Totally Tubular Festival

“Thursday night, I’m going to a festival of eighties music," I told my team at our morning standup meeting. My youngest colleague looked dubious. "The nineteen-eighties? It was a thing we had. You can read about it on Wikipedia," I told him.

The Totally Tubular Festival was billed as a festival of eighties pop, featuring a selection of bands from the period, many of which I remembered fondly from my distant youth. The acts seemed to be mostly British; maybe the most successful American bands of the era tended more to middle-of-the-road rock and so didn't fit the pop format that the organizers envisaged.

Many of those appearing were not, shall we say, in their first youth, and not everyone who was in bands at the time necessarily still wants to live the pop lifestyle or appear on stage with their sometime bandmates. When we arrived, the band on stage was billed as Annabella’s Bow Wow Wow, which hinted at a possible conflict over the rights to the name. Annabella Lwin, the waif-like teenage punk who was the frontwoman of the original band, was now a sturdy middle-aged lady, but she put on a good show, confidently belting out the hits. Her guitarist, a gentleman named Lightnin’ Woodcock, sported perhaps the most memorable hairstyle of the evening, with a hair and beard that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Sun Wukong, both dyed flourescent yellow.

Next up were Men without Hats, best known for the silly, catchy hit ”The Safety Dance”, but who I always felt deserved more recognition for their songwriting chops. Their product was pop in the purest sense, but they understood the formula better than almost anyone, and were never afraid to explore its possibilities and push its boundaries. They’re still a fun act to watch, and served up a crowd-pleasing selection of their best-known songs (including two renditions of “The Safety Dance”). The drummer, I was shocked to see, was wearing a Stetson, something that vocalist Ivan Doroschuk alluded to with a reference to him “breaking all the rules.” Doroschuk's brothers Stefan and Colin weren’t in evidence; instead, Colin’s daughter Sahara Sloan appeared as the band’s keyboard player.

Perhaps the biggest hit of the evening was Tom Bailey, formerly of The Thompson Twins. Bailey was accompanied by a band of three young women somewhat confusingly called The Sisters of Mercy (yes, the Thompson Twins had a song called “Sister of Mercy”, so they have some rights to use the name – but it does invite confusion with the other, better-known band). I had always thought of Bailey – perhaps quite unfairly – as a little pretentious and self-important, but tonight's set showed him off as a really first-rate performer. He’s a very capable multi-instrumentalist, and he powered through the sometimes challenging vocals of the Thompson Twins’ back catalog impeccably. He and his white-clad bandmates delivered a fun, high-energy show that felt like the real headliner of the evening.

It wasn’t the last set, though. That fell to Thomas Dolby, one of my favorite musicians and perhaps the prime mover behind the whole festival. After Bailey’s barnstorming act, Dolby’s set felt very low-key by comparison. He opened, rather confusingly, with a cover of New Order’s “Blue Monday”, and interspersed his own material with a rather idiosyncratic version of Bowie’s "Heroes”. Appearing alone, wrapped in darkness, his show was an odd, almost intimate affair, as if he were shyly performing for a few close friends instead of playing to a rooftop full of people as the headliner of a festival. His set wasn’t bad by any means – in fact, I loved it, and would eagerly go to see the same thing again. But the energy was very different from everything that had gone before, so that the evening seemed to tail off instead of ending with a bang.

All in all, the festival was great fun. It was impressive to see how well both the music and the musicians have held up after so many years. If any of the bands come back this way, together or separately, I’ll definitely go again.