE 1980's CD collection and other CDs contained a lot of songs I did not care for.  Plus they were not organically ordered like an album that I envisioned, see DJJD Volume 1 post for an explanation of album structure.  Second, my sister at the time was not responsible for taking care of those CDs.  They were all scratched and almost unplayable.  I had to resort to extreme cleaning tactics to copy those tracks before they were gone.
              Many of those tracks were eventually spread out at the end through six albums, with Retro 80's Volume 3 through Retro 80's Volume 6 having some sort of conceptual tone to each album.  There were also some tracks during remastering that were taking out of my original DJJD CD collection and placed in these Retro 80's collection.  

Concept and Theme of the Album

            It's no big concept, except the obvious one that these songs are in what I call the "Retro 80's" genre.  This genre I believe spans from late 1979 through 1986, where "New Wave" was the famous style of music.   Music started to change in 1987 towards glam Metal, Hip Hop, and eventually alternative rock (started by Nirvana).  This album would be the "best of the best" of Retro 80's, in my opinion.   It encapsulates the early 1980s the best way possible.

           

Concept and the Album Cover

            There were many variations of the album cover during its span.  In the remastering, I changed the cover with an 80's style background with blocky album titles in the same color scheme.  The back cover is a screenshot of the Atari 2600 game Super Breakout, with the blocky titles and the computerized font for the song listing.