In many ways the last year of the decade wasn’t too dissimilar from the early years – people were still using synths and computers to make their records, except the computers were now the size of a suitcase rather than an entire room, the records could be made in your bedroom instead of a professional recording studio and the drums now sounded like drums rather than someone hitting a biscuit tin with a stone. There was still a yearning for the familiar though, and the Stars On 45 medley craze of 1981 was echoed in 1989 by the likes of Jive Bunny, only now you could simply cut and paste the original records together instead of having to recruit teams of session musicians to painstakingly re-record them. The Christmas number 1 was also familiar, albeit in a depressing way as it showed how far mainstream pop music had deteriorated in the second half of the decade.
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