1988: the style and substance of ‘New Times’

In 1988 three events took place that characterised the Zeitgeist of the decade and marked as clear a break with the cultural and theatrical practices of the 1960s and 1970s as the Conservative Party victory in May 1979 had signalled in British politics. Firstly, in October the magazine Marxism Today produced an overview of the impact of recent developments in industrial capitalism on global economies and societies: it provocatively entitled its survey ‘New Times’. This followed hard upon its response to the successes of the ‘new’ and ‘radical’ Right, whose figureheads were President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: a revised programme for the British Communist Party, which the Morning Star newspaper described as the ‘final abandonment of … Marxist-Leninist principles’. Secondly, that same month the style magazine The Face published its ‘Killer 100th Issue!’, offering 200 pages of quintessentially post-modern bricolage, in which Becks beer sponsorship was effortlessly sutured to harrowing images of famine victims, and lists of sound-bites haphazardly juxtaposed London’s Docklands with Japan and Reagan with Trouble Funk, the ‘hippest groove on the globe’. Its art director, Neville Brody, had famously described this wilful deconstruction of journalistic and narrative coherence as ‘Every typeface tells its own lie’.