Website Hype

You have probably never heard of the website known as 80’s Music Lyrics, but it’s well worth taking a peek – especially if you are an aficionado of eighties music, games and culture.

Here you can find details of bands such as Midnight Oil, the Steve Miller Band, Simple Minds, Electric Light Orchestra and Queen, as well as articles about performers such as Cyndi Lauper, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel and Madonna.

There is a forum where you can discuss all things eighties, including games, toys, fashions, books, TV programmes and movies. Needles to say there is plenty of discussion of eighties music, and also those memorable eighties music videos.

The site has plenty of quizzes and humour, but perhaps the piece de resistance, and the thing that brings many people to the site, is their great collection of classic eighties arcade games. Here you can play Pacman, (I love that one), Simon, with its great beeping sounds, the unforgettable Space Invaders, that was de rigeur in every English pub in the eighties. There is also Asteroids, but I enjoyed the pub machine version rather than this one – I can’t play it as well using a keyboard, nevertheless, it does bring back great memories of London pub life. There is also one of the earliest electronic games of all, Pong, although we just knew it as “Tennis”, where two players knock a “ball” back and forth – I think some pubs had specialised tables for this game.

So, if you need a bit of eighties nostalgia, or just a few fun games from days of yore to try, get yourself over to Eighties Music Lyrics.

Quite often it is the non-commercial enterprises that become the really innovative and exciting websites, and the urban75 e-zine has become one of the most popular e-zines on the web, with games, photos, an events diary, information, articles, reports, but most of all, its piece de resistance – its bulletin boards, where its aficionados simply refer to it as “urban”.

Founded in 1995 in Brixton, England, (for those of you that don’t know, Brixton is part of London, south of the River Thames), the site remains resolutely unmonetised, being strictly non-profit, with no banners, no tie-ins, and no ads. The photos are a real treat – there are galleries depicting Brixton, London, New York, Chicago, Brighton, and Wales, as well as various 360º panoramas and even photography tutorials!

The site features loads of just-for-fun games, made by various web designers, and it is made abundantly clear that many of the games are pointless and have no meaning, such as “The Dot Clicking Game” and “The Curious Thingy” – a bit like “Mornington Crescent”.

Football regularly features on the site, but you certainly don’t need to be a footie fan to enjoy it. (For those of you across the Pond, I’m talking about soccer).

The bulletin boards have grown into a highly popular community, with around 33,000 registered members, although only a fraction of these are active posters. At present, there are an impressive quarter of a million page impressions each day, and about 5,000 new posts daily.

Yours truly has been contributing much of late, due to a bit of software development work. The advice you get there is great – as well as sorting out my programming problem, I have received advice about gardening, seen photos of people’s pets, discussed food, pubs, music, had a laugh and a joke. The boards are managed by a team of sensible moderators, so things don’t get out of hand, and despite being London based, the forum has a very international dimension. Urban definitely has its own inimitable sense of humour and its own culture, and if that’s not enough, there are offline nights in London where you can meet other urbanites.